President Donald Trump
answers a final question while departing a press conference following his
historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on June 12, 2018, in
Singapore. Trump described his meeting with Kim as “better than anyone could
have expected.” Win McNamee/Getty Images
A
few hours after Presidents Trump and Kim completed five hours of unprecedented high-level
diplomatic negotiations over security and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula at
the Capella hotel resort on Santosa Island in Singapore, President Trump held a lengthy (83 minutes) press
conference detailing his discussions
Amongst
the many matters he stressed in a barrage of questioning from the US and
international media, was that dealing with nuclear weapons were his highest
presidential problem and priority.
He
observed:“ “I had an uncle who was a great professor for 40 years at MIT.I used
to discuss nuke with him all the time. He was a great expert. A great brilliant
genius. Dr. John Trump. MIT sent me a book on my uncle. We used to talk about
nuclear. You talk about a complex subject. It is not just get rid of the — rid
of the nukes. When you hit a certain point, you cannot go back.
New York Times reporter David Sanger asked Trump: “I wonder if you could
give us some sense of chairman Kim told you how many nuclear weapons he
believes he has made and whether he is willing to turn those over first and
then whether in your mind you need to do more than done in the Iran deal for
actually dismantling the uranium and plutonium processes and if you had a sense
if Chairman Kim understood what that involves and a timetable in his mind of
shutting that?
Trump
retorted: “I can tell you he understands. He understands it so well. He
understands it better than the people that were doing the work for him. That is
an easy one. As far as what he has, it is substantial. The timing will go
quickly…. It is a substantial arsenal. I used to say maybe it is all talk and
no action. We have pretty good intelligence into that, although probably less
than any other country. You probably understand that. We have enough
intelligence to know what they have is substantial.”
In
a positive, almost lyrical passage, unusually sensitive for the usually brash
US President, Trump said
“Chairman
Kim has an opportunity like no other. To be remembered as the leader who
ushered in a glorious new era of security and prosperity for his people.
Chairman Kim and I just signed a joint statement which he reaffirmed his
unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
We
also agreed to vigorous negotiations to implement the agreement as soon as
possible. He wants to do that. This is not the past. This is not another administration
that never got it started. And therefore never got it done. Chairman Kim says
North Korea is also destroying a major missile engine testing site. That’s not
in your signed document. We agreed to that after the agreement was signed.
That’s a big thing. The missiles they were testing. The site will be destroyed
very soon.
We
dream of a future where all Koreans can live together in harmony and where
families are reunited and hopes are reborn and where the light of peace chases
away the darkness of war. This bright future is within and this is what is
happening. It is right there. It is within our reach. It’s going to be there.
It will happen. People thought this could never take place. It is now taking
place. It is a very great day.”
Another US Presidential press conference on Korea,
almost 70 years earlier, on November 30, 1950 contained much different revelations.
 |
On Nov.30 in 1950, President Harry S. Truman
declined to rule out using nuclear weapons to prevent South Korea from being
overrun by Chinese troops.
|
President Harry S. Truman declined to rule
out using nuclear weapons to prevent South Korea from being overrun by Chinese
communist troops. At the time, China had recently joined North Korea in a
fierce counterattack on United Nations military forces, most of them from the
United States.
During a news conference, Truman accused
the Soviet Union of orchestrating the Chinese incursion over the Yalu River
into North Korea in a bid to spread communism throughout East Asia. The
president pledged to “increase our defenses to a point where we can talk — as
we should always talk — with authority.”
A reporter asked Truman what he would do
if the Chinese nationalists on Taiwan became involved in the Korean conflict.
The president declined to respond. Instead, he asserted that the United States
would take “whatever steps were necessary” to stop the Communist onslaught.
Another reporter then asked, “Will that
include the atomic bomb?”
“That includes every weapon that we have,”
Truman replied. The president, however, went on to say that he wanted to see
the bomb never used again, saying “it is a terrible weapon, and it should not
be used on innocent men, women and children.”
Before leaving office in 1953, with the
war mired in a stalemate, Truman told Congress, “we are being hurried forward,
in our mastery of the atom … toward yet unforeseeable peaks of destructive
power [when humans could] destroy the very structure of a civilization. … Such
a war is not a possible policy for rational men.” https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/30/truman-leaves-nuclear-option-on-the-table-in-korean-conflict-nov-30-1950-264580
Korea was run by a US
Military Government from 1945 to 1948, a situation that inevitably deeply
shaped post-war Korean history . Historian Bruce Cummings of the University of
Chicago stresses the importance of the atrocious massacres of war on the
peninsula, and the American incendiary bombing campaigns.
The Korean War, which officially began in
1950, ended with a tense armistice in 1953, and saw as many as 327,000 US
troops were engaged there. Today, with Korea still partitioned into a
democratic south and a communist north, 37,500 U.S. troops remain in South Korea,
most of them stationed near the demilitarized zone that divides the two
countries.
According to Professor Cumings, the United
States became mired in a civil war between the North, whose leader Kim Il-sung,
the grandfather of Kim Jong-un, had
gallantly fought against the Japanese in Manchuria starting in 1932, and the
South, whose leadership consisted largely of collaborators with the Japanese
occupation. According to Cumings, the North Koreans “essentially saw the war in
1950 as a way to settle the hash of the top command of the South Korean Army,
nearly all of whom had served the Japanese.”
(‘The 38th Parallel,
book review, New York Times, September 8, 2010; https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/books/review/Heilbrunn-t.html)
A New
York Times review of Cumings’s book
demonstrates that the Korean War was a civil war with long, tangled historical
roots, one in which the US had little business meddling. He notes how
“appallingly dirty” the war was. In terms of civilian slaughter, he declares,
“our ostensibly democratic ally was the worst offender, contrary to the
American image of the North Koreans as fiendish terrorists.”
(‘The Korean
War: A History’, by Bruce Cumings; New York Times, July 21,
2010; https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/books/22book.html)
President Trump’s team still has much
delicate fence mending to do
Bruce Cumings is a historian at the University of Chicago; the
author of several books, including a doorstop two-volume history entitled “The
Origins of the Korean War”; and a gifted controversialist. He distills his work
in his primer, “The Korean War,”
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