So what did Saddam get for Christmas? An atomic clock that's automatically synchronized with the cesium fountain clock in Boulder, Colorado. Instead of showing the time though, it shows the amount of time he has to live, and it counts down days rather months or years. It even has a built-in sound system that supplies him with the psychological feedback of the tick-tock. Soon there will be the general sound of booming.

While this is going on the Middle East, the situation in North Korea is becoming more serious. After the North Koreans admitted they had violated previous agreements they'd signed, they now demand more concessions from us even while they're reactivating their nuclear reactor that can produce weapons-grade fissile material. Steven Den Beste had an characteristically thorough analysis of the situation. He concluded that the North Korean leadership, as best we can tell, is insane and cannot be counted on to react rationally to anything we do. The only option is to isolate North Korea and wait it out. There are no easy options here.

The victory by the go-soft candidate in the South Korean presidential election has encouraged Kim Jong Il to be bolder with his provocations. The reactivation of the nuclear reactor is just the first. Expect more, not in the least because the situation in the north can't be getting any better. With pressure mounting on Kim Jong Il as his country staggers towards final collapse, he's going to have to find more creative ways of staying in power. All of those ways point to increasing conflict with the US.

Any direct military conflict would have prohibitively high expected casualties, so initiating military action against North Korea can only be a last resort. Our best hope is to hollow out the north and destabilize the regime without this being seen as a direct provocation; much easier said than done, obviously. About the only way I see achieve something like this is to enlist China's cooperation. Although China has had relatively warm ties with Pyongyang (insofar as this is possible), the nuclear warheads and long-range missiles North Korea is trying to build are just as much as a danger to China as they are to Japan. The distance from Seoul to Tokyo is 716 miles, while the distance to Beijing is 598 miles. (The server had no data for Pyongyang, but the idea is the same.) Assuming that the Chinese leadership is rational, they rules in Beijing should be worried by the prospect by a certifiable madman with nuclear missiles that can reach them in their capital. China would be much more subject to nuclear blackmail by Kim Jong Il than the US; to hit the continental United States, the North would need a ballistic missile with a range of well over 5,000 miles. So the danger coming from North Korea should be just as a big a worry for the Chinese as it is for the US, if not more so. The Chinese don't seem to be worried though. Either they know something we don't, or they think they can handle Kim Jong Il. This is a very fine line to tread; such handling could quickly become appeasement. China is opening its economy and relying ever more on world trade. It's now the world's largest cell-phone market and the fourth-largest car market. The Chinese have more to lose from a conflict in their region by the day.

The calculation the Chinese are making is probably that they can somehow handle Kim Jong Il, and that his lunatic foreign policy is useful for keeping the US at bay. As long as we believe that the Kim Jong Il could launch an attack against the south, it means a substantial number of troops and materiel is tied down in the Korean peninsula. More importantly, as long as the threat from the north persists, these are assets we can't employ should a conflict arise over Taiwan.

How many US troops would remain on the Korean peninsula if the regime of Kim Jong Il were to fall? Based on the experience after the end of the cold war in Europe, there could be a substantial reduction in the US presence in Korea. This should be something that the Chinese ought to welcome. The projection of US military power in the region would not suffer too much, since the current presence in Korea is tied down anyway. The remaining smaller force could actually be more effective in projecting US force there. Eliminating the madman of Pyongyang would be beneficial in reducing the number of troops, increasing the effectiveness of the remainder and in giving China the satisfaction of an apparent reduction in US force in Asia. And of course it would remove a threat to Beijing as well.

The trick then is to find a way in which the North Korean regime can be hollowed out without this resulting in a military escalation. The closest situation resembling a precedent we have is again the case of East Germany. The thing that pushed the regime over the edge were developments elsewhere in the eastern bloc. The Hungarians had more or less completed a transition from communist dictatorship to the first steps on the way to freedom. Once the chances of another Soviet crackdown (as in 1956) had seemingly become remote, the Hungarians got bolder and moved further with their liberalization. They tore down the barbed wire that had kept eastern Europeans captive for two generations. The most important thing they did was to allow East Germans to exit the country to Austria, from where they could then go to West Germany, which had generous financial aid waiting for them. From this point on, the unraveling of Honecker's regime accelerated. It was not without risks. There was always the threat that the Soviets might crack down again (perhaps after a coup in Moscow), or that the German and the Czechoslovaks (the other hard-line regime at the time) woudl order their forces to shoot their own people. Fortunately it never came to that.

If the Chinese were to stop deporting North Koreans who are fleeing across the border we could end up with a similar situation. Even if they would not actively welcome refugees, a silent change in policy that woud allow North Koreans to stay in China would be momentous in its importance. The tab for feeding and housing the refugees could be picked up by South Korea, Japan and the US. All of this would need to be done in a very low-key way so as to avoid public provocations of the North Koreans. Nor is this a risk-free policy, as it could still provoke an escalation from the North, but aside from doing nothing it's probably one of the least provocative things we could do. But it depends on the cooperation of China.

It also depends on how quickly word would spread throughout North Korea. It's hard to tell how much the people who're held captive in North Korea know about the outside world. The Voice of America does broadcast in Korean on shortwave, but how many have radios in the North and dare to listen I don't know. In the former East Germany there was a valley where the TV signals of the West Germany broadcasters could not reach. It was called the "Tal der Ahnungslosen," the Valley of the Clueless. North Korea is likely to be a country of the Clueless. On the other hand, the people do know that they're not living in the paradise that the propaganda wants them to believe in. Starvation and an oppressive totalitarian regime will do that to you. But as long as the power structure is in place, the risk of voicing dissent is too high. Once it crumbles, it will come down quickly I suspect. But after the fall, you're going to end up with a country where everyone has serious mental issues. The rot of communist rule infected the minds of the peoples of eastern Europe too, and they were relatively lucky compared to the North Koreans.

We do know that people are trying to flee North Korea and they are trying to flee to China. Whether they're desperate because of starvation or the lack of freedom, the fact is that they know about the way out. The government can't completely keep everything and everybody locked down all the time, so word of the ability to flee to China will spread. I think. I will also admit that it's very easy to theorize from my computer chair half a world away about a society about which we know very little. Still, apart from the sit-it-out option I don't see what else we could do without entering into a major armed conflict. The latter might still become necessary, but that would very ugly indeed.