Well you’ve only got to answer one question on this one, and hey, I like the result; it might even be described as partially accurate…

You are elegant, withdrawn, and brilliant. Your mind is a weapon, able to solve any puzzle. You are also great at poking holes in arguments and common beliefs. For you, comfort and calm are very important. You tend to thrive on your own and shrug off most affection. You prefer to protect your emotions and stay strong.

Bruce Cumings North Korea presents a compelling picture of the Stalinist state, as I said yesterday, but it also presents a revealing, and frequently terrifying, picture of the world’s rogue superpower.

Cumings says: “It was the Korean War, not Greece or Turkey or the Marshall Plan or Vietnam, that inaugurated historically unprecedented defense budgets (the budget quadrupled from June to December 1950, from $13 billion to $54 billion, or more than $500 billion in current dollars) and built the national security state at home and a far-flung archipelago of military base abroad, that transformed a limited containment doctrine into a global crusade, and that ignited McCarthyism just as it seemed to ” fizzle, thereby giving the Cold War its long run. (p. 8)

Now you might say that Cumings is making special pleading for his pet subject, but that budget figure is telling.

Eight years after that budget jump, Cuming says, the US brought nukes to South Korea “in spite of the 1953 armistice agreement that prohibited the introduction of qualitatively new weaponry … primarily to stabilize the volatile civil war” (to stop the South attacking the North).

If you suffer from nightmares you might not want to read the next bit …

There were 280mm nuclear cannons and “Honest John nuclear-tipped missiles” and a year later air-borne “Matador cruise missiles”. Later atomic demolition mines, which weighed 60 pounds but had the same power as the Hiroshima bomb, were added. They were moved around in Jeeps, helicopters and carried in backpacks!!! “That one of them might stray across the DMZ during a training exercise … and give Pyongyang an atomic bomb was a constant possibility.”

“In January 1968 the North Koreans seized the American spy ship Pueblo, capturing the crew and keeping it in prison for 11 months. The initial reaction of decision makers was to drop a nuclear weapon on Pyongyang.”! (p. 53)

Since the weapons were so close to the North, there was a “use it or lose it” mentality. “For decades … the US planned to use tactical and battlefield nuclear weapons in the very early stages of a new Korean conflict, the usual scenario being … within one hour of the outbreak of war”. (p.54)

So we should perhaps most thank Kim Il Sung for the fact there has not been any use of nuclear weapons since WW2. (And you can understand why the regime was, and is, so keen to have nukes of its own.)

But there is credit on the US side – in 1991 President Bush (the older – dread to think what the younger might do with these at hand) “announced that he was withdrawing all tactical and battlefield nuclear weapons on a worldwide basis, destroying them or putting them into storage”. (p.55) But as Cumings says, from the NK view, US submarines can still sail right up to their coast.

Cumings sums up the North as “a small, Third World, postcolonial nation that has been gravely wounded, first by 40 years of Japanese colonialism and then by another 60 years of national division and war, and that is deeply insecure, threatened by the world around it”. (p.151)

It is, for me, a convincing portrait.

* The British Library believes that by 2020, 90 per cent of publications will be available digitally, and only 50 per cent in print. That’s a very different world and, I think, an exciting one. (It made me think of the first time I found an academic journal on a CD – you could search the whole text, for any word: it was astounding, and yes I know I’m dating myself!)

I was reading somewhere about people who have two (or more) computers running on their desk at the one time. I’ve done it a few times at work when things were really desperate, and I’m starting to think that would be very handy at home. (Luxury, yes, but it would I think improve your productivity. I know you can flick between screens with one computer, but it is not quite the same as looking at things in parallel.)

* This sounds, to this militarily inexpert view, a very informative analysis of the increasing sophistication of the Iraq insurgency by The Yorkshire Ranter. Then this Salon piece confirms the impression of increasing sophistication of the insurgency, in its account of the attack that filled three female Marines. Its analysis of the role of women in the US military in Iraq is hardly deep, but I thought one quote from a male marine aged 20 on his third tour of duty is interesting in suggesting genuine grass-roots acceptance of the women’s involvement in the front line.

More on the technological notes: I see that Salon is providing Technorati links to blogs that are linking to its articles: now that’s what I call convergence.

* Japundit is exploring the (contradictory) accounts of the past of female sumo wrestling, and plans for its revival. (Via the excellent new History Carnvial XI on Siris.)

* The Telegraph reviews what sounds like two fascinating books on the fall of the Roman Empire. I’m particularly taken with the exploration of what happened after The End.

PS. I have to add, you REALLY don’t miss this commentary on Ascot hats. If you don’t laugh, you should check to see if you have a pulse.

I promised some time ago a post on North Korea, or rather on Bruce Cuming’s book of that title, and finally here it is.

First, a digression. I went to North Korea in 1998 – there’s an article I wrote about the trip for the Guardian Weekly here – and it was, and no doubt still is, the most fascinating, if spooky, place. I doubt I’ll ever forget the television news, with the presenters’ frenzied enthusiasm, or the way in which I became invisible in the streets of Pyongyang, even the simplest of eye contact seeming to be forbidden, or perhaps too frightening, for the inhabitants.

Cumings is no apologist for the regime – he describes Kim Il Sung at age 68 – “he was a cross between Marlon Brando playing a big oil mogul in a film called The Formula, walking with feet splayed to handle a potbelly and hands amidriff thus to pat the tummy, combined with the big head on narrow shoulders, and the blank, guttural delivery of Henry Kissinger”. (p. 148)

Yet he makes the obvious, but often missed, point, that the regime can’t be quite so dysfunctional as American and South Korean propaganda would suggest, since if it were, it could not have survived.

He says, yes there probably are as Amnesty International reports, 100,000 political prisoners. “Does this system promote human freedom? Not from any liberal’s standpoint. But from a Korean standpoint, where freedom is also defined as an independent stance against foreign predator – freedom for the Korean nation — here, the vitriolic judgments do not flow so easily. This is a cardinal virtue among a people that has preserved its integrity and continuity in the same place since the early Christian era.” (p. 151)

So what is Kim Jong Il really like? “… not the playboy, womanizer, drunk, and mentally deranged fanatic ‘Dr Evil’ of our press. He is a homebody who doesn’t socialize much, doesn’t drink much, and works at home in his pajamas, scribbling marginal comments on the endless reams of documents brought to him in gray briefcases by his aides … He is prudish and shy, and like most Korean fathers, hopelessly devoted to his son and the other children in his household – vastly preferring to sequester himself with them, rather than preside over the public extravaganzas that amaze visitors to the DPRK. … The Dear Leader has tired of all the absurd hero worship, too; he told a visitor, ‘All that is bogus. It’s all just pretence.'” (p. 163)

As for what being an “ordinary” North Korean might be like, Cumings quotes Anthony Namkung, “who attended an evangelical Christian missionary school: ‘It helps in understanding North Korea if you have lived in a fundamental Christian community … Just like the North Koreans, we believed in the absolute purity of our doctrine. We focused inward and didn’t want to be tainted by the outside world.'” (p. 173)

It seems a believable portrait to me.

Yet, strong though this is, the account of North Korea is not the best part of this book. Its first part focuses on America’s relationship with Korea and its approach to the Korean war – extremely revealing and frightening.

But other matters call, to that tomorrow …