Daily Socotra

07 July 2006

Parallel Universe

It is a curious thing to me that the only place that stainless steel can be bent into the perfect curves to meet the frame of an old muscle-truck is in the wilds of Loudoun County.

One would think that there would be a facility to bend stainless steel located closer to the big city, but that is not the case. Bending metal is an activity best connected to our agricultural past, and the association of performance shops and NASCAR racing is connected in a tradition that goes back to the old village smithy.

The speed shop is located out in the western marches of Loudoun County, near a hamlet called Lovettsville. It is about five miles across the Potomac to the rich fields of Maryland, and not far from the intrusive slice of West Virginia that marks Harper's Ferry, where abolition and murder helped to precipitate the War that eventually changed the nature of slavery from de jure to de facto.

I will always cherish the image of a young Federal Army officer named Robert E. Lee leading a detachment of US Marines against the invasion of Abolitionist John Brown at the arsenal in the river town. He lived in a parallel universe, thinking his raid might start a racial war in America. It was a very strange thing, almost as strange as the real war his raid eventually precipitated. It really happened that way, long ago and far away.

The rains have made the vegetation out there so lush and green that it threatens to overwhelm the senses. The horses in the fields along the two-lane roads are content with the grass, and the smell with window down is heady, intoxicating.

The exposure to nature after being hermetically sealed in the capital was startling, almost enough to make one feel alive after the concern over flight performance data on other people's rockets.

My professional group tends to be a little reactionary, having held their secrets for years and years. They have been sputtering about the New York Times editorial policy for months. Most members seem to agree with the Administration that determination of national security should be left to the government.

It is not unreasonable, I think. But if you travel in the alternate universe of the Times, it is perfectly reasonable. Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., laid it out pretty clearly at the commencement address he gave at the Statue University of New York at New Paltz. The Government is, after all, the enemy. It must be watched and its machinations exposed at every turn. He deeply regretted his newspaper did not do more during Watergate, among other things.

I miss Richard Nixon, sometimes, since you never knew quite what he was going to do. He was very entertaining, but the way he changed the course of the relations between the press and the government has made things very peculiar, and pointedly adversarial. It was a relief to look at the greenery and not worry about the Constitutional issues involved, which at their roots are stark: freedom of speech and freedom of the Press. In my government career we were careful to steer clear of all that, but something is clearly off the tracks. I once was very concerned about the flight characteristics of ballistic missiles launched from Russia to the impact area on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and later the Chinese launches to the Broad Ocean Area of the Pacific.

The tools and sensors were used to accomplish precision analysis were sensitive, and quite accurate. I was startled, therefore, to read in the Times that very morning about the technical characteristics of the Taepodong rocket that flew into the Dawn's early light on the 4th of July.

Someone in the government, I do not know whom, took it upon themselves to brief the Times on what really happened. I was interested and appalled at the same time, having a sudden window into an alternate universe where secrets were passed in near-real time to the newspapers. The source was unidentified, said the article, since the matter was classified.

Someone in the Department of Defense with access to the information called up the reporters at the Times, and disclosed additional details about the Taepodong's flight path. It was longer than the 42 seconds initially reported, and was actually in the air for almost two minutes. The period of stabile flight was what was reported, not the tumbling horror of a failed rocket headed for the Japanese home islands.

The officials who are leaking the classified information are in a lot better position than I am to convey the ambiguity of the launch. One could interpret the trajectory in several ways, and the Times, bless its muddled head, printed all of them. The rocket is estimated to be capable of flying 3,500 miles, depending on the payload, and overflew Japan the last time it was launched.

This latest appears to have been a depressed trajectory, which indicates something else altogether. The Times was not helpful enough to print the readouts from the sensors I am accustomed to using, so I am left with the same muddled conclusions as everyone else. Maybe there wasn't enough fuel loaded to get the rocket to Japanese air space. Maybe the North intended to abort the mission before it got there. Maybe it was just another screw up from the Hermit Kingdom.

It is hard enough to look into a walled-off despotic state. It is harder when they live in an alternate universe.

While we were concerned about the rockets, and the horses concerned about the content of the clover, and my speed shop concerned about reliable delivery of stainless steel tubing, there was something else happening. It warmed my heart, in a way, since I actually have a certain fondness for the creative madness of the North Koreans. Any time I think I have them figured out, they offer up some other delightful lunacy.

Having bitten every other outstretched hand, the North has attacked the Chinese. Not in the way you would think. Even better. I wish I could return to the executive dining room in the high-rise in Pyongyang where I once had lunch with their leadership. I can imagine the blue-sky sessions about strategy. "What do you think would drive the Americans nuts this week?" Perhaps there would be a fine cognac after the meal was done.

The rockets are really a key to something else, of course. The immediate crisis of the famine is past, but the infrstrcuture has continued to disintegrate. Food augmentation and fuel supplies from China were recently cut off. Not about the launches, mind you, but about rolling stock.

As the relief supplies rolled in, the Northerners kept the trains, returning only the crews. They insist that the locomotives and rail cars are just part of the complete aid package. It is not theft. It is just a self-identification of need.

You can imagine the poor Chinese, looking across the border at their crazy ally, clutching their trains and announcing the new rules. They have suffered an enormous loss of face, and there is nothing they can do about it without betraying the fact that they are completely impotent.

Now they know what it has been like to sit on the other side of the table in Panmunjong from them all these years since the Armistice.

When things don't appear to be working out, the North just shifts to a parallel universe. There is talk there may be more rockets flying soon if things don't work out the way they want.

I'll share this with you, just a feeing I got after the luncheon with the Secretary General of the North Korean Workers Party. I thought he was having a grand time. He had pletny to eat, and for him, a game with constantly changing rules was immensely entertaining.

I take comfort that our own alternate universe is delivering the classified assessments of what is coming next, right to my desktop.