China and North Korea had proposed that North Korea freeze nuclear and missile programs. Their reasons are much like Khrushchev's. North Korean leaders are seeking economic development, and understand that they cannot make much progress while facing the overwhelming burden of military production.

The North Korean proposal was rejected at once by Washington, just as it had been two years earlier-and just as Khrushchev's initiatives were rejected by the Kennedy administration, leading to the closest brush with total disaster in human history. The reason for the instant rejection is that the Chinese-North Korean proposal has a quid pro quo: it calls on the United States to halt its threatening military exercises on North Korea's borders, including simulated nuclear-bombing attacks by B-52s.

The Chinese-North Korean demand is hardly unreasonable. North Koreans, of course, remember that their country was flattened by US bombing, and some may well remember the gleeful reports in American military journals about the bombing of major dams when there were no other targets left, the rejoicing about the exciting spectacle of huge floods wiping out the rice crops on which Asians depend for survival-very much worth reading. This is a part of history that it would be useful to retrieve from the memory hole and to ponder.

— Surviving the Twenty-First Century by Noam Chomsky, José Mujica, Saúl Alvidrez (18%)