This is an excerpt from Sunday's Boston Daily Globe, the link follows:

During his first year in office, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung has sought a delicate balance: While trying to appear strong on defense, in light of the ever-present threat of attack from across the border, he also has promoted a so-called ''sunshine policy'' of more engagement with North Korea. Bernard Krisher, former Tokyo bureau chief for Newsweek magazine and now publisher of the Cambodian Daily, talked with Kim recently in Seoul. Krisher, who has covered Kim for almost two decades, asked him about difficulties in restructuring the economy, and his plans for future overtures to the north. Here are excerpts from their conversation.

SNIP

Q.Could there be some miscalculation in the year 2000 when all the computers could go berserk? Might the North Koreans, even if they don't want a war, through a computer problem accidentally set off something with all the firepower there?

A. We are all anxious we might experience such type of incidents in the year 2000. That's why we must all be ready, and they have to be very keen about this issue as well. They also must find ways to prepare to fix this problem. Should some kind of conflict occur, we should establish a system where we can confirm whether it is a provocation or an accident.

On my recent visit to China, I told President Jiang Zemin that people are saying the Korean peninsula is the area in the world which is the most vulnerable to have a conflict. Yet if we have the will, we can very easily resolve this issue. My administration has a very clear policy toward North Korea: While we will not, of course, tolerate any military provocation, we have no willingness to harm them nor reunify by absorption.

It is 100 percent certain we will not attack. ... We are determined not to resolve any issue through war or military power, and if North Korea has the same commitment, while the four major countries around the Korean peninsula can also guarantee they will not intervene, then we won't have any war ever in the Korean peninsula.

dailyglobe

-- Deborah (infowars@yahoo.com), March 15, 1999

Answers

Has anyone asked the question as to how long various countries early warning radar might stay down after failure? As a fix on failure scenario, do they stay down for hours? Days? Months? At some point, the tension and human error factor would grow to be enormous.

Anyone seen anything on this?

-- -- (_@_._), March 15, 1999.