The great
divide over North Korea By
Gavan McCormack
For 60 years the world has
faced no greater threat than nuclear weapons. Yet
nuclear politics, in principle the most urgent for
human survival, has been in practice the most
ridden with hypocrisy.
Mohamed ElBaradei,
director general of the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA), has described as
"unworkable" the way of thinking that it is
"morally reprehensible for some counties to pursue
weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable
for others to rely on them for security and indeed
to continue to refine their capacities and
postulate plans for their use". [1]
While
he did not spell out particular countries, the
nuclear superpowers plainly fill the category of
countries that "rely on ... refine ... postulate
plans for" use of nuclear weapons, while they
undoubtedly see as "morally
reprehensible" the attempt of
other countries, notably North Korea and Iran, to
do likewise. While plainly hypocritical, the
former is the position of the United States (and
its allies, such as Japan).
In May 2005,
the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review
conference collapsed in failure. It was a disaster
and an outrage, but scarcely a surprise.
Responsibility was equally shared by the
established nuclear powers whose hypocrisy
discredited the system and those outside the club
seeking to justify themselves according to the
superpower principle: without nuclear weapons
there is no security.
Former president
Jimmy Carter summed it up: "The United States is
the major culprit in the erosion of the NPT. While
claiming to be protecting the world from
proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and
North Korea ... they also have abandoned past
pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear
weapons against non-nuclear states." [2]
Despite the evidence, especially since
September 11, 2001, that nuclear weapons are no
guarantee of security, the nuclear club powers (
US, Britain, Russia, France, China) ignore the
obligation they entered 30 years ago under Article
6 of the NPT, and reaffirmed in 2000 as an
"unequivocal undertaking" for "the elimination of
their nuclear arsenals".
The dominant
Western powers among them also turn a blind eye to
the secret accumulation of a huge nuclear arsenal
on the part of a favored state (Israel) that
refuses to join the NPT and thumbs its nose at the
idea of non-proliferation. The US has also just
lifted a 30-year ban on sales of civilian nuclear
technology to India, describing it as "a
responsible state with advanced nuclear
technology", even though civil nuclear energy
cooperation with a non-signatory contravenes the
very essence of the NPT.
The US in March
2003 launched a devastating war on Iraq based on a
groundless charge that the country was engaged in
nuclear weapons production. Yet it maintains its
own arsenal of about 10,000 warheads, deploys
shells tipped with depleted uranium that spread
deadly pollution likely to persist for centuries,
has withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile
(ABM) Treaty and declared its intent not to ratify
the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), has
adopted (in 2006) a production schedule of 250
nuclear warheads per year, is making great efforts
to develop a new generation of "low yield"
mini-nukes and promises to extend its nuclear
hegemony over the earth to space.
Robert
McNamara, defense secretary in the 1960s, in March
2005 described American reliance on nuclear
weapons as a foreign policy tool as "illegal and
immoral". [3]
Japan is a well-known
nuclear victim that maintains "three non-nuclear
principles" (non-production, non-possession and
non-introduction into Japan) and has a "peace
constitution". Yet the core of Japan's defense
policy is nuclear weapons. [4] True the weapons in
question are not Japanese but American. Japan
clings to the assurance that any enemy attacking
or threatening it with nuclear weapons would be
devastated by American nuclear counter-attack.
Its non-nuclear "principles" therefore
amount to no more than the pretence, while its
actual policy is unswerving commitment to
(American) nuclear weapons. So supportive has
Japan been of American nuclear militarism that in
1969 it entered secret clauses into its agreement
with the United States so that the "principles"
could be bypassed and a Japanese "blind eye"
turned toward American vessels carrying nuclear
weapons docking in or transiting Japan, an
arrangement that lasted until 1992. [5]
The Japan of "non-nuclear principles" is
also in the process of becoming a nuclear
superpower, the sole "non-nuclear" state that is
committed to possessing both enrichment and
reprocessing facilities, as well as to developing
a fast-breeder reactor. Its stocks of plutonium
amount to more than 40 tons, the equivalent of
5,000 Nagasaki-type weapons. Its determined
pursuit of a nuclear cycle, giving it the
wherewithal to be able quickly to go nuclear
should that Rubicon ever be reached, is in
defiance of the February 2005 appeal from the IAEA
director general for a five-year freeze on all
enrichment and reprocessing works. [6]
Japan's 40 tons of plutonium may be
compared with the 10-15 kilograms of fissile
material that North Korea was accused of illicit
diversion in the 1994 crisis, or the .7 of a gram
South Korea produced in the early 1980s and for
which it was severely rebuked by the IAEA. [7]
When Japan's Rokkasho facility - probably
the world's most expensive facility in modern
history, expected to cost about 19 trillion yen
(US$170 billion) over the term of its use -
commences operation in July 2007 it will be
capable of reprocessing 800 tons of spent fuel a
year, yielding each year about eight more tons (or
1,000 warheads-worth) of plutonium. The best
estimates are that a one-percentage loss of
materials in such a vast system would be
impossible to detect. Japan also regularly ships
highly toxic wastes across vast stretches of rough
and dangerous ocean, each shipment equivalent to
about 17 atomic bombs-worth, in defiance of
countries en route and despite risks of piracy or
terrorist hijacking.
In the United
Nations, Japan declines to associate itself with
the "New Agenda Coalition" (NAC) that came into
existence following the nuclear tests by India and
Pakistan in 1998 to try to exert more urgent
pressure for disarmament and non-proliferation.
For Japan, the NAC was too "confrontational", in
other words, too directly challenging the nuclear
privilege of the US and the other nuclear
privileged powers. For Japan to join NAC, against
US wishes, might also have been to weaken the
US-provided "umbrella".
While Japan
therefore stresses non-proliferation, insisting on
North Korean obligation, it is passive on
disarmament, ie, specifically downplaying the
obligations of the US and other superpowers. Its
defense policy rests on the attachment to, perhaps
even the implicit longing for nuclear weapons. It
is therefore cool to the idea of a Northeast Asian
nuclear weapons free zone.
The problem
of perspective While it is common in the
Western (US-centered) world to think of the "North
Korea problem" in terms of a threatening,
nuclear-obsessed, tiny and irrational country with
a political system, based on "great" and "dear"
leaders, that refuses to follow common sense, from
North Korea the world looks very different. The
"problem" is the United States, and the half
century of hostile, violent and always
intimidating confrontation from the intervention
that divided Korea in 1945 and the devastating war
of 1950 to 1953 to the hostility that continues to
this day.
Washington is outraged over the
program it believes North Korea has been following
over the past decade and a half to produce nuclear
weapons. Pyongyang, on the other hand, looks back
over more than half a century of nuclear
intimidation by the US. During the Korean War,
military commanders Douglas MacArthur and Matthew
Ridgway, presidents Harry Truman and Dwight
Eisenhower, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all at
one time or other favored nuclear attack on North
Korea and were restrained only by the fear of
possible Soviet retaliation.
Then, for
almost the entire period of the Cold War, American
nuclear weapons were stored in South Korea - in
violation of the Armistice Agreement of 1953 -
ready for instant deployment and use, and even
after their withdrawal, at South Korean
insistence, much of North Korea continues to be
targeted by US sea and air-based nuclear
war-fighting systems.
Set in its
historical context, the North Korean decision to
"go nuclear", however reprehensible, is neither
illogical nor incomprehensible. After experiencing
explicit nuclear intimidation for decades,
Pyongyang seems to have decided that its security,
like that of the superpowers, could only be
accomplished by either turning itself into a
nuclear power and achieving the impregnability
that is assumed to go with that status, or by
using a supposed or real nuclear weapons program
as a negotiating ploy to achieve security from
nuclear and non-nuclear threat.
Whether it
actually possesses any such weapons, the lesson it
(and indeed any other country feeling insecure)
would reasonably draw from the invasion of Iraq,
and the acceptance into the nuclear club of India
and Pakistan, would be the need to persuade its
enemies that it did. In the twisted logic of
nuclear politics, that which renders all humanity
insecure becomes that without which no country can
consider itself secure.
In 1994, the
confrontation between the US and North Korea
degenerated to the brink of war, staved off only
at the last minute by an accommodation known as
the Geneva "agreed framework". Under it, North
Korea froze its graphite reactors and accepted
international inspection of its plutonium wastes,
while the US promised to construct two
alternative, light-water reactors, supply heavy
oil for energy generation until the reactors came
on stream, and to move toward political and
economic normalization.
During the eight
years that the framework functioned, relations
between the two countries were stabilized and late
in the Bill Clinton administration there were
dramatic portents of reconciliation. In the end,
however, all that North Korea actually got was the
supply of heavy oil, which was then cut off in the
middle of the winter of 2002-3. The reactors,
supposed to be generating power from 2003, never
progressed much beyond some large holes in the
ground. Rather than steps toward normalization,
the George W Bush administration came to power in
2001 denouncing North Korea, referring to it in
January 2002 as part of the "axis of evil".
The framework broke down in particular
over the US insistence that Pyongyang had been
pursuing a two-track nuclear weapons program: the
one that was subject of the 1994 agreement, using
the wastes from the Yongbyon reactors to process
plutonium for "Nagasaki-type" nuclear devices, and
the other, a covert program using uranium
enrichment to produce "Hiroshima-type" devices.
According to assistant secretary of state
James Kelly, officials in Pyongyang confessed such
a program to him during his October 2002 visit to
Pyongyang. This confession (denied by North Korea,
which insisted that Kelly had misunderstood its
statement of the right to such a program as a
statement of its possession) led the US to suspend
its commitments under the framework. This in turn
prompted North Korea the following January to
withdraw from the NPT and resume its weapons
program.
For the United States,
elimination of any North Korean nuclear weapons
and related programs (plutonium and uranium-based)
is the overriding, but far from exclusive, goal.
It also demands demilitarization, especially the
scrapping of North Korea's missile program, and
major political changes (in respect of human
rights ). Some within the Bush administration are
also committed to regime change. North Korea, for
its part, seeks resolution of the problems that
have plagued it for so long: isolation,
intimidation and sanctions, through the conversion
of the ceasefire of 1953 into a permanent peace
treaty and the "normalization" of relations of all
kinds - security, political, diplomatic, economic
- with the United States and Japan.
At the
heart of the booming Northeast Asian region, it is
anomalous and destabilizing for such confrontation
to persist. Increasingly, neighbor countries now
play an active role in seeking to resolve it.
The Beijing initiative From
2003, China began to play a crucial role in
attempting to broker a solution, hosting from
August 2003 what became known as the "six-party
talks", bringing together the key protagonists,
the United States and North Korea, together with
the neighbor states - South Korea, China, Russia
and Japan.
For two years, the talks
produced little. The US representative was under
instructions not to speak to his North Korean
opposite number save to state and restate US
demands, calling on North Korea to undertake what
he called "CVID" (complete, verifiable,
irreversible, dismantling) of all nuclear
programs, to scrap its missiles and reduce its
conventional forces, and to address terrorism and
human rights concerns, while he dismissed North
Korea's demand for a guarantee it would not be
attacked, and its pleas for comprehensive
normalization, as unnecessary, irrelevant,
premature and occasionally as "blackmail".
Asked after the August 2003 session what
the biggest obstacle in the negotiations had been,
Wang Yi, the the Chinese chairman of the talks,
replied, "The American policy towards DPRK
[Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, North
Korea] - this is the main problem we are facing."
[8]
Despite regular statements from
Washington about the unity of the five countries
that sat with North Korea around the table,
disunity was characteristic. Even on the US claim
of a North Korean confession to a covert uranium
enrichment program, central to the case of North
Korean bad faith, the US was unable to persuade
its Beijing conference partners.
Late in
2004, even after a concentrated diplomatic effort
by the second Bush administration, both the
Chinese foreign minister Li Zhaoxing and the
director of South Korea's National Intelligence
Service explicitly rejected the US claims. [9] By
then, the manipulation of intelligence to justify
war on Iraq was well known, and the intelligence
on North Korea could not escape similar suspicion.
The US journal Foreign Affairs published
an analysis by the highly placed Washington
observer, Selig Harrison, who pronounced the
evidence inconclusive, based on a deliberate
favoring of "worst case scenarios". [10] Evidence
of North Korean purchases of aluminum from Russia
(and of failed attempts to import it from
Germany), and of the Pakistan-based A Q Khan
network (he is called the father of Pakistan's
nuclear program), point to attempts by North Korea
to procure the materials for an enrichment
program, but its denial of actually having an
active and ongoing one is plausible. In any case,
the US failed to convince its partners of a
crucial aspect of its case.
What had begun
in the Beijing conference forum as a US attempt to
mobilize a united front of pressure on North Korea
began to turn, under South Korean, Chinese and
Russian "reverse pressure", into a true,
multilateral negotiating forum. Two years into the
negotiations, the US softened its rhetoric and
ceased its abuse, showing a readiness to talk with
the North Koreans and shifting from talk about the
need for "regime change" in North Korea to "regime
transformation".
In itself, it was a minor
shift in terminology. In September, fearful of
becoming what Jack Pritchard, formerly the State
Department's top North Korea expert, described as
"a minority of one ... isolated from the
mainstream of its four other allies and friends in
the six-party talks," [11] and facing an ultimatum
from the Chinese chair of the conference to sign
or else bear the blame for their breakdown, [12]
the US yielded. The parties to the Beijing
conference reached a historic agreement on
principles and objectives.
Under the
September agreement, North Korea would scrap "all
nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs",
return to the NPT and allow international
inspections. In return, it would be granted
diplomatic recognition, normalization and economic
benefits, including, at "an appropriate time", a
light-water reactor. [13]
Several major
points were left unclear: whether "existing
programs" that North Korea would scrap included
the enriched uranium weapons program on which
Washington insisted but whose existence Pyongyang
denied, and when and under what conditions would
North Korea become entitled to a civilian nuclear
energy program. The right to a civilian nuclear
program is described in Article 4 of the Non
Proliferation Treaty as "inalienable". South
Korea, Russia and China took the view that North
Korea should enjoy its right to a civil, energy
program once it returned to the treaty, but the US
head of delegation, Christopher Hill, had ruled it
out for North Korea.
It was also notable
that long-range missile programs and "
human-rights concerns" were not addressed in the
September agreement, although they remained major
concerns in Washington and had been vigorously
argued by Japan and the United States. The
reluctance to include any reference to "human
rights" on the part of China in particular, which
views American "human rights" campaigns as a cloak
for attempts to achieve regime change and extend
US influence, is well-known.
As for South
Korea, it is deeply concerned over human-rights
questions in North Korea, but takes the view that
non-interference and "Sunshine [openness and
engagement with the North]" policies are the best
ways to achieve long-term improvement.
However vague and incomplete, the Beijing
consensus of September declared principles that
conformed to international law, recognized the
interests of regional countries for a
denuclearized peninsula and responded to North
Korea's complaints. Yet the agreement held for
little more than a day.
In both Pyongyang
and Washington, hardliners seized the initiative
to block possible reconciliation. North Korea made
its commitment to end its weapons program and
return to NPT safeguards dependent on getting a
light-water reactor first. [14] The US responded
by insisting that no light-water reactor could
even be considered until all other steps necessary
to bring North Korea back into the NPT were
complete. It then summarily terminated the KEDO
agreement (the Korean Peninsula Energy Development
Organization's light-water reactor project at the
heart of the 1994 pact, which had remained frozen,
but not cancelled, until then). [15] Pyongyang's
view of "appropriate time" for a North Korean
light-water reactor was "now", Washington's the
distant future.
One may well wonder why
North Korea should have insisted on a civilian
energy program and in particular its claim to a
light-water reactor. There is a certain logic to
it. North Korea has a chronic energy problem, is
rich in uranium and for long has dreamed of using
its resource to solve its problem. In the 1980s,
when North Korean president Kim Il-sung succeeded
in persuading the Russians to provide him with a
reactor, he insisted on the newest, light-water
(Russian VVER) type, rather than a graphite one,
ie, the most advanced technology rather than the
technology most compatible with a weapons program,
and was apparently extremely angry when he learned
that they had sent him the graphite model instead.
[16]
In the 1990s, Kim was persuaded to
sign on to the agreed framework because of the
American promise to supply him a light-water
reactor. Yet the American government was reluctant
from the start, dragged its heels, and from 2001
the Bush administration sought the first
opportunity - which came in 2002 - to scrap it. In
Beijing from 2003, North Korea again pressed the
case for a light-water reactor and the Bush team
opposed it until the very last minute and, when it
agreed to it under pressure, probably had little
intention of ever honoring its commitment.
The wisdom, economics and safety of
nuclear power may be open to serious question, and
the provisions of Article 4 of the NPT may deserve
revision, but it was scarcely credible for the US
(and Japan) to demand that North Korea alone
should be deprived of a right that was generally
recognized and is even entrenched in the very
treaty that it is being told it must return to,
especially when both Japan and South Korea
currently produce about 40% of their electricity
from nuclear power stations and China is planning
massive expansion in the sector.
Whether a
light-water reactor is the appropriate way to
address North Korea's acute energy crisis is
another matter. Such reactors are fabulously
expensive, take years to construct and would
require many billions of dollars upgrading the
national grid before any electricity from it could
be circulated. However desirable as a symbol of
prestige it might be, it seems hardly appropriate
to the needs of the economy. On both sides, the
light-water reactor becomes the irrational symbol
of the deeper issues of confrontation, lack of
trust (on both sides), and insecurity (on North
Korea's side).
Non-nuclear
considerations The Beijing agreement was
only possible because in Washington, for a time,
pragmatic forces that gave priority to nuclear and
missile concerns over "regime change" and "human
rights" were briefly in the ascendancy. That
ascendancy did not last long. Following what the
head of the Bush administration's North Korea
working group, David Asher, referred to as a
"strategic decision" at the highest level, policy
direction shifted late in 2005 from realists in
the State Department to a more highly charged and
highly-placed group directed by Vice President
Dick Cheney and coordinated by under secretary for
Arms Control Bob Joseph, who were determined to
squeeze North Korea on every front, especially in
regard to its alleged illegal activities and its
human rights record. [17]
The purport of
the "strategic decision" seems to have been to
widen the scope of negotiations from nuclear
matters, on which some progress had been made, to
the nature of the regime itself, thus neutralizing
the Beijing process, with the ultimate objective
not of normalizing relations but of toppling the
regime.
Allegations of North Korean
involvement in narcotics are far from new. The
Pong Su, a North Korean ship, was seized in
Australian waters in 2002 after unloading 150
kilograms of heroin. Two men from the ship were
convicted and sentenced to long prison terms,
although the captain and several crew members were
eventually acquitted. [18]
However, the
allegations of narcotics dealing were stepped up
in 2005 and extended into a comprehensive campaign
of denunciation of North Korea as a criminal
organization. In September, the US government
ordered suspension of transactions with a
Macau-based bank that was alleged to have helped
North Korea launder drug and counterfeit money and
froze the assets of eight companies accused of
involvement in weapons sales, publicized defector
allegations of regime engagement in large-scale
opium production and accused North Korea of the
manufacture and distribution of counterfeit
hundred dollar bills, "super notes". [19]
The picture that emerged was of "an
extensive criminal network involving North Korean
diplomats and officials, Chinese gangsters and
other organized crime syndicates, prominent Asian
banks, Irish guerillas and a former KGB agent".
[20]
The coordinator of the Bush
administration's North Korea working group
described North Korea as "the only government in
the world today that can be identified as being
actively involved in directing crime as a central
part of its national economic strategy and foreign
policy ... In essence, North Korea has become a
'soprano state' - a government guided by a
[Korean] Workers' Party leadership whose actions,
attitudes and affiliations increasingly resemble
those of an organized crime family more than a
normal nation. " [21]
The newly appointed
US ambassador to South Korea, Alexander Vershbow,
spoke in similar terms, denouncing North Korea as
a "criminal regime" responsible for "weapons
exports to rogue states, narcotics trafficking as
a state activity and counterfeiting of our money
on a large scale". [22]
"Normalization"
with such a regime, Washington implied, was no
more likely than normalization of relations
between the US government and the Mafia.
North Korea's Foreign Ministry spokesman
on December 11 retaliated by referring to
Vershbow's statement as a "declaration of war",
saying the talks were "suspended for an indefinite
period", and a few days later demanding Vershbow's
recall.
The campaign on criminal charges,
as that on uranium enrichment, rested heavily on
US intelligence sources. Given the profound
distaste for North Korea expressed by the
president and the record on Iraq, US intelligence
was inevitably suspect. South Korea's National
Intelligence Service, which had good reason to be
well-informed on its northern neighbor, advanced
the contrary view, stating that North Korea had
engaged in counterfeiting in the 1990s, but not
since 1998. [23]
The US denunciation of
North Korea on grounds of counterfeiting was
dubious for another reason. On Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld's instructions, the Pentagon in
2003 drew up something called "Operations Plan
5030", a revision of its earlier plan for war
against North Korea that featured destabilization,
including "disrupting financial networks and
sowing disinformation". [24] In other words, if
North Korea today were indeed engaged in
counterfeiting hundred dollar bills, it was taking
a leaf out of the US's own book. Unlike criminal
counterfeiting, the roots of counterfeiting as a
political stratagem are themselves political, and
resolution is only likely to be accomplished by
political processes, especially the ending of
hostilities. Since nobody would defend North
Korea on its human-rights record and few would
deny the likelihood of its involvement in crime,
however, these were issues on which Washington
could expect to be able to mobilize support easily
and on which diplomatic resolution was highly
unlikely. Congress in 2004 adopted (following a
unanimous vote in both houses) a "North Korean
Human Rights Act" and a special US envoy for North
Korean human rights took up office in August.
In December, the United Nations General
Assembly adopted a resolution jointly sponsored by
Japan, the US and the European Union, condemning
North Korea for multiple human rights abuses.
Resolution 10437 of December 16 listed "torture,
public executions, arbitrary detention, the lack
of due process, extensive use of forced labor,
high rates of infant malnutrition and restrictions
on humanitarian organizations ... severe
restrictions on freedom of religion, assembly and
on free movement within the country and abroad, as
well as trafficking in women for sexual
exploitation, forced marriage and forced
abortions".
As the focus shifted to "human
rights", the Bush administration became steadily
more active in interventions along North Korea's
borders and via the airwaves, supporting an "East
European" model of undermining and destabilizing
the regime by non-military means. The right-wing
Hudson Institute's Michael Horowitz, one of the
authors of the Human Rights Law, on December 23,
2004 stated his belief that North Korea would
implode within the year.
He also spoke of
the possibility of finding generals within the
North Korean military prepared to work with the US
and using them to bring about a coup. "Defense
Committee Chairman Kim Jong-il won't be able to
enjoy the next Christmas," he added. [25]
In a similar vein, Nicholas Eberstadt of
the American Enterprise Institute, another
prominent neo-conservative intellectual, wrote a
November 2004 article entitled "Tear down this
Tyranny." [26] Like Horowitz, he directed his
venom at both Korean governments, referring to
"the pro-appeasement crowd in the South Korean
government" who had turned that country into a
place "increasingly governed in accordance with
graduate-school 'peace studies' desiderata." From
this perspective, "negotiation" with North Korea
was out of the question. North Korea had only to
submit. To encourage it, the appropriate
diplomatic tool was a "coalition for punishment",
according to Victor Cha, who in December 2004 took
up the position of director for Asian Affairs at
the National Security Council. [27]
Like
American nuclear double standards, Japanese
human-rights rhetoric had a strong flavor of
hypocrisy because of its lack of a universal moral
frame. Outrage at being the victim of North Korean
abduction of some dozen or so of its citizens two
and a half decades ago outweighed any
consideration of its own responsibility for the
mass abductions and violations of Korean human
rights by Japan a few decades earlier and inclined
it to support the US cry for punishment.
At the Beijing table, and in addressing
the North Korean problem in general, Japan's
position was therefore closest to the American. In
some respects - as with its late 2002 suspension
of humanitarian food aid to put pressure on North
Korea over the abductions - it went further than
the US, and within the Japanese diet or parliament
the call for explicit sanctions moved toward the
top of the political agenda.
The focus
thus shifted in 2005 from nuclear questions to
questions of criminality and human rights, and
from Beijing, where the US had found it
increasingly difficult to call the shots, to the
global arena. The efforts of the regional powers -
South Korea, China and Russia - to achieve a
negotiated solution were thereby undercut. They
may find it harder to resist a campaign on crime
and human rights issues than to continue putting
pressure on both North Korea and the United States
to resolve their nuclear differences.
Prospects However reprehensible
North Korea may be, its grievances are also
serious. Its demand for relief from nuclear
intimidation should have been heeded long ago, and
its plea for "normalization" as the price of
abandonment of its nuclear program, often referred
to as "blackmail", is not unreasonable. For about
40 years, the world was indifferent to the nuclear
threat that North Korea faced from the United
States, and only when North Korea began to develop
what in great power parlance is described as a
"deterrent" was world attention aroused.
North Korea's withdrawal from the NPT and
the unfreezing of its plutonium stocks and
restarting of its graphite reactors in 2003 was
destabilizing, and it must be persuaded to return
to the treaty and its accompanying obligations.
However, the 1994 agreement broke down because of
serious breaches on both sides.
If North
Korea has produced the weapons it proclaimed in
March 2005, that would certainly be in defiance of
the international will as expressed in the NPT of
1968 and the Korean South-North "Denuclearization
of the Korean Peninsula" agreement of January
1992. If any country has the right to develop
nuclear weapons as a deterrent it has to be North
Korea, because it has faced explicit nuclear
threat longer than any country on earth.
Even the International Court of Justice
(in a 1996 advisory opinion) refused to rule that
the attempted construction of nuclear defenses by
a state under threat of nuclear attack is illegal.
[28] North Korea now uses the only negotiating
instrument it possesses to press its case for
removal of intimidation, including nuclear
intimidation, the lifting of sanctions and
economic and political normalization. Resolution
of these problems is the key to peace, cooperation
and prosperity in Northeast Asia.
The
steady pressure designed to force collapse and
regime change in North Korea is risky. The
Pyongyang regime is unlikely to surrender and if
pushed to the wall is likely to resist. Given the
fact that, according to veteran journalist Seymour
Hersh (in the New Yorker, April 17), the US in
2006 was actively considering use of nuclear
weapons against Iran, it could hardly be doubted
that similar plans were in store for North Korea.
Occasional glimpses of the US nuclear
strategy for Korea are scarcely reassuring. In the
late 1970s, eager to reassure South Koreans that
it would stop at nothing in their defense, the
Carter administration drew up plans to respond to
any move by North Korean forces into South Korea
by dropping nuclear bombs to within nine miles of
Seoul's post office. [29]
The government
in Seoul also recently released details of a 2005
study. [30] The use of US nuclear weapons in a
"surgical" strike on North Korea's nuclear
facilities would, in a worst case scenario, make
the whole of Korea uninhabitable for a decade, and
if things worked out somewhat better, kill 80% of
those living within a 10-15 kilometer radius in
the first two months and spread radiation over an
area stretching as far as 1,400 kilometers,
including Seoul. The Pentagon's "Doctrine for
Joint Nuclear Operations", posted on the web in
March 2005, made clear that nuclear weapons were
fully integrated with "conventional" war fighting
capacity.
In the confrontation between the
US and North Korea, the observer is hard-put to
think which is the more defiant of international
law and principle. Unlike the US, North Korea has
not committed aggressive war (at least in the past
half century), threatened any neighbor with
nuclear weapons or attempted to justify the
practice of torture and assassination.
The
suffering and denial of human rights suffered by
citizens of North Korea can scarcely be greater
than, say, those of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in
Iraq or Guantanamo in Cuba. Plainly, the North
Korean state is far from international norms of
behavior but, seen in its historical context, it
is not so much "evil" as the fossilized
encapsulation of the contradictions and failures
of the 20th century.
By a paradoxical
feed-back process, no factor so helps sustain its
dictatorship as US hostility, on which the
Pyongyang regime feeds, justifying and reinforcing
itself. Likewise, it may be said that no factor so
helps the US maintain its military dominance over
East Asia, its bases in Japan and South Korea, as
the ability to point to possible North Korean
aggression.
If one rules out pressure
designed to achieve regime change by precipitating
collapse, or by coup or invasion, because of the
chaos that would be likely to bring to the entire
region, what options are there?
The South
Korean, and to a lesser extent Russian and
Chinese, approach to North Korea constitutes an
alternative. Instead of squeezing North Korea,
cutting trade and restricting the flow of funds to
it, and working covertly to achieve "regime
change", South Korea, and the regional powers
China and Russia, were all doing or planning
deals, maximizing their cooperation and engagement
in the two-way flow of funds and trade, and
steadily incorporating North Korea into the
networks of regional cooperation: ie precisely the
reverse of US and Japanese practice.
Setting aside fundamentalist hostility to
North Korea, South Korea began in the late 1990s
to articulate an approach that it summed up in the
word: "Sunshine". Though despised by the US
government as wimpish, this approach has served to
pry open doors through which different winds now
blow in North Korea. The contest around the
Beijing table, and the ongoing contest over North
Korea, represents essentially a contest between
the American attempt to achieve regime change by
the mobilization of a "coalition for punishment"
and the Seoul approach to seek windows through
which "sunshine" can penetrate into North Korea.
The people of South Korea won their own
democracy though decades of struggle against
oppressive and criminal regimes that were
supported by the US and its close allies who now
claim to stand for freedom and democracy.
If the people of North Korea are to
achieve the same victory, it is likely to be in
their own way, in association with their southern
compatriots, and by peaceful means. The campaign
to "free" them is as likely to be disastrous in
its consequences as the campaign to "free" Iraq.
The Beijing agreement of September is the best
agreement thus far and renewed pressure on both
Washington and Pyongyang to honor and extend it is
the only way forward.
Notes [1] Mohamed
ElBaradei, "Saving ourselves from
self-destruction," New York Times, February 12,
2004. [2] Jimmy Carter, "Saving
nonproliferation," The Washington Post, March 28,
2005. [3] "McNamara derides illegal nuke
policies," AP, March 10, 2005. [4] "The GOJ
[Government of Japan] ... cannot help but rely
upon security policies which include nuclear
deterrence." See discussion between Japanese
non-governmental organizations and the arms
control and disarmament specialists of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The real thinking of
Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). [5] Morton Halperin, "The
nuclear dimension of the US-Japan alliance",
Nautilus Institute, 1999.
[6] Mohammed ElBaradei, "Seven steps to raise
world security" ,The Financial Times, February 2,
2005. [7] IAEA, 2004 [8]
"South Korea, Russia wants diplomatic push, China
blames US policy," Agence France-Presse, September
1, 2003. [9] Selig Harrison, "Crafting
Intelligence", March 2005. Japan Focus No 229.
[10] Selig Harrison, "Did
North Korea Cheat?" Foreign Affairs,
January-February 2005, and at Japan Focus, No
186. [11] Charles L (Jack) Pritchard, "Six-Party
Talks Update: False Start or a Case for Optimism",
conference on "The Changing Korean Peninsula and
the Future of East Asia", sponsored by the
Brookings Institution and Joongang Ilbo, December
1, 2005. [12] Joseph Kahn and David E Sanger,
"US-Korean deal on arms leaves key points open,"
New York Times, September 20, 2005. [13] For
relevant documents, Korea and World Affairs,
volume XXIX, 3, Fall 2005, p 45-464. [14]
North Korean Foreign Ministry Statement of
September 20, 2005, ibid, p 458. [15] "US,
Partners end N Korean nuclear project", Associated
Press, November 22, 2005. [16] Yoshida
Yasuhiko (head of public relations at IAEA,
1986-1989, subsequently professor at Osaka
University of Economics and Law), "Keisuiro no
tottoku ha Kin Nissei no ikkun," Shukan Kinyobi,
September 30, 2005, p 20-21. [17] Guy Dinmore
and Anna Fifield, "US hardliners grab North Korean
Policy reins," The Financial Times, December 20,
2005. [18] Peter Gregory and Geesche Jacobsen,
"Freighter crew cleared of drug charges," Sydney
Morning Herald, March 6, 2006. [19] "US
accuses North Korea of $100 bill counterfeiting,"
Washington Times, October 12, 2005. [20] Josh
Meyer and Barbara Demick, "N Korea running
counterfeit racket, says US," Sydney Morning
Herald, December 14, 2005. [21] David L Asher,
"The North Korean criminal state, its ties to
organized crime, and the possibility of WMD
proliferation," Policy Forum Online, No 05-92A,
Nautilus Institute, November 15, 2005. [22] "US says N Korea
'criminal regime'," BBC News, December 17, 2005.
[23] Kwang-Tae Kim, "Agency: North Korea not
counterfeiting," Associated Press, February 2,
2006. [24] Bruce B Auster and Kevin Whitelaw,
"Upping the ante for Kim Jong-il," US News and
World report, July 21, 2003. [25] Seung-Ryun
Kim, "Horowitz: North Korea will explode within
one year," DongA Ilbo, December 24, 2004. [26]
"Tear down this tyranny," The Weekly Standard,
November 29, 2004. [27] "Korea's Place in the
Axis," Foreign Affairs, 81, May-June 2002, p
79-92. Quote here is from the book, Victor D Cha
and David C Kang, Nuclear North Korea: A Debate
on Engagement Strategies, New York, Columbia
University Press, 2003, p 153. [28]
International Court of Justice, Advisory opinion
on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear
weapons, July 9 1996, paragraph 97. [29] Hans M Kristensen,
"Japan under the Nuclear Umbrella: US nuclear
weapons and nuclear war planning in Japan during
the Cold War," Nautilus Institute, July 1999,
"Vulnerability of North Korean Forces,"
Defense Nuclear Agency, Washington,
April-1977-March 1978, published under FOI by
Nautilus Institute, March 31, 2004. [30] Chosun Ilbo, June 6, 2005.
Gavan McCormack is professor in
the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
at the Australian National University and (2003 to
2005) visiting professor at International
Christian University in Tokyo. His most recent
book is Target North Korea: Pushing North
Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe,
Nation Books, 2004). He is also a Japan Focus
coordinator.
