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Can catastrophic Korean war be
avoided?
By Marc Erikson
"I
didn't think it was likely in the first place," might be
your initial response. Well, think twice, and start by
considering the events of this past week. Last Sunday,
four North Korean MiG fighters intercepted a US RC-135
spy plane, specially equipped to detect missile engine
tests and launches, in international airspace (150 miles
off the Korean coastline), approached it to within 15
meters and locked on with their fire-control radars. The
last time this sort of thing happened was in 1969 when
North Korea shot down a US reconnaissance plane, killing
31 Americans. A repeat was an imminent possibility.
On Tuesday, large-scale annual joint US-South
Korean military exercises ("Foal Eagle") commenced and
will run through April 2. In response, North Korea said
that it was prepared for nuclear war and a Foreign
Ministry official told the French daily Le Monde that
Pyongyang would completely withdraw from the 1953
armistice agreement that terminated the Korean War if
the US persisted in its "threatening behavior". That
same day, it was disclosed that US Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld had ordered 12 B-52 and 12 B-1 bombers
to Guam (within ready reach of North Korea) "to deter
aggression", and President George W Bush, still
stressing diplomacy, for the first time no longer ruled
out the use of military force.
That's the news,
but the details are mere incidentals indicating
escalation potential and that (and how) accidents might
happen. Historically, most wars have started in such
manner, not as pre-planned events. But the added
ingredients in most cases were underlying conflicts of
interest, goals and principles that proved intractable,
could not be reconciled by political means, and
engendered misjudgment and miscalculation. Those
conditions are present to a large extent in the standoff
between North Korea and the United States and define
increasing war risk going forward.
The US
position as spelled out clearly by Secretary of State
Colin Powell in early January is that Pyongyang's
violations of its nuclear freeze commitments (the 1994
Agreed Framework) demonstrate that there is no point in
going back to the 1994 position, and that instead North
Korea's nuclear installations must be dismantled. The
same point was reiterated a few days ago when
speculation had arisen that the US might be prepared to
accept a nuclear-armed North Korea and White House
spokesman Ari Fleischer said that the exact opposite was
the case.
And what's Kim Jong-il's game? While
taking note of the fact that from the beginning of the
current standoff last October until now Kim's regime has
demanded bilateral talks with the US for the purpose of
negotiating a non-aggression pact, the received wisdom
in Washington and Seoul remains that Kim wants to extort
further economic aid in return for backing down and that
firm commitments to extend it will do the trick. Seoul,
in particular, is on that line and practiced it two
years ago when about US$200 million was funneled to Kim
to have him agree to the "historical meeting" with Nobel
Peace Prize winner Kim Dae-jung.
This line of
thinking is dangerous nonsense and shows precisely where
and how miscalculation could enter into the equation.
Kim's regime today finds itself in much the same
position as Mao Zedong's China in the early 1960s. The
1960 Sino-Soviet split had deprived China of all allies;
the 1958-60 Great Leap Forward had led to economic
crisis and mass starvation (at least 14 million died
between 1959 and 1961); the United States had installed
nuclear weapons on Taiwan, posing an immediate threat no
longer deterred by the Soviet nuclear umbrella. And yet,
and precisely to assure its sovereignty and independence
and the survival of the communist regime, China from the
autumn of 1960 onward embarked on an independent crash
nuclear-weapons development program and tested its first
nuke on October 16, 1964. Food and energy aid wasn't the
issue for Mao then; it isn't the issue for Kim today.
A bit more of Chinese history further elucidates
the point. The Soviets designed and built China's
initial nuclear-weapons infrastructure, including
equipment, plans and training. In October 1957, the two
nations signed the New Defense Technical Accord in which
the Soviets promised to supply China with blueprints for
and a working prototype of an atomic bomb. But this
accord was canceled in June 1960 and all Soviet advisors
left China within months. Knowing that
enriched-uranium-based weapons were easier to make than
plutonium implosion devices, China chose the gaseous
diffusion method of enriching uranium to weapons grade
and construct its first device. Kim has done the same
since about 1998, allegedly with Pakistani help.
The man is dead serious about turning North
Korea into a declared nuclear power to have a proven
deterrence capability against South Korea and Japan and
US forces there. He fears US attack. That's not just a
put-on. He will have read the new US national security
doctrine of last September that sanctions preemptive
attack and, of course, knows all about "regime change"
watching Bush's Iraq policy.
The standoff, then,
is between a US policy of pushing North Korean nuclear
disarmament and a Kim policy of developing nuclear
weapons for self-preservation. Can or will Kim give up
on his goal? That's not a whole lot more likely than Mao
giving up on nuclear development in the 1960s. Will the
US give up its demand for dismantlement of North Korea's
nuclear weapons program? That's equally unlikely, as the
very logic of its Iraq policy is WMD (weapons of mass
destruction) disarmament to prevent proliferation. From
the clash of these hardened positions arises the grave
danger of armed conflict catalyzed by a spy-plane-type
incident, imposition of sanctions, or a naval blockade
of North Korea to prevent the sale of WMD and delivery
vehicles.
Kim is not irrational, he won't trade
food for nukes. Like Mao, he doesn't care about his
starving people when it comes to regime survival. Short
of iron-clad security guarantees, he won't stand down
and change course. But who's going to provide such
guarantees, and in a credible, binding and enforceable
manner?
Next: Kim's arsenal and war doctrine
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