Talks aside, North Korea won't give up
nukes By Yoel Sano
The
long-awaited second round of "six-way talks" over North
Korea's nuclear-weapons program ended, as expected,
without agreement in Beijing, and a real solution to the
dispute appears to be as distant as ever. It is
therefore worth considering seriously the possibility
that North Korea has decided once and for all that
possession of nuclear weapons is the country's surest
form of defense - namely against Washington - and that
negotiations are merely aimed at buying time for
building up its stockpile.
Pyongyang has
suggested such a nuclear-stockpile defensive strategy
previously, and an examination of its behavior over the
past decade and the increasingly adverse geopolitical
environment facing leader Kim Jong-il's regime certainly
points to this outcome: Talk but don't give up nukes.
This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that
in the six months since the first round of talks, there
has been no meaningful shift in the position of the two
protagonists: the United States and North Korea.
Herein lies the crux of the problem: if North
Korea possesses nuclear weapons - and it is believed
already to have from two to five - then the United
States' ultimate fears come closer to reality; if North
Korea abandons its nukes, its own ultimate fears of US
hostile intentions come closer to reality. The truth of
the matter is that neither side trusts the other, making
it virtually impossible to conduct sincere and
productive negotiations.
Pyongyang's fears are
fueled by US attacks on countries without nuclear
weapons: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Thus, in its
view, possessing nuclear weapons is the ultimate
guarantee that the US will not entertain any ideas about
invading and bringing about regime change in Pyongyang
itself. North Korea's nukes warn Washington that there
will be a very high price to pay if the United States
were ever to attack. That price could well be the
destruction of US bases in South Korea and Japan, or
attacks on Seoul and Tokyo, or even Los Angeles and San
Francisco - if Pyongyang succeeds in developing a fully
intercontinental ballistic missile. North Korea's
current longest-range missile, the Taepodong 2, can
"only" reach Alaska.
The latest round of talks
looks surprisingly similar to the previous session: the
US continues to demand a complete, verifiable, and
irreversible dismantling (CVID) of North Korea's nuclear
program - or rather, programs. Pyongyang actually has
two nuclear programs: one based on plutonium, which was
officially frozen in 1994, the other based on uranium,
the existence of which is more ambiguous and not
acknowledged by North Korea.
Washington's
calibrated response: No! No! No! In return for
CVID, North Korea wants the United States to sign a
formal non-aggression treaty, establish full bilateral
diplomatic relations, and provide Pyongyang with
billions of dollars' worth of economic and energy
assistance. Washington is unwilling to reward North
Korea for halting a nuclear program that it believes
should never have been started in the first place.
As such, the closest thing to progress in the
latest round has been North Korea's confirmed
willingness to freeze its official nuclear
plutonium-enrichment program, which it restarted in
December 2002 after a diplomatic row with the US. This
resulted after visiting US officials claimed that
Pyongyang had admitted to them in October of that year
that it was operating a parallel uranium-based nuclear
program. North Korea denied such an admission, and
continues to deny the existence of the uranium project.
The fact that it does so makes it impossible to
negotiate the issue. Not only that, but Pyongyang's
offer of a freeze of its official nuclear program falls
well short of US demands for its dismantling.
Despite this gulf between Washington and
Pyongyang, the US surprisingly described the latest
round of talks as "very successful". Washington appeared
pleased that all parties, except North Korea, agreed to
a full denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and the
US saw creation of a common front as conducive to
increasing pressure on North Korea. The other countries
are China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.
North
Korea, meanwhile, openly stated after the talks: "There
is a fundamental difference in the attitude between the
US delegation and the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic
of Korea] delegation." Host nation China agreed with
that statement, although it refrained from criticism,
merely noting, "The road is long, and there will be a
few bumps in the road."
Indeed, the "road" is
looking more like a steep rock face. Although all
parties agreed to more six-way talks in June, the
glacial pace of progress and the fact that months
separate these rounds suggest that it could still be
years - if ever - before a solution satisfactory to all
is reached.
Prolonged standoff could mean an
end to talks There is a danger in such a
scenario. The United States and North Korea might
conclude that neither side is serious about
negotiations, and abandon them altogether. Indeed,
Pyongyang appears to have concluded some time ago that
building nuclear weapons - and experts say it already
has a few - is its surest form of defense.
At
this stage, it is worth looking at the psychology
between the two sides. The US has never accepted the
idea of allowing North Korea to possess nuclear weapons,
fearing that this would encourage it to invade South
Korea, playing the nuclear card to deter any US
intervention. More recently, though, Washington's
concerns have stemmed from North Korea's close ties with
"rogue states" such as Iran, Libya and Syria. And there
are concerns that Pakistan's traitorous nuclear
scientist who sold secrets was also helping North Korea.
And, in light of the September 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks on the US, Washington's ultimate fear
is that Pyongyang could even sell nukes to al-Qaeda,
thereby posing "an imminent danger of nuclear weapons
being detonated in US cities", in the words of former US
defense secretary William Perry.
North Korea's
ultimate fear is a US invasion or aerial attack designed
to overthrow the regime of Kim Jong-il and the ruling
Korean Workers Party (KWP). Pyongyang therefore wants
the United States to sign a formal non-aggression treaty
guaranteeing the safety of the regime, establish full
bilateral diplomatic relations, and provide energy and
billions of dollars' worth of economic assistance. No
way, says Washington.
America's fears and North
Korea's fears collide; if either side makes concessions,
it believes its worst nightmares would be realized and
the other side would launch aggression. Total lack of
trust only worsens the chances of resolution.
Certainly, the chances are close to nil that Kim
Jong-il will follow Libyan leader Colonel Muammar
Gaddafi's recent example of publicly announcing the end
of his country's weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
programs and cooperating with international inspectors.
Why North Korea wants the bomb North
Korea has embarked on a nuclear-weapons program for
three main reasons.
The first, though least important, is prestige. For
any country, possession of nuclear weapons confers a
degree of status, showing that it has the scientific,
technological and military know-how required to put
together the ultimate weapon. This is especially true in
North Korea's case, since the country can boast precious
few achievements of any kind in recent years, or even
decades. Without nukes, or even suspected nukes, North
Korea would probably be another Myanmar, routinely
condemned for its atrocious human-rights record, but
generally isolated and ignored in the region and by the
wider world.
The second reason is to use it as a bargaining chip
in relations with the United States, South Korea, or
Japan - North Korea's principal enemies and adversaries.
Those nations' policymakers who favor a negotiated
solution to the nuclear issue suggest that Pyongyang
will build up a nuclear arsenal, then trade it away for
diplomatic and economic concessions. The trouble is,
once these concessions have been won, there is no way to
guarantee that North Korea has given up its
nuclear-weapons program without verification. And even
if "verification" takes place, Pyongyang can pursue -
indeed, has been pursuing - a covert nuclear program, to
which it allegedly admitted in October 2002, this
despite having pledged to suspend nuclear activities
eight years earlier.
The third and real reason for North Korea's pursuit
of nuclear weapons is the security of the country, and
by extension the regime of Kim Jong-il. This has been
confirmed by high-level defectors such as former
diplomat Ko Yong-hwan, by Kang Myong-do (the son-in-law
of former prime minister Kang Song-san), and even by Kim
Jong-il's former Japanese sushi chef, Kenji Fujimoto.
In this regard, 1991 must be seen as a turning
point. Although Pyongyang had already embarked on its
weapons program by that time in order to gain a decisive
military edge over its southern neighbor, it must have
been alarmed by two major international developments:
the US-led Gulf War to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in
January-February of that year, and the collapse of the
Soviet Union - for years North Korea's main patron - by
the end of the year.
New global environment
demands new security These events, coupled with
the fact that its other former patron, China, was busy
pressing ahead with "heretical", capitalist economic
reforms, sent a strong message to North Korean leaders
that the only real defense of the regime lay in
possession of nuclear weapons. Neither Russia nor China
- which had come to North Korea's assistance in the
Korean War (1950-53) - was interested in doing so again.
Certainly, the international climate in the
1990s reinforced this view. The US almost went to war
with North Korea over the nuclear issue in the summer of
1994. In addition, in December 1998 the United States
and the United Kingdom launched Operation Desert Fox, in
which four nights of air strikes targeted Iraq's
suspected WMD sites, apparently aimed at triggering a
coup to unseat president Saddam Hussein.
Four
months later, in March 1999, the US and its North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies launched
Operation Allied Force against the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, in support of the country's ethnic-Albanian
population in the province of Kosovo. Seventy-eight days
of air strikes followed, resulting in billions of
dollars of economic and industrial damage to Yugoslavia,
with very little loss to NATO forces. This was followed
by the occupation of Kosovo by tens of thousands of NATO
troops.
Again, from October to December 2001,
the US and its allies went into action, this time
against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime, resulting
in its overthrow, and replacement by a pro-Western
government. While this was retaliation for the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001, the apparent ease with
which US forces prevailed - where Soviet forces had
fared so poorly in the 1980s - must have alarmed North
Korea's leaders.
Less than two years after that,
in March 2003, the US invaded Iraq, and deposed Saddam
within three weeks, with far fewer losses than predicted
by naysayers.
Lesson: US only attacks
countries without nukes It cannot have been lost
on Pyongyang that all of the nations attacked by the US
lacked nuclear weapons. Judging by the United States'
kid-glove treatment of North Korea in comparison to the
punishment meted out on Iraq in early 2003, both
Washington and Pyongyang understand this situation
clearly.
So giving up nuclear weapons appears
out of the question, regardless of negotiations.
According to the late Robert Bartley, of the
Wall Street Journal, the 1994 "Agreed Framework" - under
which North Korea officially suspended its
nuclear-weapons program in return for the provision of
two new reactors less suited for weapons production, and
the supply of 500,000 tons of US oil per year to
compensate for energy losses - was actually the fourth
time, of at least six occasions in total, that the US
had officially "solved" the problem with North Korea.
Bartley noted that the first time was in 1985,
when US president Ronald Reagan persuaded Pyongyang to
sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). On the
second occasion, in 1991, president George H W Bush
removed all US tactical nuclear weapons from South
Korea, thereby giving less reason for Pyongyang to worry
about a US nuclear attack. The third time, in 1993,
president Bill Clinton persuaded Pyongyang to submit its
nuclear program to international inspection. The fifth
"solution", in late 1994, was a formal affirmation of
the Jimmy Carter-brokered deal in the summer that led to
the nuclear freeze. The sixth solution in 1999 allowed
for US inspection of a suspected underground nuclear
site at Kumchang-ri, which turned out to be empty.
What is surprising is that from October 2002,
Pyongyang suddenly became much more open about its
nuclear-weapons program. Whereas previously North Korea
had tended to deny that it possessed or was seeking to
develop nuclear weapons, its alleged admission to
visiting US officials in October that it was operating a
secret nuclear program suggested a new brazenness in its
approach to relations with the US.
Indeed, BBC
Monitoring (the wing of the British Broadcasting Corp
that monitors and translates foreign radio and
television broadcasts) reported on November 17, 2002,
that Radio Pyongyang had for the first time stated that
North Korea possessed nuclear weapons. South Korean
commentators were more skeptical, however, suggesting
that the BBC had mistranslated a broadcast in which
Pyongyang had merely stated a right to possess nukes.
Pyongyang goes public on nukes as US plans
Iraq war Either way, the timing of the broadcast
was hardly a coincidence. With the United States already
laying the diplomatic and military groundwork for an
attack on Iraq, North Korea apparently was hoping to
demonstrate that the US could not deal with two major
crises at the same time.
Further, Pyongyang also
appeared to have been warning Washington that it too
could brandish its nuclear arsenal, after President
George W Bush's February 2002 designation of North Korea
as a member of the "axis of evil", along with Iraq and
Iran. It was also probably motivated by the revelation
in the US media in March 2002 that North Korea was one
of seven countries that the US might attack with nuclear
weapons, under the Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review -
the other listed countries: China, Iran, Iraq, Libya,
Russia and Syria.
That document stated that a US
nuclear strike might be launched in retaliation for the
use of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, or under
circumstances in which a target could withstand a
conventional attack - or merely "in the event of
surprising military developments".
After the
collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, Kim Jong-il
is one of the last dictators presiding over a regime
that publicly opposes the United States. True, there is
still Alyaksandr Lukashenko in Belarus, Fidel Castro in
Cuba, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, but they are all
regarded as eccentric nuisances rather than serious
strategic challenges. Meanwhile, the US seems to be
quietly reaching an accommodation with the ayatollahs of
Iran, while largely ignoring Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
This leaves Kim Jong-il in a precarious
position, one that might be getting worse by the month,
especially with President Bush on record as stating that
he "loathes Kim Jong-il".
Iraq aside,
Pyongyang saw ominous US moves in 2003 Although
the US was preoccupied in Iraq during most of 2003,
other developments on the Korean Peninsula suggested
that North Korea might well have grounds to fear
America's military wrath at some stage.
For a
start, the United States was pressing ahead with
redeployment of its troops in South Korea away from the
inter-Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), where they are
vulnerable to North Korea's 13,000 artillery guns
located just north of the zone. This move is part of a
broader restructuring of US forces in Asia and it also
seeks to reduce the US military presence in Seoul at a
time when anti-Americanism is on the rise in South
Korea. Pyongyang, however, may well interpret this as a
sign the US is pulling its troops out of harm's way as a
prelude to an attack on North Korea.
Fueling
Pyongyang's paranoia as well as legitimate fear, in July
last year US News and World Report magazine carried a
story outlining a new US military plan, known as
Operational Plan 5030, whereby Washington could seek to
bring about regime change in Pyongyang by carrying out
massive military exercises. These maneuvers would be
designed to sow confusion in the minds of North Korean
military leaders and deplete the country's war reserves
- without the need actually to attack the country.
Reinforcing Pyongyang's unease, that same week
the former Speaker of South Korea's National Assembly,
Park Kwan-yong, published his memoirs, revealing that
that during the 1994 near-war on the Korean Peninsula,
the Clinton administration considered a preemptive
strike on North Korean nuclear facilities - without
giving prior notice to the South Korean government. That
meant that Pyongyang could not even rely on its southern
kinsmen to restrain the US, if it came to war.
US article calls for 4,000 daily 'shock and
awe' sorties Less than a month after these
revelations, former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
director R James Woolsey and retired Lieutenant-General
Thomas McInerney, the former assistant vice chief of
staff of the US Air Force, penned an article in the Wall
Street Journal advocating the viability of the military
option against North Korea. They suggested that the
country could be bombed at a rate of 4,000 sorties a
day, compared with 800 a day in the "shock and awe"
campaign against Iraq in 2003. They also stated that US
marines could quickly capture Pyongyang itself, and
defeat North Korea decisively in 30-60 days.
Although neither of the two men holds any
official position, Woolsey is known to be close to
neo-conservative elements who are influential with the
Bush administration, and who favor a hardline position
toward Pyongyang. Among them, former Pentagon adviser
Richard Perle is opposed to the US ruling out the
"Osirak option", a reference to the Israeli air force
destruction of Iraq's main nuclear reactor at Osirak in
a lightning air strike in 1981.
Against this
backdrop, therefore, it is hardly surprising that North
Korea has gone to such great lengths to build nuclear
weapons. Indeed, the leadership has literally followed
former Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq's pledge that his
country would develop nuclear weapons even if it meant
that his citizens would have to eat grass to survive.
Hunger and starvation are grave and endemic problems in
North Korea.
Although North Korea refrained from
testing a nuclear device on the 55th anniversary of the
founding of the communist state last September, as some
had feared, Pyongyang announced in October that it had
finally finished reprocessing 8,000 nuclear fuel rods
from which to build dozens of nuclear weapons.
Pyongyang: Nukes only for deterrence,
self-defense This led North Korean officials to
speak even more openly about possessing nuclear weapons.
Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su-hon told reporters in
October that Pyongyang would only ever use the bomb as
deterrence, and would not pass nuclear weapons on to
third parties. Similarly, North Korea's ambassador to
the UK, Ri Yong-ho, told Reuters that Pyongyang's
nuclear deterrent was ready for use and capable of
deterring any US attack, but that it would be used only
in self-defense.
None of this sits well in
Washington. Yet the US may have no choice but to
tolerate a nuclear North Korea if it is to avoid a
devastating war on the Korean Peninsula. In the
meantime, after the lack of progress in the second round
of six-way talks, Pyongyang has bought itself at least
another four months of breathing space until June.
During this time it can press ahead and build up its
nuclear arsenal, probably betting on the fact that with
US forces tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan - and with
presidential elections due this November - there will be
"no war in '04" on the Korean Peninsula.
Even if
the United States were to offer North Korea a
comprehensive security guarantee and full diplomatic
relations, it is not clear that this would be enough for
Pyongyang to give up its nukes. The US had diplomatic
relations with Iraq and Yugoslavia in 1990 and 1998, but
this did not preclude war in the following years.
Similarly, a non-aggression treaty lasts only as long as
there is no aggression. Given the unilateral US
abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty -
which for many years was the cornerstone of US-Soviet
"mutually assured destruction" (MAD) - Pyongyang may
well conclude that US treaties are meaningless.
Ronald Reagan stated back in the 1980s that to
keep the United States safe from Soviet attack, his
country could rely either on Soviet promises or US
technology, and that he'd bet on the latter any day. In
2004, it seems that Kim Jong-il is betting on Korean
technology.
Yoel Sano has worked for
publishing houses in London, providing political,
security and economic analysis, and has been following
North Korea, as well as other Northeast Asian
developments, for more than 10 years.
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