With the
third installment of the six-party drama set to play out
in Beijing from June 23-26, all sides have begun
telegraphing their positions as a prelude to talks, with
continued US insistence on complete, verifiable,
irreversible dismantlement (CVID) of all facets of North
Korea's weapons program increasingly out of sync with
the rest of the region.
China, the host of this
and the previous two rounds of talks, stated last week
that US claims concerning North Korea's highly enriched
uranium (HEU) project are, in Beijing's view, unfounded.
Last week senior Chinese official Zhou Wenzhong was
emphatic that his government had not been privy to any
"smoking gun" intelligence indicating North Korea's
uranium program.
This is crucially important, as
it is the HEU project and not the far more transparent,
plutonium-based nuclear-weapons initiatives that pose
the greatest threat to regional and, potentially, global
security. Plutonium enrichment is a difficult procedure
and the process involves the release of krypton-85, a
gas that can be monitored and tracked by the United
States remotely. While North Korea's strangely public
primary reactor site at Yongbyon is easier to monitor
and inspect, the plutonium program seems designed to
allow maximum visibility - a distraction from the
country's secret HEU facilities thought to be buried
under a mountain somewhere in the country's northeast.
Though the exact location, scope and scale of the HEU
project are still mysteries, the North Koreans
themselves acknowledged its existence in meetings with
US assistant secretary of state James Kelly in 2002, and
testimony from Pakistan's nuclear godfather Dr Abdul
Qadeer Khan, confirms the long-term involvement of
Pakistan in the development of this project.
But
China seems ready to ignore the growing mountain of
evidence, and North Korean's own admission, and focus
only on the plutonium issue - a chip North Korea has
demonstrated it is quite interested in bargaining away.
North Korea would like to negotiate some sort of freeze
to its high-profile plutonium program in return for
iron-clad security guarantees and massive energy
assistance, allowing the HEU program to continue adding
atomic weapons to North Korea's arsenal while creating
the opportunity for highly lucrative HEU sales to
interested buyers around the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the South Koreans have made no secret
of their intention to offer "bountiful infrastructure,
industrial and energy" aid to North Korea, as South
Korea too is more than willing to look the other way
concerning North Korea's clandestine nuclear development
in the spirit of rapprochement and reconciliation. South
Korean officials have made it known that even the most
tentative steps toward CVID of the North's plutonium
project, not the HEU project, will more than suffice and
be rewarded with even greater South Korea largess.
Indeed, the state-run Export-Import Bank has started a
program using public money to offset losses South Korean
companies may incur through their investments in North
Korea - more Southern tax dollars (investments in North
Korea cannot be made in South Korean currency) sent
north in a bid to buy reconciliation.
Though
Russia shares a short border along the Tumen River with
North Korea, its attention is focused thousands of
kilometers away. The threat of North Korea selling
weapons-grade uranium or plutonium, for example, to
domestic terror groups is small in the minds of Russian
policymakers. Historically, North Korea has been careful
not to offend the Russians, well aware of the importance
of maintaining good relations with both Moscow and
Beijing, its key benefactors. Russia's concerns about
fissile material falling into the hands of domestic
terror organizations do not center on North Korea but
rather the relative abundance of such material on offer
in former Soviet republics in Central Asia. As far as
Moscow is concerned, nuclear black-marketeers within the
borders of its former empire pose a far greater threat
to Russian security than Kim Jong-il's stockpile.
The staunchest US ally in the region is
undoubtedly Japan, but here too we see a shift. The
Japanese certainly have no trust in Pyongyang and
definitely recognize the inherent threat of the North
Korean state, but Japan's view of the threat is
increasingly divergent from that held by the United
States. The Japanese are more concerned with North
Korea's delivery systems, its missiles, than its nuclear
program. Japan believes, perhaps rightly, that the
chances of North Korea launching a preemptive nuclear
strike are slim given the immediate and overwhelming
reaction it would elicit and the crushing blow to Kim's
rule it would no doubt usher. For Japan it is North
Korea's force-projection platforms - its missiles - that
are a greater menace.
And it was perhaps with
this in mind that the North Koreans conducted an
above-ground missile-engine test this month. The engine
tested is believed to be the thrust behind the
Taepodong-2, a long-range missile capable of reaching
not only all of Japan, but potentially the western
seaboard of the US, including Alaska, home to 25% of the
United States' proven oil reserves.
The
Taepodong-2 can carry a larger payload a greater
distance that the Taepodong-1, the missile North Korea
test fired over Japan in 1998.
The tests this
month came only two weeks after Japanese Prime Minister
Junichiro Koizumi's May 22 meeting with Kim Jong-Il in
which he brokered the release of five Japanese family
members kidnapped and held by North Korea for decades.
The one-day summit included a pledge by North Korea to
maintain the moratorium on missile-flight tests, though
US officials believe North Korea is testing its missiles
in Iran, a shrewd maneuver that keeps North Korea within
the word, if not the spirit, of the moratorium. Though
Japan was eager not to appear to be rewarding Pyongyang
for releasing the Japanese captives, it was quick to
pledge an additional 250,000 tons of food aid and US$10
million worth of medical equipment immediately after the
release.
The United States is looking
increasingly isolated in its demand for CVID of all
components of North Korea's nuclear program and, to make
matters worse, politically motivated election-year
divisions are forming within the US. Previous policy
architects such as Bill Clinton-era energy secretary
Bill Richardson, a proponent of the now-failed 1994
Agreed Framework, declared at this week's World Economic
Forum's Asia Strategic Insight Roundtable that the US
needs to be more conciliatory toward North Korea, and
make a deal (no matter how flawed and unworkable)
focusing only on "short-term reprocessing and
weaponization of plutonium fuel rods rather than broader
uranium-enrichment issues".
This, of course, is
the same logic that underpinned the now-defunct Agreed
Framework, an agreement that called for North Korea to
freeze its nuclear program in return for heavy-oil
shipment and the construction of two light-water
reactors. The North Koreans admitted in 2002 to what had
long been suspected by regional policy experts, that
they had reneged on their promise, extracted as much as
they could from the agreement in the interim, all the
while furthering their offensive-weapons capacity. Now,
voices from the past sensing blood in US political
waters (Richardson is considered a strong candidate for
vice president should Democrat John Kerry win the
presidency this November) are coming forth again armed
with the same failed policy solutions.
Given
regional divisions coupled with more immediate threats
in the Middle East - including growing concern among US
officials concerning the other surviving member of the
"axis of evil", Iran, and its nuclear program - it's no
wonder North Korea feels secure, unflinching in its
demands for a comprehensive security guarantee before
any movement on nuclear programs will be discussed. As
the alliance strains and fractures, North Korea will use
the lack of consensus to create further distance between
the United States and the region, offering individual
bilateral "agreements", appearing conciliatory while
extracting what it can bilaterally, leaving the US very
much alone on its side of the table.
The US
declared that real progress at this round is crucial,
but it seems any progress that does emerge from the
meeting will likely be bilateral in nature, not
multilateral as Washington had originally hoped. The
United States could use another failure in Beijing, the
third strike, as the excuse it needs to move the whole
matter to the United Nations Security Council, but given
the political relationship and geographical proximity of
North Korea to two permanent members of the council
(China and Russia), it is highly unlikely a resolution
with teeth would be forthcoming. As the non-US members
of the six-party confab continue to focus on more
narrow, domestic agendas in their dealings with
Pyongyang, a six-party solution to the North Korean
problem seems as remote as ever.
David Scofield, former
lecturer at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies,
Kyung Hee University, is currently conducting
post-graduate research at the School of East Asian
Studies, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom.
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