North Korea's insistence on the
right to civilian nuclear development and American
insistence that all nuclear programs be placed
under international control seem headed again to
an impasse when talks on the issue continue in
November. That despite a September 19 agreement
that the North end its nuclear arms program in
exchange for security and aid guarantees from the
United States.
Barely had the ink dried on
this week's deal at the six-party talk in Beijing
when North Korea began demanding a light-water
reactor as a condition of disarming its nuclear
weapons program. Despite US dismissal of the North
Korean demand as so much political, domestic
face-saving against hardliners, the North has continued
to throw cold water on the
significance of the agreement:
North Korea Says US Using Talks as
Pretext for Attack [Reuters, September 21] SEOUL
- North Korea accused the United States on
Wednesday of using diplomatic talks to try and
take away its nuclear arms so that Washington
could crush the reclusive state with an atomic
weapons strike.The statement follows another by
North Korea on Tuesday which threw into doubt a
six-country deal on giving up its nuclear arms,
just one day after it was struck. In that
statement the North vowed to keep the weapons
until Washington provides it with civilian
atomic reactors.
The official
communist party newspaper in Pyongyang stated then
that Washington is waiting for a chance to attack
it. "Clear is the ulterior intention of the US
talking about settlement of the nuclear issue
through dialogue under the pretext of the
six-party talks. In a word, it is to disarm the
DPRK [the Democratic People's Republic of Korea,
North Korea's official name] and stifle it ... "
But, according to a report carried by the official
KCNA news agency, the DPRK "will steadily
strengthen its war deterrent to defend national
sovereignty and security with supreme vigilance".
The real reason for the confrontation over
the North's nuclear weapons no longer seems
obscure. Nuclear weapons have no battlefield
military use unless the bombed side is unable to
retaliate in kind, as was the case when the United
States dropped atomic bombs on Japan to end WW II.
Had Japan been able to retaliate, there would have
been a nuclear stalemate, as there was later for
the US facing the nuclear-armed Soviet Union,
China, Pakistan and India. Indeed, many countries
have since acquired nuclear weapons and there have
been many regional wars. But no country has sought
to use them as weapons in a first strike, given
the strong likelihood of international
retaliation, no matter which side has threatened
or aggrieved the other side. Whether it was China
or the Soviet Union, India or Pakistan, every bit
of documented evidence shows that the post-World
War II proliferation of nuclear weapons has been
motivated by the desire for military deterrence,
as defensive weapons against a preemptive nuclear
strike by a potential foe.
Right after
World War II, the US held a monopoly on atomic
weapons. Immediately, Britain and France started
research to break the monopoly. It was clear to
them that "the bomb" gave any state the ability to
inflict unacceptable losses on an aggressor.
Notwithstanding the suicidal nature of
nuclear war, post-WW II Britain, without its
colonial empire and without massive manpower,
wanted nuclear weapons to have "Great Power"
status "on the cheap". (The Rise and Fall of
the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy, Random
House, p 370) When France detonated its first
atomic bomb in 1960, French leader Charles de
Gaulle exulted, "Hooray for France - since this
morning she is stronger and prouder." (Kennedy, p
401) In 1949, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, in a
conversation recorded by Milovan Diljas, deputy to
Yugoslavian leader Marshall Tito, declared that
the power of the atomic bomb left no doubt that
"he would not rest until he, too, had the
'powerful thing'". (Controlling the Bomb:
Nuclear Proliferation in the 1980s by Lewis A
Dunn, Twentieth Century Fund, 1982, p 153)
The USSR rejected the 1946 American
proposal (known as the Baruch Plan) to replace the
American atomic weapons monopoly of the time with
international control of all nuclear-energy
development. Likewise, China's fear of American
nuclear blackmail - US General Douglas MacArthur's
request (denied by president Eisenhower) to nuke
China in the Korean War and the 1960s debate in
the Kennedy administration over limited nuclear
war and the doctrine of "flexible response" (later
called by the Bush administration "preemptive
military action") - inspired the Chinese to
detonate an atomic bomb in 1964.
But as a
defense against aggression, the bomb has never
been a true military weapon unless there was no
risk of retaliation; atomic weapons destroy what
they would defend or gain for the users. It
amounts to mutually assured destruction. That is
what nuclear retaliation has meant: no second
strikes, no real shield against a strike. There
can be no rational employment of nuclear weapons
in a war between two nuclear-armed states. In the
context of the Korean nuclear talks, unlike
finding a nuclear-armed Osama bin Laden, President
Bush knows where to find North Korea in the event
of a North Korean attack on US-South Korean
forces. International security agreements
therefore must include a potentially nuclear-armed
North Korea, in order to effectively enforce a ban
on the trade of such weapons to terrorists and
anarchic states.
One way to build mutual
confidence in the international community is for
all states to concede the essentially defensive
nature of nuclear weapons. As former State
Department non-proliferation expert Lewis A Dunn
concluded as far back as 1982: "American efforts
to contain proliferation ... have become
inadequate with the spread of peaceful
applications of nuclear energy. ... Any state with
some experience in building and operating complex
chemical processes [oil refineries, for example]
would have little difficulty in building a first
pilot reprocessing plant to accept fuel from a
commercial reactor. ... Nuclear weapons are an old
technology. ... Technical barriers clearly are a
'wasting asset' for nonproliferation. ... Nuclear
weapons are primarily instruments of deterrence."
(Controlling the Bomb: Nuclear Proliferation in
the 1980s by Lewis A Dunn, Twentieth Century
Fund, 1982, passim)
Iran and North Korea,
and other Third World countries, either out of
fear of American power or fearing the political
disadvantages that result from that power, may
also wish to have the potential to build such
weapons. Rather than frustrating their desire to
have a nuclear potential, international efforts
ought to focus on helping them understand that the
weapons have no military purpose in a real war.
And the aim of non-proliferation efforts - for
implementation of a United Nations agreement -
ought to be to prevent nuclear weapons from failed
states and terrorists. North Korea, despite its
closed and dictatorial nature, is neither a failed
state nor a source of international terrorism.
The US has had to live with Kim Jong-il's
biological and chemical weapons of mass
destruction for a long time, so there is no reason
for the US and South Korean not to continue living
with his nuclear ones. With the threat of
international retaliation, the North Korean leader
has no rational offensive strategy for nuclear
weapons. And it makes sense then for the US to
begin normalizing relations with North Korea
whether it has nuclear weapons or not. Clearly,
with unusable offensive nuclear weapons in North
Korea, a peace treaty between the US and North
Korea, and restored international stability to the
Korean peninsula, can encourage irrepressible
democratic reforms in the Hermit Kingdom. What
good, after all, are nuclear weapons that can't be
used except in suicidal defense? On the other
hand, the US attempt to deny North Korea a
rational deterrent against potential superpower
aggression is a waste of time. And it only
promotes suspicions that the US wants a North
Korea unable to resist a US-inspired regime
change.
That kind of diplomacy will only
delay the North's democratic reforms, raising the
question whether pursuing such futile diplomacy by
the Bush administration is a form of its own
domestic political face-saving against hardline
American conservatives, who want confrontation
rather than negotiation. The more the Americans
push for a nuclear-disarmed North Korea, and the
more North Korea refuses to disarm, the more
Americans can then say that confrontation is the
only option that can achieve disarmament. In that
case, North Korea needs only wait for a regime
change in the US, as did the Soviet Union and
China, which were once subjected to the same kind
of American pressure to disarm.
American journalist Carl Senna
lives in Canada and is author of a biography of
Colin Powell.
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