Page 1 of 2 SPEAKING FREELY Kim Jong-il's military-first policy a silver
bullet
By Kim Myong Chol
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The military-first policy, now in its 12th year, is a well-known international
symbol for Kim Jong-il and his Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).
Twelve years may be sufficient for a report card. A look at what Kim has done
during that time
indicates beyond doubt that this policy has been a silver bullet.
Kim officially launched the military-first policy on January 1, 1995. The DPRK
has built up such a nuclear deterrence that it does not need any form of US
security guarantee any longer. As the nuclear test last October 9 demonstrated,
the DPRK is now a de jure nuclear-weapons state, the fourth-most-powerful after
the United States, Russia and China.
Not to recognize the DPRK as a nuclear state is something like refusing to call
a person armed with a gun a gunman.
On September 9, the founding anniversary of the DPRK, Dr Mitchell B Reiss,
former director for policy planning at the US State Department and currently
vice provost for international affairs at the College of William and Mary in
Williamsburg, Virginia, spoke at the fourth Global Strategic Review of the
London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies:
Perhaps the
least noted and most astonishing aspect of the entire diplomatic process
involving North Korea during the past few years has been the almost complete
inability of four of the world's strongest military and economic powers,
including three nuclear-weapons states and three members of the UN Security
Council - the United States, China and Russia - and Japan to shape the
strategic environment in Northeast Asia. They have [proved] thoroughly
incapable of preventing an impoverished, dysfunctional country of only 23
million people from consistently endangering the peace and stability of the
world's most economically dynamic region. This has been nothing less than a
collective failure.
While international-relations theorists can debate how this remarkable reversal
of the standard measures of power and powerlessness could occur, North Korea's
gains have come at the expense, not least, of the United States. Washington has
suffered setbacks to its major policy objectives in the region and globally.
Achievement 1: Neutralization of US nuclear umbrella
One of the 5,000-year-old aspirations of the Korean people is to acquire
powerful national defenses equipped with long-range deep-strike capabilities of
hitting the enemy's heartland and turning it into a sea of fire, instead of
letting Korea become a war theater. For the first time in Korean history, Kim
Jong-il has fulfilled this historic aspiration as he has put the Korean
Peninsula under North Korea's own nuclear umbrella, neutralizing the US nuclear
umbrella.
In other words, North Korea under Kim has emerged as a de jure nuclear-weapons
state with deep-strike capabilities, making it totally unnecessary to seek
written US security assurances. The risk of war has begun to disappear from the
Korea Peninsula as Kim is now one click away from torching the skyscrapers of
New York and other cities in the metropolitan USA or Tokyo into scenes of
towering conflagrations. Dangun Wanggeom, Jumong, Yon Kyesomun, Ulchi Mundok
and Li Sun-sin would be delighted at the great feat of Kim Jong-il. Any new war
involving Korea is certain to be waged mainly on the US mainland or Japan.
As a result of the US invasion of Iraq, civilian casualties are numerous and
material losses are beyond description. Thus the US thinks twice before
striking the DPRK. The US is afraid of engaging North Korea after its missile
and nuclear tests.
The United Nations sanctions imposed on the DPRK for conducting missile tests
and a nuclear test have lost much of their effect.
In an article titled "Too soft, too soon", the major British newspaper The
Financial Times noted on November 22:
Christopher Hill, Washington's
chief negotiator for North Korea, declared boldly that the world was not going
to live with a nuclear North Korea. These now look like empty words. Amid the
turmoil in the Middle East, the attempts to curb another nuclear program - this
one in Iran - and the change of power in the US Congress after the mid-term
elections, the North Korean threat has been all but forgotten.
The host of Japan's Asahi TV program Saturday Scramble aired on December
2 lamented, "Regrettably, the things are moving in a way Kim Jong-il desires."
The Washington Post in its December 31 editorial noted: "At the time the regime
of Kim Jong-il appeared to be calculating that it would not suffer severe
consequences for its provocation and that the world would eventually accept it
as a nuclear power, as India and Pakistan have been accepted. Sadly, that logic
is beginning to look justified."
Joseph Nye, former US assistant secretary of defense and currently dean of the
Kennedy School of Administration, Harvard University, noted in his contribution
to the March 12, 2003, Los Angeles Times:
The decision to focus on Iraq
rather than North Korea shows that deterrence works, but in this case what it
shows is North Korea's ability to deter the United States. With more than
11,000 artillery tubes hidden in caves in the Demilitarized Zone, North Korea
can devastate Seoul even without weapons of mass destruction. This reality
prevented the Clinton administration from executing a preemptive strike against
North Korea's nuclear facilities at Yongbyon in 1994.
The
result is that now the people of the DPRK, who would have long ago gone mad
after being exposed to more than 50 years of
