US twists arms, Pyongyang plays footsie
By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - The semi-crisis over the restart of North Korea's nuclear weapons
program is reaching D-Day - as in Decision Day - with the sense that the United
States is pressing hard for a compromise over skepticism from South Korea and
objections by Japan.
United States President George W Bush is believed to be on the verge of doing
what everyone had expected him to do in early August and pull North Korea's
name off the State Department's list of nations sponsoring terrorism beyond
their borders. American diplomats are said to have finished the delicate task
of twisting the arms of reluctant officials in South Korea and in Japan
who see the verification deal as failing to resolve the long-range issue of a
nuclear-free Korean peninsula.
As North Korea makes menacing moves to rev-up tensions, diplomatic analysts
agree that the easiest way out of the quandary is to limit the US demand for a
verification protocol strictly to the Yongbyon nuclear complex and save
concerns about the North's uranium enrichment program for another day, and
another crisis.
The semi-crisis - one that hardly rivals concerns about the nose-diving global
economy or wars in the Middle East - escalated this week as North Korea presses
the volume button to be sure everyone hears its message clearly. That is, we're
not just going back to producing warheads, we're figuring out how to attach
them to missiles and deliver them to targets - and we're also thinking of
another nuclear test if that's what it takes to get attention.
Since Dear Leader Kim Jong Il reportedly suffered a stroke in mid-August, it's
not certain whether he personally is micro-managing every move as before.
Whoever's doing it day-by-day appears, however, to be conducting an orchestra
with instruments sounding high and low notes, loud and soft, from the West or
Yellow Sea to the United Nations and the Vienna headquarters of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The most alarming sounds come not only from the nuclear complex, but from the
place near the northeast coast where an underground test was carried out on
October 9, 2006. The North Korean's just might want to sound an encore. The
worry is the next noise-maker might be a lot louder than the first, which was
deemed less than a spectacular success, and possibly even a failure, since it
was far less powerful than usual nuclear blasts.
At the Yongbyon complex, North Korea appears to be playing footsie with IAEA
inspectors - not yet expelling them, as they did at the end of 2002 after the
breakdown of the 1994 Geneva framework agreement, but telling them not to go
near the sensitive elements of the Yongbyon complex. These include not only the
five-megawatt nuclear reactor but also the plutonium reprocessing and
fabrication facilities that have produced somewhere between six and a dozen
warheads in recent years.
Diplomats responded with alarm when North Korea shut them out of the complex,
where for several months they and American technicians were watching the
disablement of the reactor and other gear essential to producing warheads. The
most spectacular evidence that North Korea was abiding by the agreement of
February 13, 2007, on giving up its nukes and the follow-up timetable on
October 3, 2007, was the explosion of the complex's 60-foot cooling tower, live
on global television, on June 27.
As of two weeks ago, however, the inspectors were barred from the reprocessing
center, and now they are left with nothing to do but await orders from Vienna
on when to go home.
One big reason for them to stay where they are is that North Korea could
quickly reverse course if Bush takes them from the terrorist list. Bush had
been expected to do that in early August after a 45-day waiting period mandated
by law from the time he notified Congress of his intention. He delayed on the
grounds that North Korea first had to sign off on a protocol under which
inspectors could go just about anywhere, impromptu, without notification, to
see if North Korea were really doing all that it claimed to be doing to get rid
of its nukes.
The US strongly suspects that North Korea has processed more plutonium for
warheads, and Washington wants details on the number of warheads already
produced. The US also, of course, wants to know about the enriched-uranium
program and proliferation of nuclear know-how and missiles, on which Israel
claims the North has cooperated with half-a-dozen Middle Eastern countries.
United States envoy Christopher Hill has said the idea was not to search "house
to house", but North Korea has been objecting to the proposed protocol as an
impossible intrusion. On his latest trip to Pyongyang, Hill came up with what
is widely believed to be a watered-down version of the original wish list. He
and Sung Kim, chief of the State Department's Korea desk, who has formally
replaced Hill as chief nuclear envoy, have tried to sell the idea in Seoul and
in Tokyo but have met with a lukewarm response.
South Korea's conservative President Lee Myung-bak, reversing the "Sunshine
policy" initiated in 1998 by then president Kim Dae-Jung, has demanded full
verification of disablement of the North's nuclear program as a condition for
food and fertilizer shipments that South Korea has been sending the North
regularly in recent years.
North Korea has branded Lee a "traitor", and a North Korean defense official
called him "human scum" when South Korean officials requested an end to the
insults at a meeting a week ago at the truce village of Panmunjom at which the
North asked South Korea to stop activists from sending propaganda leaflets over
to the North.
Japan, if anything, is still more reluctant in view of bitter sentiment
engendered by North Korea's refusal to answer numerous questions about the
abduction of a number of Japanese in the late 1970s and early 1980s. North
Korea has acknowledged 13 abductees, eight of whom it says have died, but
Japanese believe as many as 80 have been held in the North.
Japan's Kyodo news agency was the first to report that Bush would remove North
Korea from the terrorist list this month. Although the report did not say so,
Japanese officials were believed to have gotten that impression from Sung Kim's
meetings in Tokyo with Japan's nuclear envoy, Akitaka Saiki, who earlier flew
to Seoul to hear what Hill had to say about his meetings with the North
Koreans.
North Korea has accompanied moves at Yongbyon with a drumbeat of menacing
gestures elsewhere. North Korea test-fired two short-range missiles off the
west coast on Tuesday and reportedly is ready to fire 10 more. Although
test-firing missiles is not unusual, analysts believe North Korea is working to
develop what's needed to tip the missiles with warheads that it could send to
targets anywhere in the region, notably Japan, and as far as the west coast of
the US if delivered by a long-range Taepodong.
North Korea also threatens a naval battle in the West Sea around the Northern
Limit Line, below which South Korea bans foreign vessels. North Korea has
refused to recognize the line and has challenged South Korea in two firefights
- the first in June 1999 in which a North Korean ship was sunk and a number of
North Korean sailors killed, the second in June 2002, when a South Korean
patrol boat was sunk and six sailors killed.
As South Korean patrol boats scoured the waters on their side of the line,
North Korea's naval command warned of another battle and Pyongyang's Korean
Central News Agency said there was "a limit to forbearance and the South needs
to carefully contemplate the consequence of its actions".
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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