Pyongyang sends a radioactive riposte
By Donald Kirk
NEW YORK - The North Korean riposte to the fresh set of sanctions imposed by
the United Nations Security Council confirmed, among other things, what the
George W Bush administration said for years. Yes, North Korea has a program for
producing highly enriched uranium for nuclear warheads.
The fact that North Korea has reserved its most sensational revelations and
inflammatory rhetoric for Bush's successor, President Barack Obama, deepens the
sense of confrontation. American liberals, accustomed to rising in wrath
against Bush, are quiescent while waiting to see how Obama deals with the
escalating threat to the peace and stability of Northeast Asia.
On the face of it, the North Korean statement that it is using highly enriched
uranium to fuel its five-megawatt reactor is not exactly sensational. The news
from Pyongyang that it's widening the uranium program and stepping up
production of plutonium at
its nuclear facility at Yongbyon, 90 kilometers north of Pyongyang, also adds
little if anything to what was already known.
North Korea's defiance of the Security Council's attempt at punishment for its
nuclear test of May 25 does, however, accentuate one overwhelming problem. By
stating the obvious so clearly, North Korea is daring the major powers to act.
Chinese diplomats, almost immediately after passage of the resolution, called
for forbearance and patience, leaving no doubt that China is not about to take
up the challenge by boarding North Korean ships or forcing down North Korean
planes in search of suspicious cargo - regardless of the sanctions.
Nor is China going to do much beyond pro-forma motions to penalize or inhibit
financial institutions or firms selling components for North Korea's programs.
A flourishing sub rosa trade between China and North Korea ensures the
continuity of Chinese support for much of what the North is up to. The bottom
line is that there is no way to stop North Korea from conducting a third
nuclear test and firing off more missiles, perfecting the means to deliver
weapons of mass destruction to targets near and far.
North Korea's loud response to the UN Security Council's sanctions could hardly
have been better timed, coinciding as it did with South Korean President Lee
Myung-bak's visit to Washington this week.
Lee will meet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert
Gates on Monday and visit the White House on Tuesday for a summit with Obama
that is sure to produce the kind of rhetoric that opponents of Bush would have
denounced as "hardline".
Curiously, Monday is the ninth anniversary of the summit in Pyongyang between
North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong-il and South Korea's then-president Kim
Dae-jung, who initiated the "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation with the North.
Lee has refused to endorse the joint statement that emerged from that historic
meeting, but his government on Monday said Kim Jong-il had gone back on the
communique by failing to pay a return visit to South Korea.
Aside from vowing the usual support of the US-Korean alliance in the face of
North Korean "provocations", Obama and Lee are expected to come out in
affirmation of the need for the US to provide a "nuclear umbrella" over the
region. The US has held out the ultimate threat of nuclear strikes ever since
the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, but North Korea's
latest vituperations add a special urgency to South Korea's desire to get this
threat down in writing.
Like North Korean rhetoric, the mere mention of what Obama and Lee may politely
call "an extended nuclear deterrent" will represent an abrupt escalation in the
war of words surrounding the Korean Peninsula. No one expects the US to be
dropping more atomic bombs in the near future, any more than North Korea is
expected to fire off a warhead of its own, but the reference is going to make
huge headlines.
If anything, to judge from the North's response to South Korea's Foreign
Minister Yu Myung-hwan laying the groundwork in a meeting with Clinton, the US
pledge of a nuclear deterrent may inspire greater heights of rhetorical rage
from Pyongyang than the UN sanctions adopted last Friday.
Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of North Korea's Workers' Party, signaled the
response in a commentary warning that such a statement would comprise "an
unforgivable criminal act ... ". South Korea, said the paper, would become "a
nuclear powder keg that can explode at any moment and drive the peninsula into
a US nuclear battlefield by drawing more US nuclear weapons into South Korea".
Rodong Sinmun directed much of its rage against South Korea, as it has over the
course of more than a year of steadily worsening relations that have totally
reversed a decade of North-South reconciliation. Calling South Korea's top
leaders a "group of traitors", the paper said that the quest for US assurance
of a nuclear umbrella "revealed every shred of its atrocious scheme to wage a
second Korean war with nuclear weapons on the back of its US boss".
The commentary provides the rationale for North Korea to rev up its own nuclear
program, despite repeated US denials of the existence of nuclear warheads
inside South Korea. The US, under George H W Bush, withdrew its nuclear
warheads from the South around 1990 in order for South Korea to be able to
enter into an agreement with North Korea that year for a "nuclear-free Korean
Peninsula".
The real point of North Korean charges that the US harbors nuclear warheads in
the South, however, is that the US does indeed have large numbers of nukes
available for use in a showdown in the western Pacific. The warheads are kept
on US warships and bases in Japan and Hawaii, all within easy range of North
Korea if all-out war were to break out in the region.
North Korean rhetoricians have no problem building on that reality to charge
that US forces actually have 1,000 warheads in South Korea, and they regularly
blast any US-South Korean war games as "nuclear war exercises".
Considering that large numbers of US warplanes join in the exercises, while an
aircraft carrier and destroyers equipped with Aegis-class counter-missile
systems hover offshore, US officials have trouble denying that preparation for
nuclear war is one of their purposes. Who is to say that nuclear warheads have
never been aboard that aircraft carrier?
It is against this background that Rodong Sinmun declared that "our nuclear
deterrence is a means of defense for our homeland", but the refrain is now so
familiar as not to arouse a great deal of concern. What is worrisome, however,
is that the overall decibel level is definitely increasing.
Gates contributed to the rhetoric in a meeting in Singapore of Asian and
Pacific defense officials, promising not to "stand idly by as North Korea
builds the capability to wreak destruction on any target in the region - or on
us". Only "genuinely tough sanctions", he said, could "bring home real pain" to
North Korea as well as Iran "for their failure to adhere to international
norms".
Like rhetoric from Pyongyang, however, those words were more bark than bite.
Gates presumably would cite the UN sanctions as the means to inflict pain on
North Korea, but he offered no clue as to how to enforce them.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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