North Korea's nuclear obsession
Recent missile launches, nuclear tests and the detention of two US reporters have caused serious concern in the international community and reversed a process of relative détente. Please note that the views expressed by the author of this feature do not necessarily reflect the views of Asia:NZ.
Twelve months ago plans to coax reclusive North Korea into the global community seemed to be progressing well. In February 2008 the New York Philharmonic performed in the country’s capital, the most significant cultural exchange between the two countries since the Korean War. In May 2008 the United States announced that it would deliver 50,000 tonnes of food aid as a humanitarian gesture unrelated to nuclear talks and the following month, after Pyongyang filed an inventory of its nuclear programme, it took steps to remove North Korea from a list of states sponsoring terrorism.
Then things began to unravel. In September 2008 the North expelled US nuclear inspectors and began reconstructing its disabled Yongbyon reactor (facility pictured right), ostensibly because of delays in the fulfillment of US aid pledges. Then Pyongyang revoked all political and military agreements with South Korea, accusing the South of ‘hostile intent’. In April 2009, North Korea launched a rocket which it claimed was to put a satellite in orbit, but which other countries saw as a thinly disguised long-range missile test. Weeks later, in the face of strong international condemnation, the North conducted its second underground nuclear test.
With another North Korea missile launch imminent — this time from a newly-built west coast launch site — the United States announced that it was deploying missiles and radar to help shield Hawaii from a potential North Korean strike. At the same time, Japan reiterated that it ‘cannot accept’ a nuclear-armed North Korea, while South Korea declared that it ‘would never tolerate’ military threats and provocations by the North. Two short-range missiles were test-fired by North Korea in the first week of July.
What has gone wrong?
For more than half a century, relations with North Korea have been rocky and Pyongyang’s dealings with the outside world continue to be characterised by renegade behaviour and brinkmanship. However, the latest twists have even seasoned Western analysts guessing as to the meaning.
The usual explanation — that the impoverished North plays the nuclear card to extract economic concessions from the West — no longer appeared to hold true. The Obama administration clearly signaled its willingness to engage with Pyongyang even before the latest round of tests and all that Pyongyang has reaped from its latest actions is a further tightening of sanctions and growing frustration even among its staunchest allies.
The already fraught relationship has been worsened by the widely questioned detention and sentencing of two American reporters – Laura Ling and Euna Lee of San Francisco-based Current TV – to 12 years of hard labour. Accused of entering North Korea illegally, the two women were arrested in March along the Chinese-North Korean border, an event which caused uproar in South Korea and the US. While the Obama administration has been careful to stress the event is a humanitarian issue, it is widely felt that the plight of the journalists could become a political and diplomatic bargaining chip.
The United Nations Security Council has taken no stance on this latest incident, but it has already put in place mechanisms to address North Korea’s recent military build-up. Security Council resolution 1874 calls on international naval vessels to request inspection of ships suspected of carrying banned materials. Significantly, both China and Russia, traditionally seen asPyongyang’s most steadfast allies, supported the resolution and issued a joint statement expressing ‘serious concern’ about developments on the Korean peninsula and calling for a return to the stalled Six-Party talks (6PT) on nuclear proliferation.
Moreover, South Korea’s conservative president, Lee Myung-bak, has shown less forbearance than his predecessors with the North’s game-playing and has made it clear that future economic concessions would be tied to unequivocal progress on nuclear disarmament.
Troubled waters ahead
There are indications that the North is now irreversibly committed to pursuing a nuclear weapons programme to create a credible nuclear deterrent rather than to employ it as a tool of what has been called ‘mendicant militancy’. Pyongyang declared that any attempt to interfere with its cargo vessels would be considered ‘an act of war that will be met with a decisive military response’. It also served notice through its official news agency, KCNA, that it no longer considered itself bound by the longstanding truce that ended the Korean War in 1953. As to Resolution 1874 aiming to end its nuclear programme, North Korea responded that it would ‘weaponise all plutonium’, that it had already reprocessed more than a third of its spent nuclear fuel rods, and that it would start uranium enrichment.
Some analysts have concluded that the bellicose rhetoric is aimed at a domestic audience rather than declared with foreign policy objectives in mind. Two possibilities have emerged. Either hard-liners among North Korea’s leadership took advantage of Kim Jong-il’s illness last year to clamp down on all gestures of rapprochement with the South or, and this is widely seen as more likely, the 67-year-old Kim Jong-il is using the distraction of a manufactured military and diplomatic crisis to consolidate power in order to impose his plans for leadership succession. This is certainly the view of South Korea.
Kim Jong-il and his father Kim il-sung, who died in 1994, have ruled the North for a total of more than 60 years. In June 2009 several South Korean newspapers quoted unnamed members of the country’s parliamentary intelligence committee as identifying Kim’s youngest son Kim Jong-un as his chosen successor, though there has been no independent confirmation. If true, Kim Jong-un’s relative youth — he is thought to be 26 — would count against him in a society which values age in its leaders.
One view holds that, in any case, to create an endless succession of ‘great’ or ‘dear’ leaders would eventually weaken the North’s political ideology which has as its foundation the ‘eternal’ president, Kim il-sung. Much less problematic, runs the argument, would be the rule of a collective leadership council.
The root cause of North Korea’s commitment to developing nuclear weapons is likely to be traced to its profound fear of regime collapse. The country is to all intents broken. Despite scant Western access to information, reports that occasionally manage to come out of the country paint a picture of a majority living in grinding poverty and showing widespread signs of malnutrition. North Korean infrastructure is inefficient and its industrial base is run down. Reportedly, even its military cannot afford to adequately train pilots. The state holds an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 of its own people in brutal Stalinist-era labour camps. And, in secret, its leaders pursue any means available, from counterfeiting to arms exports, to earn foreign currency.
President Obama’s senior strategists have repeatedly described the North as retreating into what they call a ‘defensive crouch’ — holding the world at bay with nuclear tests while frantically trying to formulate a survival strategy.
Right now the strategy looks like doing little more than ensuring that the end, when it comes, will be messy. Meanwhile day by day, Pyongyang’s isolation deepens.
by Vaughan Yarwood
Images sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
