Sunday Times (London) December 29, 2002, Sunday
'Do or die' Kim has Bush in nuclear trap
By Michael Sheridan Far East Correspondent and Tony Allen-Mills Washington
TWO nights before Christmas the caviar was piled high at a government guesthouse in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Vodka and champagne flowed freely as Kim Jong-il, the self-styled "Dear Leader" of one of the world's most impoverished nations, entertained the mayor of Moscow to dinner.
In the darkened streets of the freezing capital, North Koreans shivered through another evening of power cuts, eating whatever they had managed to scavenge. At Kim's dinner, the chandeliers blazed as Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to North Korea, watched the country's enigmatic dictator playing host to Mayor Yuri Mikhailovich Luzhkov.
"The dinner proceeded in an amicable atmosphere," the official North Korean news agency announced later. But Karlov knew that behind the displays of mutual respect a crisis was rapidly building. Shortly before the meal Kim had received a polite but firm message from President Vladimir Putin. Russia wanted Pyongyang to stop provoking the United States by threatening to build nuclear weapons. Confrontation could only harm the region, Putin warned. It was time for all sides to talk.
Karlov's fears were confirmed within hours of Luzhkov's departure for Moscow. Putin's pleas were ignored as North Korean scientists and technicians marched into a nuclear plant at Yongbyon, about 55 miles north of Pyongyang, and began dismantling an elaborate network of United Nations seals and cameras that were intended to monitor any illicit work on a nuclear weapons programme.
While the Christian world celebrated Christmas, the North Korean state took another frightening step towards a nuclear showdown with President George W Bush.
When two days later Kim compounded his defiance of international agreements by ordering the expulsion of UN inspectors, there was no mistaking the change of mood in capitals around the world.
A problem that had previously seemed pale compared with the enormity of a likely American military attack on Iraq is suddenly threatening to consume half of Asia in a potential conflagration.
"I feel like I'm staring into the gates of hell," said a dazed nuclear expert in Washington.
Pyongyang's belligerent nuclear gambit has stunned and embarrassed Bush's administration. "They thought they had time to deal with Kim later, but time has run out," said David Albright, a former UN nuclear inspector.
"We know it's nuclear brinkmanship," grumbled a befuddled western diplomat, "but why is Kim taking us to the brink so fast?"
Officials were also struggling to explain why Iraq, which is a long way from building nuclear weapons, is still regarded as a more pressing threat than North Korea, which may already have several bombs.
Senator Richard Lugar, the incoming Republican chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, called the North Korean situation "very dangerous". In a veiled rebuke to the administration he warned: "We're going to have to devote a great deal of attention in the same concerted way we did with Iraq."
At the root of the drama was Washington's decision last October to suspend US oil shipments to North Korea after Pyongyang admitted its scientists had been working on a uranium enrichment programme, which breached a 1994 agreement that offered US economic assistance in exchange for a ban on weapons development.
Anxious to preserve its focus on Iraq, Washington has spent much of the past two months playing down Kim's threats as a likely bluff intended to pressure the administration into resuming negotiations on aid for North Korea's ruined economy. American officials also believe Kim is attempting to drive a wedge between Washington and South Korea, where 37,000 US troops are based.
When North Korea announced last weekend that it was removing surveillance cameras from a pond containing 7,700 spent fuel rods - which can produce enough plutonium for five or six nuclear weapons - the conflict took a more sinister turn.
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, promptly warned that the Pentagon was ready to fight two wars at once. If Kim felt "emboldened" because of the world's preoccupation with Iraq, "it would be a mistake", Rumsfeld added. Yet Kim appeared far from cowed. The official Pyongyang news agency boasted that "North Korea is stunning its rivals in a do-or-die spirit".
Instead of drawing back from the brink, Kim charged towards it, demanding the removal of the International Atomic Energy Agency's inspectors and announcing the reopening of a reprocessing laboratory capable of making weapons-grade plutonium from the spent fuel rods.
Suddenly it seemed there might be more to Kim's aggression than a negotiating ploy. North Korea is a member, with Iraq and Iran, of Bush's "axis of evil". Should Baghdad fall, as America expects, there seems little doubt that Bush will turn next to Pyongyang and then Tehran, whose own nuclear ambitions are coming under hostile American scrutiny.
What if Kim has concluded that his only hope of deterring a future American attack is to build a nuclear arsenal? The CIA believes Kim may already have used plutonium to make at least two nuclear bombs.
In truth, the West's policy towards North Korea has been unravelling for years. In 1994 President Bill Clinton defused a similar crisis over Kim's suspected weapons development by drawing up the so-called Framework Agreement that was intended to regulate Pyongyang's nuclear programme in exchange for improving its energy supplies.
The Americans enlisted Japanese and South Korean support for a pact that promised the construction in the north of two comparatively harmless light water nuclear reactors, plus 500,000 tons of oil each year to relieve its energy shortage.
In return, Kim agreed to freeze activity at the Yongbyon nuclear complex. Fuel was removed from the 5-megawatt Soviet-built reactor and placed in a cooling pond. International inspectors placed cameras above the pond and sealed off key areas of the plant with chains and locks.
It did not take long for Washington to realise that the pact had become a sham. Construction began on the light water reactors, but slowed as relations with the West deteriorated.
"The North Koreans were totally duplicitous and treacherous," complained one Clinton administration official connected to the talks.
"They lied at every single negotiation, tried to rewrite every agreement and made everything impossible."
Meanwhile, North Korea's population of more than 22m endured famine and ever-increasing hardship as the country's economic and social structure lurched from crisis to collapse, its internal stability maintained only by a pitiless regime of spying and executions.
For Bush and his campaign advisers, then closing in on the White House, the chaos in North Korea was a prime example of Clinton's fudge-and-muddle style of foreign policy, avoiding confrontation and encouraging America's foes to believe they might get away with murder.
The Bush view appeared vindicated when satellite surveillance and other intelligence indicated last year that although the North Koreans had stopped making plutonium, they had launched a secret second programme to enrich uranium - an alternative material for nuclear bombs.
Last summer an American delegation travelled to Pyongyang to confront the regime with evidence of its trickery. To the Americans' amazement, the North Koreans did not deny it. They brazenly said that they intended to continue with the nuclear programme and boasted they had "much worse" weapons.
In that unsettling exchange, the seeds of the present crisis were sown. Bush responded by cutting off fuel deliveries and refusing to negotiate further with Pyongyang.
His contempt for Kim was laid bare to Bob Woodward, the Washington Post journalist who quoted the president as saying: "I loathe Kim Jong-il ... because he is starving his people."
Relations were scarcely improved when a Spanish warship, acting on US intelligence, intercepted a North Korean freighter with a cargo of Scud missiles destined for Yemen. Washington was eventually obliged to concede that the shipment did not break international law; if the seizure was intended to send a warning to Kim, the Americans may have miscalculated.
Far from subduing the unpredictable dictator, the naval drama propelled Kim to new heights of reckless defiance. In short order last week, the Yongbyon monitoring cameras were taped over, UN seals were broken and the inspectors told to leave.
By yesterday it was Bush, not Kim, who looked trapped. The American president has failed to engineer a decisive intervention by Russia or China. He is fast losing friends in South Korea, where Roh Moo-hyun, its president-elect, is committed to dialogue with the north.
For all his determination not to repeat Clinton's mistakes, Bush is now facing a replay of the 1994 crisis. If he tries to negotiate, he will be denounced by Republican hawks for caving in to Kim's aggression. He will also run the risk of further treachery from Pyongyang.
In the short term the administration is playing down the possibility of military action and pressing for the UN to intervene. But the realisation is growing in Washington that the eventual alternative to negotiation may have to include a military attack.
ANY opening American salvo, most military experts assume, would flatten the complex at Yongbyon. Much harder to predict would be Kim's response. Unlike Saddam Hussein's shrivelled military arsenal, North Korea possesses enough long-range firepower to wreak havoc among its neighbours.
It has 500 Scud missiles, and up to 30 Nodong ballistic missiles with a strike range of 650 miles. Both could be loaded with chemical or biological weapons.
North Korean scientists are believed to have produced stocks of anthrax, cholera and plague. According to a South Korean defence ministry document, scientists in Seoul, the nation's capital, have also identified eight chemical production plants and six storage facilities for chemical weapons such as mustard gas or nerve agents.
Another ballistic missile, the Taepodong-2, has an estimated range of more than 3,700 miles, which means it could reach Alaska or parts of Russia.
North Korea also possesses a huge conventional artillery force with 12,000 pieces dug in within range of Seoul. Military analysts have calculated that on the first day of any war, it could be hit by 500,000 shells.
If Washington strikes Yongbyon, would Kim dare strike back? He could target American bases in South Korea or even the US naval base at Yokosuka, Japan. While the Americans would deploy Aegis-class destroyers with missile interceptors, the region's worst fear is that any conflict might not be limited to a brief exchange of missiles and may result in a nuclear disaster.
"The question is, can the US deliver a clean, knockout blow that resolves the crisis?" said John Pike, one of Washington's leading military analysts. "My guess is that blowing up Korea could be very messy."
Most officials in Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo believe Kim will use his weapons to take the region to the brink of calamity, then pause to extract the political and economic concessions he needs to prop up his regime.
The trouble with brinks of calamity is that some leaders do not see them in time - particularly dictators cocooned in personality cults. Both Bush and Kim in their different ways, have taken the road to confrontation without knowing where it will end.
Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Limited
