The Weekend Australian April 26, 2003
NUCLEAR CONTAINMENT - Plan to stop North Korea's rogue weapons program in its tracks - N Korea and US finally talk
By Catherine Armitage
The burning issue
IT was hardly a meeting of old friends when North Korea and the US sat down at the same table for the first time in six months in Beijing. No one expected miracles. If China, there as broker or participant depending who you asked, couldn't get them to shake hands, who would be surprised, given the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome panic. That they were talking at all was a breakthrough.
It nearly didn't happen. A few days out, North Korea said it had begun reprocessing spent fuel rods, a step towards nuclear weapons manufacture the US regards as a "red line". Then the North claimed there had been a translation error, and it had not begun the reprocessing. Error or not, the message was clear: We can and we will, if we don't get what we want. And what the North seemed to want was an iron-clad guarantee the US would not attack it.
As if in response, news then broke in The Australian of a contingency plan to bomb the Yongbyon nuclear reactor if the red line was breached. The New York Times revealed US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld had pondered collusion with China to bring about regime change in Pyongyang -- thereby confirming North Korean President Kim Jong-il's worst fears.
The US sent Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly to Beijing to make clear the official position promoted by his boss, Secretary of State Colin Powell: kill the nuclear program. Verifiably. Irreversibly.
Kelly's name has been mud with the North since he set the current cycle of bluff and counter-bluff in motion last October by exposing, after a meeting in Pyongyang, that Kim's regime was secretly working towards making nukes in defiance of a 1994 agreement. Underscoring their disdain, the North's envoy to Beijing, Li Gun, was an official seen as too lowly to cut a deal.
As the talks drew to a close the best scenario was that all sides would agree to meet again soon in a genuinely multilateral forum, which included Japan and South Korea. Worst case: no room for compromise found, North Korea retreating back to its shell to work on its nukes, the US dusting off those contingency plans.
In black and white
US success in Iraq brought North Korea to the bargaining table: True or false? True, according to Paul Greenberg in Townhall.com. "Knock a wheel off the axis of evil and the whole thing goes wobbly. Few arguments in international diplomacy are so convincing as a convincing victory." False, argued Ralph Cossa in The Japan Times, pointing out that Washington's deployment of bombers to Guam in March, China's warnings on North Korea's nuclear ambitions and Seoul's much firmer stance began influencing Pyongyang's stand.
As to US plans for a possible military strike against the North's nuclear plants, Doug Bandow in the Los Angeles Times branded it a "wild gamble". As Bandow reminded readers, Pyongyang had the capacity to fire "up to 500,000 shells an hour into Seoul". And North Korea's erratic behaviour made it "the last country on Earth where you would want to set a precedent or test a general proposition", said Fred Kaplan in the online journal Slate.
With South Korea in the firing line, excluding Seoul from this week's talks was a mistake, penned Scott Snyder in the International Herald Tribune. "Seoul should play a key diplomatic role in shaping diplomatic solutions to security issues on the Korean Peninsula." Snyder, however, regarded China's involvement as a sign it now regarded "regional stability as a higher priority than non-interference".
Getting Pyongyang to the negotiating table was one thing, but changing the essential nature of Kim Jong-il's regime was another, opined The Washington Post. "Australia's seizure this week of a North Korean vessel engaged in the state-sponsored trafficking of heroin was a reminder that criminal behaviour has been the essence of Mr Kim's regime." The only real indicator of change "would be a strategic decision by the leadership to liberalise its totalitarian system and respect human rights".
WATCH THIS SPACE: Most observers expect the best that can be hoped for from this week's talks is an agreement to meet again. Don't expect any bold switches from either the US or the Koreans.
@ www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/korea-orbat.htm
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