North Korea's WMD Program: Purposes and Implications
Prepared Statement by Nicholas Eberstadt
Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy, American Enterprise
Institute
House Committee on International Relations,
Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific
February 17, 2005
Last week's declaration by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, aka North Korea) that Pyongyang possessed nuclear weapons, and would hold on to its nuclear arsenal "under any circumstances", was greeted with shock and astonishment around the world. The most surprising part of last week's momentous development, however, was that North Korea's bold move was so widely regarded as genuinely unexpected, both in Washington and abroad.
The North Korean government did not opt to join the world's nuclear weapons club suddenly, on a bizarre and inexplicable whim. To the contrary: last week's announcement represents the entirely predictable culmination of decades of steady, deliberate effort and careful, methodical progress on a multifaceted program of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)-a program that includes work not only on nuclear weapons, but also on chemical weapons, biological weapons, and ballistic missiles.
This WMD program is propelled not by irrational impulses, but rather by a carefully considered strategy-a strategy so deeply wedded to purposes of state that can be described as integrally fused into the very logic of the North Korean system.1 That strategy, and the logic that undergirds it, may be intuitively unfamiliar to those of us with modern, "globalization era" sensibilities. But unless and until we appreciate we appreciate the thinking that animates North Korea's WMD quest, we will face the prospect of ever more unpleasant and expensive surprises from Pyongyang.
In a very real sense, the DPRK is a state unlike any other on the face of the earth today. It is a political construct specially and particularly built for three entwined purposes: to conduct a war, to settle a historical grievance, and to fulfill a grand ideological vision.
That vision is the reunification of the now-divided Korean peninsula under the unfettered "independent, socialist" rule of the Pyongyang regime-in other words, unconditional annexation of present-day South Korea and liquidation of the government of the Republic of Korea (ROK) so that Kim Jong Il & Co. might exercise total command over the entire Korean race (minjok in Korean).
If that vision sounds preposterous and utterly impracticable to us, please understand that it looks very different from Pyongyang. North Korean statecraft has been predicated on that very vision for over half a century. To this day, "Sunshine Policy" and all the rest notwithstanding, Pyongyang grants diplomatic status to only one "government mission " from Seoul: this being the legation of the so-called "South Korean National Democratic Front (SKNDF)", an invented resistance group supposedly based in the South, which regularly uses North Korean airwaves to denounce the Republic of Korea as an illegitimate colonial police state.
The grievance is the failure of the famous June 1950 surprise attack against South Korea-an assault that might well have unified all Korea on Pyongyang's terms but for America's unexpected military intervention in defense of the ROK. In Pyongyang's telling, it is only America's continuing and malign imperialistic support that has permitted an otherwise rotten, unstable and utterly irredeemable ROK government to survive since 1950 (and more recently, to take on the trappings of prosperity and democratization).
The total-mobilization war state that Pyongyang has painfully erected over the decades (at among other costs, the North Korean famine of the 1990s) is a response to this grievance, and an instrument for fulfilling this vision. And the war that North Korea has prepared for is not some future theoretical contingency. Quite the contrary: in the view of North Korean leaders, their country is at war today, here and now.
Although we ourselves are sometimes inattentive to it, the fact of the matter is that the Korean War's battles were only halted through a cease-fire agreement (the Armistice of 1953)-there has never been a peace treaty bringing the hostilities to a formal and conclusive end. The Korean War is, from the DPRK's standpoint, an ongoing war-and North Korea's leadership is committed to an eventual, unconditional victory in that war, however long that may take, however much that may cost.
Against all odds, North Korean leadership still attempts to support a vast conventional military force-long rehearsed for an anticipated reprise of June 1950-on a dysfunctional and failing Soviet-type economy. Despite the ingenuity and bravery of North Korean People's Army officers and soldiers, this force cannot hope to prevail over the combined ROK-US alliance that awaits them on the other side of the DMZ. Thus the neutralization, and effective removal, of the United States and the US alliance system from the Korean equation is utterly essential from Pyongyang's perspective.
That objective, however, cannot be achieved by the DPRK's conventional capabilities-today or in any foreseeable future. To deter, coerce, and punish the United States, the DPRK must possess nuclear weaponry and the ballistic missiles capable of delivering these into the heart of the American enemy. This central strategic fact explains why North Korea has been assiduously pursuing its nuclear development and missile development programs for over thirty years-at terrible expense to its people's livelihood, and despite all adverse repercussions on its international relations.
Although Pyongyang rails against "globalization" in other contexts, North Korea's own conception of the uses of WMD are fully "globalized". Thanks largely (though not exclusively) to its short-range "SCUD"-style missiles and bio-chemical weapons, primarily targeted on South Korea, Pyongyang can always remind counterparts in the Blue House that the enormous metropolis of Seoul is a hostage to fate, to be destroyed at a moment on Kim Jong Il's say-so. Intermediate No "Dong type" missiles capable of striking Japan (and American bases in Japan) with nuclear warheads put Japanese political leaders on permanent warning of the possible costs of incurring North Korea's anger, and the potential dangers of siding with the United States in any time of Peninsular crisis. Finally, long-range missiles of the improved "Taepo Dong" variety may be capable of striking the United States mainland, now or in the relatively near future.2
Several important implications flow from the DPRK's conception of, and strategy for, its WMD program.
First, continuing and escalating international tensions are not the accidental and unwelcome side-effects of the program: they are instead its central purpose. Simply stated, the DPRK's growing WMD arsenal, and the threats it permits the North Korean regime to pose to other governments, are the key to the political and economic prizes Pyongyang intends to extract from an otherwise hostile and unwilling world.
Second, WMD threats-and especially nuclear and missile threats-have already been used by North Korea with great success: as an instrument for extracting de facto international extortion payments from the United States ands its allies, and as a lever of forcing the United States to "engage" Pyongyang diplomatically, and on Pyongyang's own terms.3
The greatest potential dividends for North Korean nuclear and ballistic diplomacy, however, still lie in store-and this bring us to a third point. For half a century and more US security policy has been charged with imposing "deterrence" upon Pyongyang. Shouldn't we expect that Pyongyang has also been thinking about how to "deter" the US over those same long decades?
Nuclear weapons (especially long-range nuclear missiles) might well answer the "deterrence question" for the North Korean state, as former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry incisively recognized in his 1999 "Perry Process" report: faced with the risk of nuclear attack on the US mainland, he warned, Washington might hesitate at a time of crisis in the Korean peninsula. But if Washington's security commitment to the ROK were not credible in a crisis, the military alliance would be hollow: and vulnerable to collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. North Korea's WMD program, in short, may be the regime's best hope for achieving its long-cherished objectives of breaking the US-ROK military alliance, and forcing American troops out of the Korean peninsula.
Fourth, those who hope for a "win-win" solution to the North Korean nuclear impasse must recognize the plain fact that Pyongyang does not now engage in "win-win" bargaining, and never has. The historical record is completely clear: Pyongyang believes in "zero-sum" solutions, preferring outcomes that entail not only DPRK victories, but also face-losing setbacks for its opponents. From the DPRK's perspective, "win-win" solutions are not only impractical-they leave adversaries unnecessarily strong-but actually immoral.
Finally, those who believe that a peaceful and voluntary de-nuclearization of the DPRK is still possible through yet further rounds of international "conference diplomacy", or through some future "negotiating breakthrough", must be ready to consider what such an outcome would look from North Korea today-that is to say, from the standpoint of the real existing North Korean state, not some imaginary DPRK we'd rather be talking to.
No matter how large the pay-off package, no matter how broad and comprehensive the attendant international formula for recognition and security, the Western desideratum of "complete verifiable irreversible denuclearization" (CVID) would irrevocably consign North Korea to a world in which it is the metrics of peaceful international competition that matter-and thus irrevocably to a role in international affairs for the DPRK more in consonance with the size of its GNP. No North Korean leader is likely to mistake such a proposal for a bargain.
Even worse from Pyongyang's standpoint: a genuine agreement to denuclearize might well threaten to undermine the authority and legitimacy of the North Korean state. Since its founding in 1948, the DPRK has demanded terrible and continuing sacrifices from its population-but it has always justified these in the name of its historic vision for reunifying the Korean race. Today, however, forswearing its WMD options would be tantamount to forswearing the claim to unify the Korean peninsula on Pyongyang's own terms. Shorn of its legitimating vision, what then, exactly, would be the rationale for absolutist North Korean rule?
The unsettling thrust of this analysis is not just that North Korean leadership today may positively prefer a strategy that augments the government's WMD capabilities: it may also positively fear a strategy that does anything less.
To conclude: the task now before us is to make the world safe from North Korea. Kim Jong Il, by contrast, is doing his best to make the world safe for North Korea. Making the world safe from North Korea promises to be a difficult, expensive, and dangerous undertaking . For America and her allies, however, the costs and dangers of making the world safe for North Korea stand to be incalculably higher.
1 Parts of this testimony draw upon the author's contributions to a recent study by the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) on the North Korean challenge to US missile defense. Thanks go to NIPP's Dr. Keith A. Payne and Amb. David J. Smith for supporting and encouraging my research in that effort.
2 There is no indication, incidentally, that North Korean decision-makers view WMD as "special weapons", to be held in reserve-on the contrary, missiles and nuclear devices seem to figure integrally in North Korean official thinking and are already being used on a regular basis in North Korean statecraft, as the government's ongoing foray's in "blackmail diplomacy" attest. And despite Pyongyang's emphasis of race doctrine, there is no indication whatsoever that North Korean leadership would hesitate to use such weapons on minjok-race brothers-in South Korea. Pyongyang did not blink at starving perhaps one million of its own people for reasons of state in the 1990s. It regards the South Korean state as a cancerous monstrosity, and those who support it as corrupt and worthless national traitors.
3 Despite the
North Korean regime's seemingly freakish face to the world, North Korean
leadership's capabilities for making subtle and skillful calculations is
underscored by the bottom line in its negotiations with the United States
government over the past decade. Between 1995 and 2004, by calculations of the
Congressional Research Service, Pyongyang secured more than $1 billion in
foreign aid from the US-a state the DPRK regards as its prime internatio
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
