Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=09/13/2003

TYPE=ON THE LINE

NUMBER=1-01392

TITLE=North Korean Standoff

INTERNET=Yes

EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY 619-0038

CONTENT= Transcript for OTL released Friday UTC

THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Host: The North Korean Standoff. Next, On the Line.

[music]

Host: Six-way talks aimed at defusing the threat of a nuclear North Korea made little progress last month. The United States and regional powers South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia sat down with officials of the Communist regime of Kim Jong Il to call on North Korea to stop its apparent development of nuclear bombs. North Korean negotiators demanded that the U-S sign a non-aggression pact before talks could proceed. The U-S said there is only one precondition to negotiations: that North Korea must end its nuclear bomb-making program. North Korea refused. This month, Kim Jong Il held a massive military parade to mark the regime's birthday. Thousands of goose-stepping troops paraded by, but missing were any of the missiles that Kim has been saying he would use to rain fire on his enemies.

Is the North Korean nuclear threat real? I'll ask my guests: Don Oberdorfer, Journalist-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, and the author of the book "The Two Koreas"; Gordon Chang, author of "The Coming Collapse of China"; and James Robbins, professor of international relations at the National Defense University. Welcome, and thanks for joining us today.

Don Oberdorfer, were the six-way talks more of a success or more of a failure?

Oberdorder: They were some of both, in my view. They were a success in that they were held. It's the first time such a meeting has been held in northeastern Asia involving North Korea and the United States as well as South Korea, Japan and Russia, and China most importantly, in fact. And China's role is extremely important, very positive -- the first and most important activity of China on the international stage, I think, since the Chinese revolution.

We did not succeed in settling the problems. No one expected that in two or three days of talks they were. But I think actually there was less success than had been hoped for. Partly, in my view, it's due to North Korean difficulties, which you mentioned, but partly it was due to the United States, which did not put forth a very forthcoming position, and one that satisfied even the Chinese. So, we look forward, I think, to another round of talks and the possibility that in the interim the United States may decide to become more serious, North Korea may or may not decide to become more serious. And we hope that these talks would be the beginning of a process that eventually could make progress toward the elimination of North Korea's nuclear threats and nuclear materials.

Host: Gordon Chang, what do you think?

Chang: I agree with most of that. The important thing, though, is that Korea is not just about Korea. Korea is also about Iran. As we look at the problems in North Korea, we have to remember that Iran is building, or trying to build, nuclear weapons as well. So we don't have forever to solve the problem in northeast Asia. Which means that these talks have to move much faster. Because at some point, we are going to have to look at the relationship between North Korea and Iran much more closely.

Host: Jim Robbins, do you think that the failure to get some sort of minimal agreement out of these talks is a failure?

Robbins: Not at all. I think that the pressure on talks usually is that people have to agree on something. I think the great success of the talks was that the United States stuck to its position. Maybe other countries stuck to theirs, but the United States did not give up on its position, did not compromise and maintained its posture. By not agreeing, I consider that to be a success. That is, you don't agree to a bad deal just to agree to a deal.

Host: Don Oberdorfer, you say you think the U-S needs to get a little more serious in these talks. Is that a matter of being willing to change its position, or is it somehow a matter of presenting its position?

Oberdorfer: It might be both. The fundamental thing is that the current administration, the Bush administration, has been very much divided about what to do about North Korea. And its activities at these previous talks that were held in April -- the three-way talks -- and now the six-party talks, in my view has been half-hearted at best. Secretary [of State Colin] Powell prevailed on President Bush to have bilateral -- that is to say, two-way -- discussions, direct discussions, between North Korea and the United States, under the overall umbrella of the six-party talks. But these discussions were held kind of in the corner of the room. They weren't serious. They took forty minutes as I understand it. With consecutive translation that's [in effect] twenty minutes or less. So they weren't really serious. And there had been a move in Washington to come to a more forthcoming position. That doesn't mean giving away what the United States wants, which is the termination of the North Korean nuclear activities, and rolling back to get rid of the nuclear materials. But the question is, how do you get there? Everybody knows if you're going to get there through negotiations, you're going to have to do it in a way that gives something to North Korea for doing this. Security, perhaps; maybe the promise of economic development down the line. None of these things was clearly discussed in a way that had any possibility of meeting the North Korean objections. So I think the U-S is going to have to get much more serious if these negotiations are going to get anywhere.

Chang: Of course the United States is going to have to soften its position. But on the other hand, giving something to North Korea might not necessarily be the right thing to do. As you know, there's been twenty years of discussions with the North Koreans. There have been problems on both sides of the discussions. But I think the fundamental problem is that the North Koreans want a nuclear bomb. And this is critical. At some point we might have to say that they're not entitled to very much, certainly much less than they would want. That very well may be, as you talked about, the correct position.

Host: Well, Gordon Chang, one anonymous Chinese official quoted in the Washington Post said, no, the North Koreans don't actually want nuclear weapons, they just want normalized relations with the U-S, and this is their way of going about it. Do you agree or disagree with that?

Chang: I think that they certainly want normalized relations with Washington. But on the other hand they also want a nuclear weapons program. And if they can get both, and if they think they can have both, that's what their objective will be. It will be a question of how clever we are at the negotiating table, and maybe how much pressure we have to apply to get the North to roll back its program.

Host: James Robbins, how serious do you think this North Korean nuclear program is at this point?

Robbins: That's a good question. Sometimes they say they have nuclear weapons -- they claim to have five-hundred warheads -- then they say they don't have anything. They say that they're not pursuing enriched uranium, but [they say that] if we negotiate with them they'll stop what they're not doing -- it's very confusing if you base it just on the public statements of exactly what they have and how grave the threat is. Now it's clear they have the capability of developing these things. Until they actually test a nuclear weapon, I don't think anyone is going to believe for certain that they have one. However, if they choose to go that route and actually test a weapon -- as they have threatened to do recently, and then retracted the threat, as they frequently do -- then that is going to destabilize the region in a way that I don't think would be in their interests. So we're probably not going to have any definitive proof on exactly what the status of their nuclear weapons program is. However, that kind of works to their favor, because it gives people the impression that it's probably further along than we think.

Host: Don Oberdorfer, is it in North Korea's interest to, not necessarily have nuclear weapons, but have people believe it has nuclear weapons?

Oberdorfer: I don't think it's in their interest, but they may think it's in their interest. They think that having nuclear weapons will ensure their security. And it's the only thing, they have come to believe, that will ensure their security after the United States invaded Iraq, particularly, after President Bush talked about the "Axis of Evil" [which he said included Iraq, Iran and North Korea]. They have come to the conclusion, apparently -- I'm not in their head [don't know exactly what they are thinking], but from all we can see -- that nuclear weapons are essential for ensuring their security. I believe that nuclear weapons, far from ensuring their security, will ensure their insecurity. Because if they continue to make nuclear materials -- it could be nuclear weapons, and there's every indication that they are manufacturing this material now -- the international community is not going to bear with this over a long period of time, because it's too destabilizing. So in my view, the time for them to, in effect, make a deal to get rid of this in return for some security, and perhaps some other benefits to a bankrupt regime that is in desperate trouble, is now. Whether that would work or not, of course I don't know, nobody knows whether such a deal could be constructed. But I think at a minimum it's important to make a very serious try. Because unless the United States does that, I do not believe the United States will be in a position then to go to our allies and say, "Look, we've tried, we've done everything we can to bring a deal about, and the fact that it's not coming about is due to North Korean obduracy, not to U-S faults. And therefore, we've got to stick together to pursue another course, a more dangerous course of squeezing North Korea, or militarily getting rid of their program."

Host: Gordon Chang, in trying to figure out what North Korea is up to, are people able to try to figure it out by thinking that the North Koreans are acting rationally? The New Yorker magazine just had a cover story that in a large headline asked, "How Crazy is Kim?". Is he a madman, or is he clever like a fox? How do you figure out what the North Koreans are trying to do?

Chang: You have to look at the margins to see, not only what they're saying, but what they're doing, and try to figure out from third-parties, because they do talk to third-parties. I think Kim Jong Il is crazy like a fox. He certainly gets a lot of mileage by being unpredictable and by having all these contradictory positions, which James talked about. It's very interesting the way that they keep the world off balance, and this has been to their advantage. But as Don says, at some point the world will get tired of this, and especially as the threat is more mature, now then clearly other nations are going to say enough is enough. And the only real issue is, when do we get to that position?

Host: Jim Robbins, there have been a lot of efforts at anticipating what will happen in North Korea. Recently some [former] officials from the [Bill] Clinton administration talked about how, when they made the Agreed Framework deal with North Korea in the nineties, that they thought of it as a stopgap measure because things were so bad in North Korea that they were convinced the regime would collapse in a couple of years, and all they needed was a deal that would hold off nuclear development for that long. Now they admit they were wrong about that. How has the regime held on against those kinds of expectations?

Robbins: Well, it's a mystery to me how they hang in there. They get international aid from the United States, recently. They have some trade relations -- the Chinese have been helping prop them up. The Russians have an interest in not seeing them melt down because all the regional countries would face a refugee crisis and other forms of destabilization. South Korea of course would be destabilized and that would hurt trade. They [the North Koreans] engage in various forms of black market activity -- international organized crime, drug dealing, the dark side. That probably helps keep their regime propped up. I'm really perplexed at the resilience of some of these totalitarian states to hang on despite all expectations. Look at Cuba, for example. Who knows what's keeping them in the game? And how can North Korea do it? It's certainly true that, to the extent that aid goes to the North Koreans it allows them to divert resources to military applications and to the military programs. So to that extent, propping them up not only helps keep them going, but it directly assists them in their military developments. So I don't particularly see how it's helpful to try to stave off things like refugee crises and other forms of destabilization that would follow a North Korean collapse, when what you're doing is creating a future nuclear threat that could have even worse repercussions.

Oberdorfer: I don't agree with your prelude. I saw that story about quoting one of the Clinton administration people saying that they expected the collapse. But she was not in the 1994 negotiations, and I've talked to the 1994 negotiators -- they did not expect that [a collapse]. That's a myth that's around Washington that's often repeated. I don't think there was an expectation there -- not by the people who negotiated anyway -- in 1994 that they [the North Koreans] were going to collapse.

Host: Was there an expectation, then, that the North Koreans would keep their side of the deal?

Oberdorfer: Yes, and in fact, the North Koreans did keep their side of the deal, except for -- and this is a big exception -- the enriched uranium program, which they started probably in the middle of the nineties, from Pakistan. Pakistanis came to them -- they had been buying ballistic missiles from North Korea. And at least what we believe is that the Pakistanis came to the North Koreans and said, "We don't have the money to pay for these missiles, but we will show you how to create nuclear materials using a totally different method than that which was discussed in 1994 [as part of the Agreed Framework]. And the North Koreans -- Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea -- presumably said go ahead without any serious consideration of the consequences if it was discovered. And it was discovered, certainly by the summer of last year the U-S was quite convinced that the North Koreans had this secret program going. On the other hand, the plutonium program -- the more near-term dangerous program -- was shut down. U-N inspectors were there every single day until the North Koreans kicked them out at the beginning of this year. So they kept that part of the bargain.

Host: Gordon Chang, is the North Korean nuclear program, then, nothing more than a sort of forced barter that they were put into [by Pakistan]?

Chang: I think essentially that this is a long-term proposition for the North Koreans. They see it as important to their security, as Don was talking about, and essentially they are going to try to keep it, hell or high water [whatever the circumstances]. We may be able to force the rollback through negotiations, but maybe not. This is something that might require a military solution given the nature of the North Korean regime. You've got to remember that Kim Jong Il depends for his support upon the military. Presumably, the military is going to be quite reluctant to give up their number-one card. So I suspect that this is going to get very ugly, and perhaps in the very near future.

Host: Jim Robbins, is the greater concern here that North Korea is going to stock itself with nuclear weapons and be a threat of using them, or is the graver concern that, in pursuit of hard currency of one sort or another, that they will use this technology to sell to rogue regimes around the world?

Robbins: I think the proliferation threat is the important one. North Korea wouldn't need a large nuclear arsenal to have a deterrent force -- I think we're kind of deterred right now in terms of the use of force against North Korea, which is a difference with the U-S vis-à-vis Iraq a few months ago. So if they just wanted to have a small deterrent force in place -- enough to hit San Diego or something like that -- that would make us think twice [about military action against North Korea]. The real threat is that if they become an international proliferator, help other countries, not just rogue states but non-state actors [such as terrorists] gain access to nuclear weapons. Or if they just build a bunch of them and lose control of them, as was feared with the Soviet Union before, where they [the North Koreans] [might] have warheads that aren't under lock and key, so to speak, and terrorists get hold of them. Then we could find a smoking hole somewhere in the middle of the United States. That, in particular, is the threat that the administration fears and is the one that they're trying to circumvent.

Host: Don Oberdorfer, how does the administration deal with this proliferation threat?

Oberdorfer: That is the main thing, as Jim says, on the minds of those policymakers who are in the proliferation area in the [Bush] administration. Part of the cleavage within the administration is between those who focus on the proliferation problem and those who focus on the regional problem of North Korea. The administration has decided, the President says -- and I believe that he has -- to try negotiations. We're now in these six-party talks. But if negotiations are to have a good chance of succeeding, the administration is going to have to go at it much more vigorously and with much more push than it has so far. And I think it is essential that they do it. Whether it succeeds or not is an open question. I don't pretend -- I've been to North Korea three times. I was there last November talking to them about their nuclear program, this highly enriched uranium program. I don't pretend to be in the minds of the North Koreans or know what they're thinking. But I do think that there's a chance, at least, for a negotiated solution. And the United States, having said it wants to go that way, having organized or helped to organize the six-party talks, ought to move ahead on that basis rather vigorously.

Host: Gordon Chang, with regard to the proliferation issue, and then these talks, there are planned exercises that the U-S is going to take off the coast of Australia to practice interdiction and the possibility of a blockade against North Korean weapons of mass destruction. And China, at least according to some Chinese officials, wants the U-S to hold up. Does the U-S hurt those [six-way] talks or help push them along by showing that they would be willing to block proliferation?

Chang: Well, if we only knew. Obviously the Koreans don't react well to pressure. But on the other hand, we do have a need to exercise with other nations in the region, because the possibility of a blockade is a real one, and it very well may be a necessary element of what we do to keep the nuclear program in North Korea within limits. We're in a sort of dilemma, in a sense that this has to continue, but obviously it has some effect on the talks. It might not be a good one. But in the North Korean situation we have to remember that there very well may be no good answers at all, and that all we're trying to do is pick from the least-worst.

Host: James Robbins, what do you think of the advantages or disadvantages of doing that kind of anti-proliferation training?

Robbins: I think it's important to display that capability to them, to show that we can interdict if we need to. I think that it's a false dichotomy to say that, on the one hand you have talks and on the other hand you have force. The two have to work hand in hand. Certainly the North Koreans believe this -- they'll threaten war at the drop of a hat. They tend to adopt a policy towards negotiations and I think the United States should do the same thing, at least in terms of showing the consequences of not coming to some kind of firm agreement. To push forward on talks -- yes, it is important to push forward on talks -- but that does not mean abandoning other means of reaching a good conclusion to this situation, consistent with U-S strategy and with global security.

Host: Don Oberdorfer?

Oberdorfer: I completely agree. I think force and diplomacy should go together. But they should be applied, as Jim I think suggested at the end, with some strategic view and not just irrationally.

Host: I'm afraid that's going to have to be the last word for today. I'd like to thank my guests, Don Oberdorfer of Johns Hopkins University; Gordon Chang, author of "The Coming Collapse of China;" and James Robbins of the National Defense University.

Before we go, I'd like to invite you to send us your questions and your comments. You can email them to ontheline@ibb.gov For On the Line, I'm Eric Felten.