Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=01/18/2003

TYPE=ON THE LINE

NUMBER=1-01264

TITLE=THE NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR CRISIS

INTERNET=Yes

EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY 619-0037

CONTENT=

THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Host: The North Korean Nuclear Crisis. Next, On the Line.

[music]

Host: This is On the Line and I'm Eric Felten. North Korea now appears to be openly pursuing its nuclear weapons program. The regime of Kim Jong-il withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty after throwing out inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. North Korea has said it will restart a plutonium reactor that was shut down as part of a 1994 agreement with the United States. The North Koreans are also threatening new ballistic missile tests. President George W. Bush has called for international diplomacy to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions. President Bush said "I view this as an opportunity to bind together nations in the neighborhood and around the world to make it clear to the North Koreans that we expect this issue to be resolved peacefully and we expect them to disarm." How will this crisis be resolved? I'll ask my guests: Joel Wit, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Kyoung-min Shin, Washington D.C. bureau chief for the South Korean television network MBC-TV and Nicholas Eberstadt, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Welcome and thanks for joining us today.

Joel Wit, how did crisis get started?

Wit: Well I think what immediately precipitated the crisis was a visit by a U-S envoy to Pyongyang at which he put on the table the fact that the United States knew that North Korea was violating an earlier agreement that froze their nuclear weapons program. He left Pyongyang having told them that they have to get rid of this program and the North Koreans have taken it from there and have escalated the situation.

Host: So instead of responding by saying "Okay, we'll get rid of this program," they've escalated the program and escalated the tension.

Wit: Well I'm not sure. The secret program has not been escalated, but they certainly moved to unfreeze the program that had been stopped by the earlier agreement. There are two separate programs here. And the fact that they didn't on the spot agree to get rid of it is no surprise to anyone.

Host: Kyoung-min Shin, what is North Korea trying to do? What are they up to at this point?

Shin: Sometime after they reached an agreement with the United States, I think they planned a new project, the so-called H-E-U [Highly Enriched Uranium] project. So, when the special envoy visited the capital city, they decided -- we don't know the real reason why -- but they decided to build a secret project. So I think they have some concerns and they have some need to start negotiating with the United States. And we don't know their reality and their ambition and their secret, but anyway, they would like to talk about that. And somebody mentioned that they really, this time, really have the ambition to get the weapons of mass destruction.

Host: Nicholas Eberstadt, why this time, now, after having agreed in 1994 to stop its nuclear weapons program in exchange for various kinds of aid and fuel, why now the desire to get those weapons?

Eberstadt: Well, North Korea does not have a famously scrupulous record of honoring signed agreements. The North Korean government has always had a somewhat conditional and opportunistic view of agreements. The idea that they would violate this agreement is not a big surprise looking at North Korea's past track record. As Joel said, the reason why now may simply be that the North Korean government was surprised. The last nuclear crisis began, of course, when the U-S surprised the North Korean government by providing the International Atomic Energy Agency information about previous North Korean violations. It's not at all clear that the North Korean leadership thought they were going to be confronted with this evidence about the secret nuclear program when Assistant Secretary Kelly visited Pyongyang in October.

Host: What's in it for North Korea to have this secret nuclear program in the first place?

Eberstadt: Of course North Korea watchers speculate endlessly about this. There are no conclusive arguments here, it's hypothesis, but when a government like North Korea works on a nuclear program for many decades and funds it at the expense of a famine in the country, one hypothesis is that maybe the government really wants nuclear weapons.

Host: Joel Wit, how has the United States responded to this escalation?

Wit: Well I think the U-S has had a problem in finding the proper response to the situation. It seems that our focus has been largely on trying to gather the international community together, and our close allies in South Korea and Japan, to try and put pressure on North Korea. The program has been condemned. Our position has been that they need to dismantle it right away before any further negotiations and this is the position we're trying to rally all the countries around. The problem is that the other countries don't see it the same way. Many of the countries in the international community, particularly South Korea and China, want to see the United States sit down and have a real dialogue with the North Koreans and try to resolve this situation peacefully first. And if that doesn't work, they might be willing to take tough measures. But the U-S is not at that point yet and I think that's part of the problem with U-S strategy.

Host: Kyoung-min Shin, does South Korea see this as a conflict between the U-S and North Korea that it's somehow going to mediate as opposed to something that involves South Korea directly?

Shin: The current administration and those who proposed the Sunshine Policy for many, many years, for five years, exactly speaking, think, you know, different ways. And trilateral talks were held last week and proposed some kind of a mediation proposal. But some critics say South Korea is not in a position to propose a mediation proposal. We are one of the involved countries and are very critical, so, I don't think we're in a position to mediate. This is not a good idea. Our country withdrew that idea quickly after the meeting. I don't know. We are in a very difficult position. North Korea is threatening our stability and security and the United States government is hesitating to have talks directly with North Korea. So we find ourselves in a very awkward situation. That's the current evaluation.

Host: What is current public opinion in South Korea about this conflict?

Shin: There is some anti-Americanism as you know, especially among the young generation. The U-S should start talks, direct talks with North Korea as soon as possible -- that's the general sentiment. The Sunshine Policy is a very good one, so we should maintain the policy and the United States publicly supports that, the Sunshine Policy from a long time, from the start. So, this time the U-S is sure to take that support again. That's the general sentiment. And because of the [two] young girls' deaths [in an accident involving a U-S military vehicle] -- that caused anti-Americansim in the streets in all cities of South Korea. So, that coincidence mixed with the North Korean situation is a bad situation in Korea at this time.

Host: How is North Korea, Nick Eberstadt, trying to influence the situation by trying to promote anti-Americanism in the South?

Eberstadt: Well, there are a couple of different aspects to the North Korean response. Some aspects I think have turned out to be miscalculations that the North Korean government rejects and is pretending never happened. The actual meeting with Assistant Secretary Kelly was a disaster from the North Korean standpoint. The sort of "in your face" response that "Yes, we've got this secret program and what are you going to do about it?" couldn't have been any more provocative and couldn't have helped the United States build an international coalition any better than it did. That little bit has been downplayed and now the North Korean government is trying to say this never happened. Certainly, they wish they had never done that. Generally speaking, however, I think we can see that the North Korean tactics are almost a step-by-step replication of the North Korean tactics in the 1993, 1994 nuclear crisis, which of course ended with a document signed by both the U-S government and North Korea as sort of a mutual understanding that temporarily was supposed to freeze the North Korean nuclear program while providing aid to the North. We might guess that something along those lines is also hoped for by the North Korean government this time.

Host: Is that what North Korea's hoping for Joel Wit?

Wit: That could be one of the things they're hoping for, but as our South Korean colleague mentioned, they may have already decided that they're going to go ahead and build more nuclear weapons. And what they're doing now is kind of throwing sand in our eyes to keep the international community off our backs while they move ahead. That's the other possibility. There's a third possibility as well and that is that the North Koreans themselves are not sure which way they're going to go and they're seeing how the situation develops and before they make any final decisions. And they don't have to make any final decisions probably for a few months, because that's when their nuclear facilities will actually be ready to start producing more bomb-making material.

Host: Kyoung-min Shin, there are a lot of people in South Korea who have called for a reduction in U-S forces that are along the demilitarized zone or perhaps a removal all together and there have been some critics in the U-S who have actually suggested the same thing for different reasons. Let me read to you a quote from an article in the New Republic magazine by Robert Lane Greene in which he said: "Why don't the South Koreans see, better than anyone the menace posed by the North? Alas, here America suffers from the same problem it has in Europe. Guaranteed security has allowed many people, especially the young, to forget there was ever a threat in the first place." How does the U-S military presence in Korea change the way the threat is perceived in South Korea and is Mr. Lane Greene's suggestion that the U-S pull out and that that would improve things, is that true?

Shin: Many [of the] young generation were born after the Korean War. We experienced in the 70s and 80s and the support by the United States for the dictators. So they as young boys and girls and students they were saw those sorts of things for many, many years in that case. So, somebody questioned exactly why U-S troops are here. Is it for our interest or U-S interest? That sort of questioning prevailed for some time and this time the support of the Sunshine Policy and the accident that I mentioned earlier coincided in the anti-Americanism slogan. "Speaking up" was the slogan. But generally speaking, the anti-Americanism is not a cause to withdraw the American troops from the Korean peninsula. Anti-Americanism may contain many, many sectors and slogans and many shifts. So, I don't think anti-Americanism is a cause to the withdraw slogans. So, I think we have to distinguish those two slogans.

Wit: Can I just add a point here? I'd like to reinforce what my South Korean colleague has said. The fact is, I think the South Koreans understand very well the threat posed by North Korea, because they've had to live with it for almost fifty years. And the fact that they understand it fairly well and they know what would happen if there was an armed conflict on the Korean peninsula, means that they are very interested in seeing things resolved peacefully with North Korea. And it's not just young people and it's not just left-wing people. I'm sure you would find many center-of-the-road or even right-wing people who understand the serious consequences of an armed conflict. And therefore want that to be the last resort in dealing with North Korea.

Eberstadt: Democratic, free, open societies can make miscalculations and can have misperceptions. And I'd qualify what you said Joel, with two observations. One observation would be that the people under thirty in South Korea today are the first generation in the entire history of the Korean people not to be personally familiar with political tragedy. Previously, for five thousand years, Korean history has been largely a history of political tragedies. They have not experienced these tragedies first hand. The other problem, I think, is that the way the R-O-K Sunshine Policy happened to be executed meant that the government's legitimacy rested importantly on the argument that it had succeeded in reducing the North Korean threat. And in making the argument that the North Korean threat has been reduced, without making a rationale for why American troops are still there, we had a kind of an accident waiting to happen. As with the tragedy that occurred last year -- running over those two innocent girls during a troop exercise -- if people do not believe there is a North Korean threat, every tragedy like that is an unbearable outrage.

Host: Do people in South Korea feel that there is a threat Kyoung-min Shin?

Shin: Yes, sure, the people are very conscious about the existence of the threatening forces. [inaudible] So, I think the general movers and the security-minded people say this is not a good time. They talk about it a little bit louder. This is not a good time to talk about withdrawal of American troops from the Korean peninsula.

Eberstadt: A very interesting public opinion poll result from early January: a survey of the South Korean public was asked who does the North Korean government wish to use nuclear weapons against if they develop them? Only a quarter of the South Korean public thought South Korea was a target for such weapons.

Host: Joel Wit, that suggests that in South Korea it's believed that North Korea's nuclear ambitions are perhaps a bigger threat to the world than to South Korea. And there have been many critics who would suggest that this is a challenge that is really not just a challenge to the United States and South Korea, but rather to the entire international system of non-proliferation. How is the international community responding to that threat?

Wit: The international community is responding in many different ways. You have the countries in the region like China, and Russia of course is part of the region and South Korea and Japan, who want to see the problem peacefully resolved through dialogue and that's because they're right next door to North Korea. You have other countries who are much further away from North Korea and I would venture to say France and Britain who are typically non-proliferation hawks who want to take a very tough approach. But this is the challenge that faces U-S foreign policy in dealing with this issue and it's not a new challenge. The challenge is to somehow bring together all these diverse groups of countries in a common effort to deal with this problem. And I would say that at least now, the administration has not really done a very good job of that.

Host: Is it just the U-S's responsibility to make other nations come together on this?

Wit: Well, you know, unfortunately, I know there are many people who would like to leave it to others to resolve, like South Korea to mediate or maybe China can resolve this problem, but the fact is that the United States has been the central player in the region and continues to be the central player in the region in dealing with this problem. And it can't just bow out of the process. It's the only one that can really bring together all these diverse groups.

Host: Nick Eberstadt, let's talk a little bit about perhaps the more specific efforts of some of these particular countries. Countries with long-time relationships with North Korea, Russia and China have been involved in trying to mediate this to some extent. What have they been doing?

Eberstadt: Russia's attitude toward North Korea until nine-eleven was quite ambivalent, was kind of playing a multi-polarity game, using North Korea as a sector of influence and multi-polarity. That has changed rather significantly since nine-eleven. The Russian government has been in much closer cooperation with the U-S although there are many sectors of the foreign ministry that seem skeptical about the U-S approach and even the U-S claims about the North Korean nuclear program. China again has had, generally speaking, closer cooperation with the United States on security questions since nine-eleven, but North Korea has always been a sort of a special case for Chinese diplomacy. China is a major aid source for the D-P-R-K and one of the questions on the table is whether the United States can convince the Chinese government to reduce its aid to the D-P-R-K to pressure the North Korean government to think more clearly, if you will, about the nuclear question.

Host: Kyoung-min Shin, we have a little over a minute left. What about other regional powers? What is expected to be the response of Japan if North Korea gets nuclear weapons up and usable and has the missile technology to deliver them to Japan?

Shin: Yes, that's a real -- we know that, so we understand it as a threat, so we are very curious to know the development and the attitude.

Host: Is there an expectation that Japan would be forced to develop a nuclear capacity of its own?

Shin: If North Korea develops, that may be an encouragement to develop nuclear weapons. Maybe South Korea may think about that, developing nuclear weapons. I think a very great first, I think.

Host: Joel Wit, I'm afraid we only have a couple of seconds left. How is the threat to proliferation stopped at this point?

Wit: Well, I think the only way to stop the threat now is for the United States to sit at the negotiating table and actually have a real dialogue with North Korea. Otherwise, I think North Korea is going to bold nuclear weapons and its arsenal is going to grow.

Host: We only have about ten seconds. Nick Eberstadt -- dialogue?

Eberstadt: We've got no credible negotiating partners. That's part of the problem of having the same man who signed the agreed framework say they were violating it. We're in a zero-sum game now and someone's going to win and someone's going to lose.

Host: We'll I'm afraid that's all the time we have for today. That's all the time we have. I'd like to thank my guests: Joel Wit of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Kyoung-min Shin of MBC-TV and Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. Before we go, I'd like to invite our audience to send us your comments and your questions. You can e-mail them to Ontheline.gov

For On the Line, I'm Eric Felten.