Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=03/01/2003

TYPE=ON THE LINE

NUMBER=1-01288

TITLE=Defusing the North Korean Bomb

INTERNET=Yes

EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY 619-0038

CONTENT=

THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Host: Defusing the North Korean bomb. Next, On the Line.

[music]

Host: While the world is focused on the possibility of a war in Iraq, North Korea continues to try to ratchet up tensions in Asia. This week the communist regime Kim Jong Il test-fired a missile into the Sea of Japan, a day before the inauguration of new South Korean president Roh Moo Hyun. North Korea then announced that it expects to be attacked by the United Sates any day. All of this comes after October's revelation that North Korea has been violating a 1994 agreement to shut down its nuclear weapons program in exchange for Western aid. Since then, North Korea has quit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and announced its plan to built intercontinental ballistic missiles. Most experts believe that North Korea already possesses at least two nuclear bombs. How can the North Korean nuclear threat be dealt with? I'll ask my guests. James Lilley, former ambassador to China and the Republic of Korea, and now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, William Odom, director of national security studies at the Hudson Institute, and Robert Einhorn, senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thanks and welcome. Jim Lilley, how serious is the nuclear threat posed by North Korea?

Lilley: At this point, I don't think it's that serious. I think that North Korea can be taken care of by the old NSC memorandum number 68, which says deterrence and containment. What I am most concerned about is proliferation. If they start proliferating nuclear weapons or know-how, and then biological chemical weapons, or continue their missile sales to the Middle East, they can be real destabilizing factor. And I think that is the primary focus for us at this moment.

Host: Bill Odom, is the greatest threat, as Jim Lilley says, not what North Korea might do with its nuclear weapons that it's building, but rather what it might do in giving it to other people?

Odom: I would agree with that. But I think we have set a pattern to complicate this matter for ourselves. I think sooner or later you'll see much more nuclear proliferation, nobody has ever stopped the diffusion of technology -- it has [only] affected the rates [at which technology has spread]. And I think we're going through a period in which we're going to have to be adjust to a more proliferated world. And that means, downplaying. I think a more effective way to slow down the proliferation is to devalue nuclear weapons. By jumping every time the [North] Koreans do something about this, as we did back in the 1990s, and to focus on the nuclear weapons problem only in North Korea, rather than what the change on the peninsula meant for strategic relations in North-East Asia, we sort of lost touch, and allowed ourselves to be wrenched into a position of conflict with the South to some degree, which we're seeing manifest itself now. I think sooner or later you just have to tell the North Koreans these things don't really count that much. As Jim Lilley said, we had a deterrence policy before -- we were able to stand toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union. And if Kim Jong Il thinks that he can shoot it out effectively with us, I think he's totally mistaken. And we just have make that clear to him.

Host: Bob Einhorn, do you agree with that the U-S has been overreacting, in a sense, to North Korea?

Einhorn: No, I don't. I have a somewhat different view. I agree with Jim Lilley that North Korea's potential to export its sensitive technologies and nuclear technologies is a very, very serious problem. But I also believe that North Korea's indigenous programs are a very serious problem. I don't think we should count on deterrence and containment working with North Korea. They may well work, but I think we have to try to prevent North Korea from going down the nuclear path. If North Korea gets nuclear weapons, acquires them and retains them, I think this will create pressures in South Korea, in Japan, eventually Taiwan, all to get nuclear weapons, and that will be very destabilizing.

Host: Many people believe that North Korea already has some nuclear weapons. So isn't that situation already in place?

Einhorn: Well, they probably have already one or two nuclear weapons -- that's what most estimates are. But I think we need to prevent them from going from one to two, to six or seven within half a year, and then to tens of nuclear weapons within about a decade. I think it is important to stop them where they are and if possible role them back.

Host: Jim Lilley, is it possible to stop where they are?

Lilley: I don't think so. I think I'd add on to containment and deterrence, economic leverage [and] economic squeeze, because this is the big leverage that we have with North Korea. Sun Tzu said -- the great Chinese strategist of the fifth century BC -- is you don't take the enemy on where he's strong, you take him on where he is weak. They [the North Koreans] are strong in their military. They're very, very weak in the economy. Their lifeline to China, they are absolutely dependent upon it. They are very cruel to their own population. They'll starve them, they'll see two million Koreans die -- four million Koreans face starvation right now. But if you really want to play this game, it seems to me that we all agree, in countries around North Korea -- South Korea, China, Russia, Japan, the U.S. -- that the key to this is no nukes [nuclear weapons] on the peninsula. We agree on that. Number two, economic reform. And these have to be linked in a way that would make North Korea aware that if they go down one path, of nuclear development, they will lose in the economic development sphere. This is going to be tough to deal with that South Koreans who look at this somewhat differently. But it seems to me the whole policy of the United States and our friends and allies is to develop a common approach to North Korea where we use incentives and disincentives to get these people to move in our direction. And if they go down the nuclear direction, they will be definitely suffer on economic side.

Host: William Odom, is this economic issue?

Odom: In a short-term tactical perspective, I would agree with Jim Lilley's general position that we begin to squeeze. I've always thought that the South Koreans are somewhat deceiving themselves in thinking that they're going to have a soft landing in the North. We've had no examples of these kind of Stalinist regimes evolving or transforming. They collapse. So the notion that you're going to transform that regime -- which seems to alive and well in some quarters of the South, and even in some parts of the United Sates -- I think just runs in face of what we know about the dynamic of that regime type. So we're sooner or later going to see rather fundamental change on the peninsula. So the big problem in my view, while nukes are a very central part of it, is how we manage that change and how it it comes out. I think that we could do some things tactically now to so exacerbate our relations with South Korea, that it will be hard to maintain a strategic relationship and military relationship with Korea after the collapse of the North. And I think we need to look out there in the future, not only for what nuclear weapons [there are] going to be, but for what our relations with Korea is going to be. Because if they break with us, where will they inexorably go? They'll drift into the Chinese orbit. So what's at stake is the future South Korea. Now we loose far less by that, if they drift into the Chinese orbit, than they do. They're the ones who are really going to suffer from this. Therefore, I think they finally have to make that decision. Internally they have to come to that view. And I think that quite a few South Koreans that I know understand this fairly clearly. But there's a nationalist dynamic that confuses this to some degree. So, in the short run, that's right. But I would like to have U.S. policy thinking about how you fit this in to the eventual fundamental change on the Korean peninsula. And if we leave that part out, we can make it harder when that part faces us with some kind of endpoint further down the path.

Host: Bob Einhorn, is the long-term relationship with South Korea in balance here?

Einhorn: It is. We see growing anti-Americanism in South Korea. It's clear that a new generation is emerging that has very different views from the generation that fought with us in the Korean War. I think it's very important that we work closely with our South Korean ally. Bill Odom is exactly right. You're not going to have any effective approach to North Korea that's diametrically opposed to the South Koreans' approach to the problem. We have new government led by President Roh Moo Hyun that is committed to engaging with North Korea. Now if we try to put economic pressure -- I agree with James Lilley, economic pressure is an important tool, but there are limits to how far South Korea will go and how far China will go in putting economic pressure on North Korea. So I think eventually we're going to have to try to sit down at the negotiating table with the North Koreans, however much we don't like their regime and to try to work out a deal with them.

Lilley: I think we're going to do that. I think that right now people expected a great deal from Colin Powell's trip. That is dead wrong. He was going there to start the whole process of getting a common approach among our friends and allies. To start the basis, with [Vice President Dick] Cheney following up in April, with the President probably following up in the summer sometime. To give summitry, to give it a tremendous push. Because although we have divergent views, we still can bring these views together, I think, in a common approach. The other thing to remember is that both China and South Korea are going through transitional governments. China is having the tenth National People's Congress starting the fifth of March. It's going to be the fourth generation leadership -- a new leadership. And the Chinese message has come through quite clearly: "Don't push us now. All you'll get is the same old cliches," which is what we got. What they're telling us, the other hand is "Wait, we are practical, sensible people. We have dealt with these North Koreans. We know how really nasty they are, better than you do. And we know something has to be done about this. But Americans, please hold off." And the South Koreans, really the same thing is coming out from Roh Moo Hyun. He's picked a leadership that we know well. His foreign minister, his national security adviser, we know them well. These are not union labor leaders. These are sensible, well-educated thinkers about these things. So I think we have not really gone as far as people say. Anti-Americanism was there when I arrived in Korea in 1986. There were 200,000 people on the streets -- they burned me in effigy. In 1987, I was privileged to see democracy come to South Korea. But you get democracy, you aren't going to get what you expect, you're going to get different things. Roh Moo Hyun, I think he is populist; he's supported the American security arrangement; he understands; he doesn't want nukes on the peninsula; he's got an approach that he is going to work with North Koreans. We can live with that. Bush said this March of 2001: we support the "Sunshine Policy." Go ahead.

Host: Bill Odom?

Odom: I agree with that. I want to make the point that, what this amounts to, it seems to me Jim, is that you're saying, 'This is not as urgent on the nuclear front as people might think it is.' And I really like the point of letting the South Koreans have this debate internally. I think the only we're going to make it with the South Koreans -- you're going to have to have South Koreans make the argument that I was making about transition in the North, you're going to have to have South Koreans that ask themselves, 'Have we ever had the kind of independence we have now, before the Americans were here?' Have we not been under Japanese hegemony, Chinese hegemony, or Russian hegemony? So they've got to think that through and let reflections get ahead of this nationalist impulse.

Lilley: They have a word for that, Bill: Shrimp among whales. [It's this] little peninsula with these giant countries all around it.

Odom: And so it is one of these things where I think if the U.S. tries to dictate to them -- I agree with Bob -- if we try to get in there and tell them to do these things the way we want them done, that's going to be really perverse. I know lots of Koreans. I haven't lived there the way Jim has, but I have many friends in the military there [that] I have [had] over the years. We have [Korean] Fellows at the Hudson Institute; we've worked very closely with them. I just think they're much too intelligent to do stupid things in the final analysis. They see that their economy is thriving. They see that they're better off with the governmental changes they've made. I think it's an internal affair, and they'll mature beyond. I have a lot of confidence in them.

Host: Bob Einhorn, there is this notion that the U.S. is having too much influence, and South Korea straining against that. And yet there is at the same time there is a call, both by South Korea and by China, that the U.S. engage in bilateral dialogue with North Korea. Whereas the U.S. is saying everybody should be involved here. Is there any conflict with that?

Einhorn: Well it's a little incongruous. The world is telling us, don't be so unilateral when it comes to Iraq or other problems, and here they're saying we're being too multilateral -- you [the U.S.] need to sit down unilaterally and talk to the North Koreans. But that's understandable in this particular case. Look, the Bush administration is right: This is not strictly a U.S.-North Korean problem. North Korea's nuclear capability affects North Korea's neighbors, it affects the whole international community. So this is a multilateral problem that needs to be dealt with in a multilateral framework. But I think the fact of the matter is, North Korea's not prepared, at this point to engage multilaterally. It wants to sit down just with the United States, and that's the only way it's going to be solved. And South Korea and China and Russia and Japan all recognize that, at least at the beginning, we have to sit down bilaterally with the North Koreans. And I think that's right. I think we should set up two parallel forums, one bilateral and one multilateral, and we could start out in the bilateral [forum] but quickly bring these multilateral talks under a multilateral umbrella.

Host: Jim Lilley, is the U.S. going to engage in bilateral negotiations with North Korea?

Lilley: I don't think there's any question about it. It's a question of whether we do it in their timing or our timing. What the North Koreans are trying to do, is they are trying to get these bilateral talks with the United States, and the one johnny-one-note [endlessly repeated point] they have is "the United States is the problem because they threaten us." And [North Korea says] we want a non-aggression treaty, and eventually we want your troops out of South Korea because this is the essence of the problem. The essence of the problem is not that: It is their weapons of mass destruction, and proliferation. If they can get us into bilateral talks, you'll see a great stream of propaganda come out that "the Americans are now talking to us and they must do the following to take the risk away from us." I think this will tie us into knots. And I don't think, particularly, that buying them off with goodies is the way to go. I think that the South Koreans have made a bad mistake in their bribery and their overpayments for the tourism [to the North]. They [the South] just poured money on them [the North]. And the North Koreans took it right into their military and the South Koreans lost their shirt. Right now, we've put in $680 million worth of food aid into that country [North Korea], largely unconditional. But we said this time, as Colin Powell's going to do it again, you're going to have monitors. Don't give us this stuff about sovereignty and pride. We're going to have people there to do it like we do in every single other country in the world. They are not a special case.

Host: Jim Lilley brings up the issue of payments from the South to North Korea, and the value of U.S. aid. When North Korea fired this test-missile into the Sea of Japan, President [George W.] Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said "This is North Korea's way of saying 'Please pay me.'" Is that really what it comes down to?

Odom: I think that's true. I agree with Jim completely on this bribery business, and trying to blackmail you into doing these things. The issue though, it seems to me, will only be solved -- we'll make real progress on this -- only when the South Koreans go through this learning experience that it doesn't pay [to appease the North Koreans]. I think we can dictate to them that it doesn't pay, but they have to reach that conclusion on their own and I think we have to depend on their pluralist system, a constitutional system, in which there are voices that make the points we're making. And they've got to have that internal debate. And if we carry it too strongly, we can be counterproductive. I think we've put wind in the sails of irresponsible young nationalists with short memories.

Host: Bob Einhorn, there's been some talk of the possibility of reducing U.S. troops in South Korea, letting South Koreans have a larger responsibility for their own security. Is that idea gaining any steam? And is it a good idea?

Einhorn: I think it's probably a good idea, but not for reasons peculiar to the Korean peninsula. The U.S. is looking at its force posture worldwide. It wants a lighter, more mobile force, more versatile to do different kinds of missions. And if we had no difficulty with the North Koreans and no anti-Americanism in South Korea, we'd probably want to be changing the composition of that force and changing its missions. So I think it probably makes a good idea regardless.

Lilley: I was involved in the original moves to try to get the high-profile [U.S. military presence] out of downtown Seoul. And I really had a terrible fight to do it. I think more, now, that we are going to change the disposition of forces in Korea. We cannot have our 2nd Infantry Division, I think with 17,000 men, up against the DMZ [the De-Militarized Zone]. It's got to be changed. It's got to be changed for reasons of deployment, reasons of safety, reasons of lessening the social fallout. And you do need the naval forces, you do need the air forces, which are very essential. But the South Koreans have a very strong army, modernized. And the North Korean army, we are starting to see signs that it is deteriorating. They are not being fed as well as they were. Their equipment is going bad. The hardened sites' cement is getting cracks in it. It is still a formidable force -- when they march it's like [Nazi parades in] Nuremberg in 1936, goose-stepping 10,000 troops. But watch them pretty carefully. This missile they shot into the ocean, I think it was a cruise missile --

Einhorn: Yes, an anti-ship cruise missile. A Styx or a Silkworm or something like that.

Lilley: It's not a big deal at all.

Host: Bill Odom what do you think of the force structure?

Odom: I fully agree with getting the high-profile [U.S. troops] out of downtown Seoul. I think that moving the headquarters out of there should have been done a long time ago, to take away this attraction for resistance and opposition in South Korea. It may make sense to move the 2nd Division someplace on the peninsula. But I would argue very strongly for no reductions in the troops. We don't have many troops there. The 2nd Infantry Division isn't up to strength -- it's a jury-rigged division; it's not a standard division. So there's not a lot to be had there. What it really means is that the U.S. has a presence, and the political implications of the presence are probably as important if not more important than the military factor. Now I think a few years ago I would have said that the military factor is terribly important, because it was much more hair-trigger along the DMZ. But as Jim said, you're seeing the deterioration of that army in the North. I think that, when you see these games that Kim Jong Il is playing now with nukes [nuclear weapons], it tells you his conventional forces -- I think you can infer that he has trouble with them there.

Host: Well, I'm afraid that's going to have to be the last word for today. We're out of time. I'd like to thank our guests, James Lilley of the American Enterprise Institute, Bill Odom of the Hudson Institute, and Bob Einhorn of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Before we go, I'd like to invite our audience to send us your questions or comments. You can email them to OntheLine@ibb.gov. For On the Line, I'm Eric Felten.