Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=03/13/2003

TYPE=ON THE LINE

NUMBER=1-09294

TITLE=NORTH KOREAN PROVOCATION

INTERNET=Yes

EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY 619-0038

CONTENT=

THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Host: Is there a North Korean crisis? Next, On the Line.

[music]

Host: North Korea test-fired another missile into the sea of Japan. It was one of a string of provocative acts meant to ratchet up tensions in the region. Just days before, North Korean fighter jets buzzed a United States reconnaissance plane that was flying in international airspace. The Communist regime of Kim Jong Il maintains a massive army, while the country's population teeters on the brink of mass starvation. After breaking an agreement to shelve its plans for nuclear weapons, North Korea has restarted its nuclear plant at Ygonbyon. The plutonium produced there could give Kim Jong Il half a dozen nuclear bombs by the end of the year. The U-S has resisted demands by North Korea for bilateral talks to negotiate an end to the provocations. Instead, President George W. Bush has called on leaders from the region to get together in multilateral talks to resolve the impasse. Can North Korea be convinced to step back from the brink? I'll ask my guests: Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms control; Nicholas Eberstadt, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, and L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs. Welcome and thanks for joining us today. Gary Milhollin, North Korea is doing its best to create a crisis. Is there really a crisis already?

Milhollin: I think you have to say there is a crisis. North Korea is in the position now of being able to produce enough plutonium for five or six additional weapons by late this year. If it does that, we're going to we, the world -- are not going to know where that plutonium is. And since North Korea has sold virtually everything it has made in the way of weaponry, we have to assume that we could be for the first time in history seeing weapon-usable quantities of plutonium in world commerce. Sell those to al-Qaida, sell those to perhaps [Libyan dictator] Muammar Qadhafi, or at a minimum, incorporation of this plutonium into additional warheads in North Korea that could threaten Japan, threaten our troops and make it much more difficult for us to get North Korea to strike an acceptable deal with us later on. So, what we're seeing is a situation where we now have an opportunity to do diplomacy, but that opportunity is disappearing, because once the North Koreans make those additional warheads, then we're not going to be able to talk to them about whether we should do that or not, and we're going to be in the process of trying to track them down. And there's no guarantee whatsoever that we would be successful in finding them.

Host: Nick Eberstadt, is that the implicit threat -- not so much that North Korea would have these nuclear weapons themselves and threaten to use them but rather the threat implied by having the nuclear weapons and shipping them off to terrorists?

Eberstadt: Well, it's all of the above. Of course it's the international nuclear commerce, but when you have nuclear weapons in the hand of a dangerous regime, the regime's all the more dangerous. One of the things which former Defense Secretary [William] Perry emphasized in his Perry Report to President Clinton back in 1999 was that a nuclear North Korea would fundamentally undermine the balance of deterrence in the Korean Peninsula, because for the first time in half a century the United States, faced with a nuclear North Korea, might hesitate about provocations North Korea might make toward the South. Undermining the deterrence in the Korean Peninsula dangerously destabilizes that area.

Host: Now don't most analysts believe that North Korea already has one or two nuclear weapons?

Eberstadt: The U-S intelligence community's formulation now, I think, is that the intelligence community in the mid-90s decided that there were one or two nuclear weapons. Previously they'd said materials for one or two nuclear weapons.

Host: Gordon Flake, is it those nuclear weapons that are already believed to be in North Korea that are causing some hesitation and figuring out how to deal with the provocations being made?

Flake: Very much so. In fact, there's some very interesting parallels of course between North Korea and Iraq, and many people are arguing that North Korea offers the best case for why we have to act preemptively in Iraq. Because, once a country has weapons of mass destruction, then the political and security calculus in dealing with them becomes much more complex. And our options in dealing with North Korea are much more constrained. I would agree with both of my colleagues here that there is indeed a crisis. But I'm actually more concerned about the immediate future than I am about the one-year later time frame or the period that is needed for North Korea to actually produce more fissile material, because it's in our attempt to shut down the North Korean reprocessing facility if it starts up or to block that, that I think the real crisis is. And that's the danger -- that in the very near future that we could either provoke a war, or start one ourselves on the Korean Peninsula.

Host: Gary Milhollin, do you think there's a risk of that?

Milhollin: I do. If we just look at it from the broadest possible perspective, if you're going to say that you hope for a diplomatic solution for this problem but you're not willing to engage in diplomacy, which apparently the administration isn't right now, then what's left? War is left. And if you look at the conduct of the North Koreans, they seem to be adopting a policy of provocation. They're provoking us at a certain level and then they ratchet it up. They're searching for a level at which they're hoping to get some kind of a definitive response from us. And when you get in that kind of a situation, especially with a country like North Korea that might have a nuclear weapon or two and us, we certainly have nuclear weapons, somebody could make a mistake. And so, this is a very dangerous equation and unless the North Koreans stop provoking, unless they abandon this confrontation policy, I think the risk of a military confrontation is very high.

Host: What do you think, Nick Eberstadt?

Eberstadt: There's a lot of memory plastic in North Korea. You go back to their playbooks, in looking at Konfrontasi policy and I think one of the things that they're going back to is the chapter on the Vietnam War right now, because the United States looks as if it may be embroiled in a major commitment in the Middle East. And when you take a look at what North Korea did in the U-S experience in Vietnam, it was exactly the sort of confrontation policy as we're seeing now: the capture of the Pueblo; American hostages good, not bad for North Korean negotiations; the attacks in 1968 against the Blue House in the attempt to assassinate then South Korean President Park Chung Hee; the shoot-down of the American spy plane, the E-C 121. All of these were things that increased North Korea's power and seemed to be instruments that might help to break the U-S South Korean alliance. Those objectives are still very much in the North Korean leadership's minds today.

Host: Now the buzzing of the U-S reconnaissance plane this last week, in which it was reported that the North Korean pilots were signaling that plane to land. Do you believe that North Korea was trying to get that plane onto North Korean territory and take those Air Force personnel into custody?

Eberstadt: It certainly seems that our military believes the attempt was to take that pilot as a hostage. North Korea has quite a bit of experience in dealing with American hostages. It's skilled in that area of negotiation.

Host: Gordon Flake, we've heard a lot about whether or not there will be negotiations. Why is it that North Korea keeps demanding that there be unilateral negotiations with the U-S, bilateral negotiations just between the U-S and Korea, and why is it that the U-S wants to bring in countries from the region to be part of multilateral negotiations?

Flake: Well, from the North Koreans' perspective obviously, the United States is the one who holds all the cards since they want to go directly to the source. But I'm actually a little bit more cynical about the current North Korean demands. If viewed in the context of the threat that North Korea feels from the United States, from the world at large, you know this is a state that's kind of hard-wired for paranoia. And in the last two years, they have been branded a member of the "Axis of Evil." President Bush has stated publicly that he loathes Kim Jong Il. On top of that, you had, you know, a repeated calling them a terrorist state. Secretary [of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld just at the end of January called them a terrorist state and even [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair said after Iraq, North Korea's next. So in the context of that paranoia, my own belief is that North Korea can not be negotiated out of its nuclear weapons. They basically view this as kind of a last gasp attempt to try to make themselves so prickly, so much like a porcupine that we won't deal with them. And so, that makes the current demands for bilateral negotiations with the U-S ring a little bit hollow. In effect, I think what they're trying to do is similar to what they did in 1994, which is raise the specter of war in order to force us to sue for peace. In 1994, if you recall, in 1992, they signed a bilateral nuclear safeguards agreement with the I-A-E-A [International Atomic Energy Agency]. They were actually caught in violation of that in 1993, threatened to pull out of the N-P-T. It was very much similar to the situation today.

Host: N-P-T being the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Flake: That's right. And then, you know, at the time, in an effort to kind of ward off conflict and to move back from war, we agreed basically to live with the ambiguity of North Korea. We signed a 1994 Geneva agreed framework under which we basically agreed not to ask North Korea about its past behavior, not to press for special inspections. Missiles, chemical and biological weapons were considered completely other issues. You know, there's an era, which is a pre-nine-eleven era, when we were willing to live with that level of uncertainty and ambiguity. And I would point out that that's very different from where we are today.

Host: Gary Milhollin, do you agree or disagree with Gordon Flake? Is North Korea in a position where they are willing to negotiate away their possibility of nuclear weapons?

Milhollin: That's a big question. I think there's some evidence. Certainly the North Koreans want to negotiate with us. They want to get money. They want to get diplomatic recognition. They want us to save their country. There's also a lot of evidence that they're hoping they can do that without giving up their nuclear program. The last time around, they managed to get things from us that they thought they needed in exchange for simply putting their nuclear program on hold. We did not insist that they give it up. I think this time around, the Bush administration believes that the only deal that would be acceptable would be a deal in which they give it up. I'm not sure that the North Koreans will accept that deal. And if that's the only deal that we're willing to give them, it doesn't look as if negotiations are going to be fruitful. There may be a compromise in this mix in which, at least I would hope, that we could give them more than we gave them in '94, but get more from them. That is, just raise what both parties are providing a little bit. And I think one of the things we need from them the most is the fuel rods out of which they're threatening to make five more bombs. Because if we could get those out of the country, that would remove the immediate threat that they're going to put plutonium on the world market or radically increase their nuclear striking power. I think we need to get those fuel rods out and it may be that we can make a deal with them that gives them enough so that they would be willing to see the fuel rods leave the country.

Host: Nick Eberstadt, should the U-S negotiate directly with North Korea in order to get the fuel rods?

Eberstadt: It's barbaric not to talk with your adversaries or opponents. Talk is harmless. What seems to me to be very dangerous, however, is rewarding the North Korean government for violating its nuclear agreements, not only because of the reinforcement of dangerous behavior for the North Korean government, but because of the terribly dangerous lesson and precedent that establishes for other would-be proliferators. So far the lesson from the latest North Korean crisis to other would-be proliferators is: "If you hurry up and get your hands on the stuff, you will be rewarded not punished."

Host: Now, is agreeing to bilateral talks in and of itself some kind of reward to North Korea?

Eberstadt: North Korea hopes that it will gain benefits from that, among the most tangible -- in addition to the son of Agreed Framework -- sort of economic benefits that Gary and Gordon were referring to, a non-aggression pact with the United States, or some sort of other document would be very valuable for the North Korean government because that would be the first legal step toward getting American troops out of South Korea, which of course has been a North Korean goal since the Korean war.

Host: Let's talk a little bit about that, Gordon Flake, about U-S troops in South Korea. There was, let me read to you two quotes from South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun. Just a little before he was inaugurated this last month, he said "It is better to struggle than to suffer deaths in a war. Koreans should stand together, although things will get difficult when the United States bosses us around." And then, just this last week, the president said, "The staunch Korea-U-S-combined defense arrangement is greatly contributing to our national security. This solid alliance should be maintained even more so, there can be no change whatsoever in that principle."

Host: What happened between those two quotes?

Flake: It's called "democracy in action." What you have to say to get elected can sometimes make it difficult to govern after you've been elected. President Roh Moo-hyun was elected really on a wave of anti-American sentiment, particularly in the context of some rather unfortunate accidents involving the death of two young South Korean school girls that really inflamed the average South Korean opinion against American military presence in South Korea.

Host: Now that was a vehicle accident.

Flake: Exactly.

Host: A military vehicle that .

Flake: Ran over two young school girls. It was a vehicle that was in an area that it shouldn't have been in. The communications broke down. The radio broke down and they didn't see the girls and ran over them. They were acquitted, but almost inexplicably, the trial for these two servicemen they charged for this was scheduled the month prior to the South Korea presidential election. And as you might imagine became very much a referendum on how people felt about the presence of military troops, and in a time when South Korea was undergoing its own political evolution and increasing demands on the part of the average South Koreans for respect from the United States. And so, I don't think there's as much incongruity between the two statements as you might believe. And in the one he's really playing to the younger generations and it's really a demand for respect: not to be "bossed around." And the second one as a governor, as the current president, he's obviously reinforcing what he has to do to secure the security of his own country. In fact, in the last week he's continued to make repeated statements about the importance of the alliance. And, in fact, just in the last couple of days he's called for the strongest U-S-South Korea alliance possible.

Host: Well, Gary Milhollin, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, U-S Secretary of Defense, started talking about the possibility of moving U-S troops away from the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea and perhaps the possibility of moving out the bulk of U-S troops. How has that affected this situation both in North Korea and in South Korea?

Milhollin: Well, I think there's a feeling that to have our troops in an urban environment isn't good. To have our troops in a position where they certainly are a little more than a trip wire perhaps isn't good. But I think there's a fair amount of feeling to the effect that it might be possible to move them, but not out of the country. Put them in a situation where they would be less obvious, less likely to provoke incidents. But the question of whether we draw them out of the country is a big one because, one possible scenario is that we move our troops out and tell the North and South Koreans that if they don't want us that they can just deal with each other. That will have the benefit, and I'm saying this now -- this is a rather grim prospect -- but the benefit of making it perhaps clear that our interests are not necessarily the same as the South Korean government's interest. Because our interest, the U-S interest is not having North Korea be a proliferant and not having it be a nuclear threat to the region, whereas South Korea's interest may be different from that. I'm not suggesting that that be done. I'm just suggesting that that may explain the position of some people who want to change the troop position. I think that we need to stay in South Korea. We need to be the guarantor of security in that region of the world, because if we are perceived not to be the guarantor of security then we're going to look at a nuclear peninsula in Korea eventually and we're going to be looking at a nuclear Japan.

Host: Nick Eberstadt, you said it's a goal of the North Koreans to get the U-S to leave South Korea. Is it possible for the U-S to rearrange its forces in some way that meets South Korean public opinion and yet doesn't give a victory to North Korea?

Eberstadt: I think it's eminently feasible. We have to remember that South Korea today, like Germany today, is a country with very even divisions of political opinion between strongly pro-American, strongly pro-alliance forces and executive heads of the country who have won paper-thin victories using anti-American sentiment. There's a deep wellspring of support for the alliance in the U-S and I suspect Secretary Rumsfeld was tactically trying to unleash this, just by the very talk of rearranging forces, just to see what would happen. And in the immediate aftermath of his comments, all of the reaction from all quarters in South Korea was, "Let's not mess with this alliance. It's too important to our well-being. And they're right."

Host: Gordon Flake, Gary Milhollin mentions the possibility not only of a nuclear peninsula, but also of a nuclear Japan. How is Japan reacting to the provocations that North Korea has been making?

Flake: Well, it's interesting. Any moves that Japan makes obviously are viewed with heightened sensitivity in South Korea and in China in particular, given the historical legacies of Japan. But in February, in response to, you know preparations in North Korea for a missile test, the Japanese government actually stated its right to consider preemptive strikes against North Korean missile facilities. And in normal times this would have caused just absolute uproars in Seoul and Beijing and there wasn't a peep. It tells you kind of how serious the situation is getting here that Japan can think directly about its own security and yet not stir these deep historical animosities. The real concern here is of course that if North Korea does indeed go nuclear, follows the Pakistan model of testing and declaring itself kind of a fait accompli [accomplished fact] a nuclear state, and then does what it did in 1998, which is test a long-range missile, a long-range multi-stage missile over Japan, my presumption is that would have a galvanizing effect on the political environment in Japan. Already, what happened in 1998, relatively innocuous though it was, really pushed through a lot of fundamental changes in our alliance relationship with Japan, in Japan's view, things like missile defense. And if done in the nuclear context, my guess is it could very well push Japan toward pursuing a nuclear option or nuclear deterrent of its own.

Host: 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 my guests, Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control; Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute; and Gordon Flake of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs. Before we go, I'd like to invite our audience to send us your questions or comments. You can e-mail them to Ontheline@ibb.gov For On the Line, I'm Eric Felten.