Pyongyang plays from position of
strength By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON - North Korean leader Kim
Jong-il, playing the nuclear card as never before,
has trapped Washington strategists in a maze from
which there may be no exit.
The question
now is whether - or when - Kim will press the
button on an underground test of a nuclear
warhead, elevating North Korea to the ranks of the
full-fledged nuclear powers and challenging
Washington to respond.
Washington
politicos, notably President George W Bush, may
issue warnings, persuade
other world leaders to bring pressure on Pyongyang
and threaten to broaden economic sanctions. The
United States might even increase its forces in
the air and waters surrounding North Korea.
Beyond such gestures, however, Bush
administration insiders have to admit there is not
much they can do either in terms of stopping North
Korea from conducting a test or somehow punishing
Pyongyang after the fact. They cite two reasons.
The first is that US forces are extremely
overextended in the Middle East, and the US is in
the process of downsizing, not increasing, its
forces in South Korea amid a tendentious debate
about who would take command in time of South
Korean forces in time of war, an American or a
South Korean.
The second relates to that
debate. South Korea's left-of-center president,
Roh Moo-hyun, is leading the charge to loosen
military ties between the US and South Korea while
pursuing rapprochement with the North. Roh
demonstrated his commitment to this policy when
his government approved more than US$200 million
in aid for the North after floods that Good
Friends, the South Korean aid-giving organization
with contacts in the North, estimates killed more
than 50,000 people and left homeless 10% of the
country's 24 million people.
Kim Jong-il
has managed to set off alarm bells here and in
Japan by dropping hints that appear as carefully
scripted as the reports in late June that the
North had positioned a long-range Taepodong 2
missile on a launch pad and was about to test it.
That particular missile turned out to be a dud
when test-fired on July 4, but six mid-range
Rodong and short-range Scud missiles were
successfully fired, giving notice of the North's
determination to make good on its threats.
Now the telltale clues of a North Korean
plan for another nightmare - an actual underground
test - are an unusual amount of "truck activity"
and mysterious coils of wire around a site in the
remote, mountainous northeast - an ideal setting.
Such signs are not quite as definitive as the
sight of a missile on a pad, but they're the most
that intelligence analysts are likely to get
without having moles inside the North Korean
nuclear program.
Bush's response
underlines just how little he can do to stop Kim
Jong-il from doing whatever he has in mind. In a
statement issued from Camp David, the presidential
retreat, he averred that a North Korean missile
test would show the seriousness of the North
Korean threat. He hoped that "those sitting around
the table with us", presumably China and Russia,
the powers with the most clout in Pyongyang, would
"act in such a manner as to help rid the world of
the threat".
Such vague talk appears more
as a sign of weakness than a will to act,
especially since China and Russia both seem to
exercise highly limited influence in their
relations with North Korea. Nor is South Korea
doing more than offering lip service, in the form
of a pro forma warning from Foreign
Minister Ban Ki-moon that is likely to have as
much impact as the warning he issued before the
missile tests in early July.
In this
atmosphere, US officials pressing for resumption
of six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear
program appear largely silent. Christopher Hill,
the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and
the Pacific and the chief US negotiator at the
talks in Beijing last year, has clearly gotten
nowhere. Kim Jong-il plays upon divisions inside
the US bureaucracy, between the United States and
South Korea - and among the great powers with the
biggest stake in the Korean impasse: China,
Russia, Japan and the US.
South Korea,
though, is also embroiled in an internal debate
that reveals the deep differences between
conservatives and leftists - and contributes to
the rising unpopularity of Roh. Former defense
ministers and retired military officers have been
increasingly outspoken in their criticism of Roh's
efforts to downgrade, if not escape, from the US
military alliance.
That whole issue will
assume immediate importance in mid-September when
Roh travels to Washington for a summit with Bush.
Somehow the White House hopes to come to terms not
only with how to deal with North Korea but also
with the politically charged question of whether
an American general will assume command of South
Korean troops in time of war.
A measure of
Bush's desire to gain Roh's confidence is that he
has remarked that, yes, he agrees that South
Korean forces are capable of taking charge of
their own forces in time of war. In exchange for
this show of understanding and cooperation on that
sensitive issue, Bush may hope for South Korea to
adopt a tougher stance when it comes to North
Korean weapons.
In fact, South Korea is
already increasing its surveillance of North Korea
for clues to a possible underground nuclear test
even though officials say they have seen nothing
to verify reports circulated here that the North
may be planning one soon.
The South last
month launched its first spy satellite capable of
monitoring activities in the North - and then put
into orbit a satellite used primarily for military
communications. The spy satellite, called the
Arirang-2, was launched by a private firm in
Russia ostensibly to conduct geographical surveys.
South Korean officials said, however, that it can
also be used for keeping an eye on North Korean
military activities.
The communications
satellite was fired from waters near Hawaii,
according to the Defense Ministry. The satellite,
named the Mugunhwa 5, for Korea's national flower,
was developed by KT Corporation at a cost of
US$313.6 million, and it is the first that is
capable of providing a military communications
network for South Korea's forces.
A
Defense Ministry source was quoted by Yonhap, a
South Korean news service, as saying that the
ministry was on "a 24-hour vigil to deal with
North Korea's potential nuclear test". The source
said the Defense Ministry had dispatched "six
skilled soldiers to the Korea Institute of
Geoscience and Mineral Resources", which is
dedicated to monitoring seismic tremors for clues
on whether the North has indeed conducted a test.
A government official saw no link between
reports of North Korea's plans to conduct a test
and the heightened vigilance on the part of the
Defense Ministry. The official was quoted as
saying the government had been pushing "to
strengthen the monitoring of North Korea's nuclear
activity since early July" - before the first
report surfaced of the possibility of an
underground test. However, South Koreans remain
skeptical about North Korea's plans for an
underground test.
The "suspicious vehicle
movement", as first reported by a senior US
official, appears reminiscent of reports in 1997
about activity around Kumchang-ri, northwest of
North Korea's nuclear complex at Yongbyon. A US
team was permitted in 1999 to visit what turned
out to be an enormous but empty cave, prompting
still more speculation as to why North Korean
engineers had dug out the cave and whether it had
originally been planned as the site of an
underground test.
A South Korean official
acknowledged "a logical possibility that North
Korea will test its nuclear weapons any time"
since the North last year had declared its success
in developing nuclear weapons. "A common view,"
said the official, "is that the North has the
technology for conducting a nuclear test" - a
carefully hedged comment that was clearly crafted
to give the impression that actually an
underground test would not represent such a major
milestone after all.
That's a view that
appears to be gaining increasing traction among
Korea-watchers here. No one doubts that North
Korea has already tested the mechanism for
triggering a nuclear explosion, and the
underground test might well prove rather
anticlimactic.
Nor is North Korea's
nuclear program seen as all bad by many South
Koreans. The fact is that South Korean activists
see the North's success in building perhaps six to
eight warheads as a matter of pride for all
Koreans, along with the South's success in
business and industry. Hardliners in the Bush
administration might be shocked to see television
footage of activists in the South cheering an
underground explosion in the North - even as
older, conservative Koreans saw the test as
another dangerous step toward a second Korean War.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been
covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces
in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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