"Bomb Scare "
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rfmcdonaldFrom :
Bomb Scare
by the Editors
Post date 03.14.03 | Issue date 03.24.03
It is only because the United States stands on the brink of one war that so few people notice how close we are to another. In recent months, North Korea has begun an escalating series of provocations: violating a 1994 agreement with the United States in which it promised to freeze its nuclear program; admitting to a secret uranium-enrichment program that could deliver weapons-grade material; expelling International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitors from Yongbyon, a facility that can reprocess plutonium and produce nuclear weapons; and launching two missiles into the Sea of Japan. American intelligence now estimates that the North may have one or two nuclear weapons, which it could use or sell on the black market.
In response, the Bush administration, which until recently had either ignored North Korea or insisted on multilateral negotiations with Pyongyang, has adopted a harder line. This month, President George W. Bush demanded Pyongyang abandon its nuclear program and explicitly said military force might be used against the North, while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently warned North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il that the United States could fight two wars at once. Backing up its words, the Pentagon has sent 24 long-range bombers to Guam that could be used to strike North Korea. And the White House reportedly is drawing up plans for an airstrike on Yongbyon, a move North Korea says would prompt all-out war.
That would be a military and political catastrophe. North Korea possesses a million-man army and roughly 13,000 pieces of artillery, more than 70 percent of which are positioned within 50 miles of Seoul. It may even be able to lob a nuclear weapon at that city of more than 15 million people. U.S. intelligence reports estimate a conflict could result in one million deaths and massive devastation in South Korea. And, though some administration officials have suggested that Kim Jong Il's military is a paper tiger, North Korea specialists vehemently disagree, noting that Pyongyang's army is one of the most dedicated in the world and would unleash thousands of rounds of artillery within the first hours of a war.
A U.S.-initiated conflict would also devastate America's alliances in Asia. The South Korean government and people adamantly oppose war. A U.S. strike that condemned hundreds of thousands of South Koreans to death (Rumsfeld recently suggested that the United States might withdraw its own troops from South Korea, presumably to spare them the consequences of such a strike) would be an inglorious first: Washington essentially killing an ally's people without their consent. (At least initially, many South Vietnamese supported America's role in their conflict, and polls show a plurality of Israelis support a war with Iraq.) It is hard to imagine such a decision elsewhere in the world--Would the White House strike Syria without Israeli consent? Would we bomb Ireland without consulting 10 Downing Street?--but then the Bush administration has consistently ignored Seoul, embarrassing former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung in 2001 by publicly denigrating his policies. Other countries in Asia, the one region of the world where the United States faces, in China, a superpower rival, would have little reason to trust a country willing to lead its ally's people to slaughter.
Tightening sanctions on the North, another prospect the Bush administration has considered, would be less devastating than war but sadly ineffective. As Marcus Noland, a Korea expert at the Institute for International Economics, has noted, the value of impoverished North Korea's illicit exports--drugs, counterfeit money, weapons technology--exceeds the value of those legitimate exports that sanctions would restrict. Kim Jong Il and his close circle have not been affected by the North's economic collapse: Kim has purchased hundreds of $100,000 Mercedes cars and would feel no personal pain from an economic embargo. China, the one country whose trade really matters to Pyongyang, refuses to even contemplate imposing sanctions.
Given the inefficacy of sanctions and the nightmare of war, starting immediate, comprehensive bilateral negotiations with the North is the best of a bad set of options. The only kind of talks the Bush administration has been willing to contemplate are multilateral. (As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, many in Washington have shied away from bilateral talks because they give Kim Jong Il too much credit as a negotiator, even though he has made major mistakes.) But no other country in the region has embraced such talks. And, in waiting for the unlikely multilateral option to present itself, the White House allows Kim Jong Il to determine the pace and tenor of the standoff and runs the risk that, by the time serious discussions begin, he will possess several more nuclear bombs.
Bilateral negotiations would not constitute a return to the 1994 agreement--to negotiate in order to get back to that place would be to give in explicitly to North Korean blackmail. Instead, the White House could ask the North to not just freeze but also verifiably end nuclear programs, something the 1994 deal only required in the distant future. Any plutonium fuel rods the North possesses would be destroyed. And, unlike the 1994 agreement, these talks would be all or nothing: Pyongyang could only gain rewards by rapidly fulfilling all the conditions set.
What's more, to verify that the North is ridding itself of its nuclear ambitions, the White House should insist that inspection teams be made up not merely of IAEA appointees but of American delegates, who would monitor the destruction of the North's nuclear programs. And, unlike the 1994 deal, which restricted the inspectors to sites where the North had started reprocessing uranium or plutonium, thereby blinding them to any new facilities Kim Jong Il might be developing, this new agreement would allow inspectors access to any site they considered suspect.
In return, Washington could recognize North Korean sovereignty, promise not to invade, and move rapidly toward political and economic normalization, including helping the North develop energy sources--though not, as it did in 1994, nuclear ones.
Though Kim Jong Il's behavior is highly unpredictable, there is at least some reason to believe such an approach could work. In recent years, he has shown some limited willingness to accept changes that did not threaten his rule, such as approving economic reforms that liberalized some price controls and created free-market special economic zones and reaching out to Japan by apologizing for North Korea's past abductions of Japanese citizens. As several Korea experts have suggested, the paranoid, perennially frightened leadership in Pyongyang has repeatedly emphasized its craving for long-term security, which the United States would be providing via a guarantee and an armistice. And, as Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution has noted, with the secretive, isolated North Korean regime, foreign countries can only get their messages across via grand gestures that grab the attention of the North's leaders--as China did in 1994 by threatening to slash aid to the North, which helped push Pyongyang to make a deal with the Clinton administration that year--and offer them a vision for the future.
Skeptics rightly note that Pyongyang cheated on that deal by secretly pursuing a uranium-enrichment program. But it's also possible that this cheating was partly prompted by the North's feeling--as early as 1995--that, by not normalizing economic and diplomatic relations, the United States was reneging on the deal itself.
Although other countries in the region have rejected multilateral negotiations, embarking on bilateral talks actually could strengthen America's position vis-à-vis its allies. While segments of the population in South Korea and Japan, including new South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun, have recently expressed doubts about ties to the United States, ultimately all three nations are working toward the same goal of disarming the North. Bilateral talks conducted with the quiet support of South Korea and Japan would allow Roh Moo Hyun, who is still gaining his footing, to work behind the scenes to bolster negotiations while not appearing to blindly support the United States, an image that angers South Koreans. After all, as Victor Cha, a Korea expert at Georgetown, has suggested, Roh Moo Hyun may not prove anti-American. His predecessor, Kim Dae Jung, was also perceived as suspicious of Washington when entering office but wound up being extremely pro-American, despite tensions with the Bush team at the end of his term.
While negotiating, the United States and its allies should simultaneously bolster efforts to control Pyongyang's proliferation--efforts that do not directly target the North Korean army or regime and are therefore less likely to provoke a conflict. Working with the Japanese and Australians, the two main naval powers among our allies in Asia, the White House could initiate a more concerted program to check and intercept North Korean missile exports on the high seas, something the United States should have done when it discovered in December that North Korea was shipping missiles to Yemen.
Washington also could help organize a regional consortium of financial institutions in Asia and Europe designed to track and block North Korea's revenues from drug smuggling, gun-running, counterfeiting, and, most worryingly, potentially selling fissile material on the black market. As financial institutions have begun to do with the accounts of various terrorist organizations, this consortium could institute more comprehensive checks on Pyongyang's accounts overseas to prevent them from peddling fissile material and other illegal products. As Joshua Kurlantzick writes in this issue ("Traffic Pattern," page 12), the United States also could pressure foreign governments to more thoroughly investigate North Korean diplomats residing in their countries before allowing them residence and, essentially, diplomatic immunity from most criminal investigations. And the United States could encourage a refugee exodus from the North, which might weaken Kim Jong Il's hold on power. The United States could have administration officials give speeches highlighting the refugees and offer China financial incentives to provide legal status and safe haven for them. Washington could also push Beijing and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to deploy refugee specialists to the North Korea-China border area to help refugees win safe passage without fear of being forcibly repatriated to the North by the Chinese security services.
Negotiating does not mean abandoning the possibility of ever using force. The armies on the Korean peninsula have been dug in to basically the same spot for five decades, and there is little potential for surprise, so a conventional war six months or a year from now would probably look little different from a conventional war with the North in one month. And, if the White House demonstrated that it had first tried to negotiate with the North in good faith, it would be easier to fight Pyongyang with the backing of key allies South Korea and Japan.
Favoring bilateral negotiations and a counter-proliferation regime, rather than combat, does not imply viewing North Korea as a lesser threat than Iraq. To the contrary, it's precisely because Pyongyang--which may already have a nuclear weapon--poses a greater threat than Baghdad that military force is today not a serious option.
In Iraq, with its far weaker military, war is difficult but possible. In North Korea, the consequences--in human lives, in the destruction of U.S. credibility in Northeast Asia and the world--are too vast to contemplate currently.
In Iraq, negotiations and inspections are problematic, unpalatable, and the United States has a better alternative. In North Korea, they are problematic, unpalatable, and our only hope. Let's hope the Bush administration grasps the distinction.
Bomb Scare
by the Editors
Post date 03.14.03 | Issue date 03.24.03
It is only because the United States stands on the brink of one war that so few people notice how close we are to another. In recent months, North Korea has begun an escalating series of provocations: violating a 1994 agreement with the United States in which it promised to freeze its nuclear program; admitting to a secret uranium-enrichment program that could deliver weapons-grade material; expelling International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitors from Yongbyon, a facility that can reprocess plutonium and produce nuclear weapons; and launching two missiles into the Sea of Japan. American intelligence now estimates that the North may have one or two nuclear weapons, which it could use or sell on the black market.
In response, the Bush administration, which until recently had either ignored North Korea or insisted on multilateral negotiations with Pyongyang, has adopted a harder line. This month, President George W. Bush demanded Pyongyang abandon its nuclear program and explicitly said military force might be used against the North, while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently warned North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il that the United States could fight two wars at once. Backing up its words, the Pentagon has sent 24 long-range bombers to Guam that could be used to strike North Korea. And the White House reportedly is drawing up plans for an airstrike on Yongbyon, a move North Korea says would prompt all-out war.
That would be a military and political catastrophe. North Korea possesses a million-man army and roughly 13,000 pieces of artillery, more than 70 percent of which are positioned within 50 miles of Seoul. It may even be able to lob a nuclear weapon at that city of more than 15 million people. U.S. intelligence reports estimate a conflict could result in one million deaths and massive devastation in South Korea. And, though some administration officials have suggested that Kim Jong Il's military is a paper tiger, North Korea specialists vehemently disagree, noting that Pyongyang's army is one of the most dedicated in the world and would unleash thousands of rounds of artillery within the first hours of a war.
A U.S.-initiated conflict would also devastate America's alliances in Asia. The South Korean government and people adamantly oppose war. A U.S. strike that condemned hundreds of thousands of South Koreans to death (Rumsfeld recently suggested that the United States might withdraw its own troops from South Korea, presumably to spare them the consequences of such a strike) would be an inglorious first: Washington essentially killing an ally's people without their consent. (At least initially, many South Vietnamese supported America's role in their conflict, and polls show a plurality of Israelis support a war with Iraq.) It is hard to imagine such a decision elsewhere in the world--Would the White House strike Syria without Israeli consent? Would we bomb Ireland without consulting 10 Downing Street?--but then the Bush administration has consistently ignored Seoul, embarrassing former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung in 2001 by publicly denigrating his policies. Other countries in Asia, the one region of the world where the United States faces, in China, a superpower rival, would have little reason to trust a country willing to lead its ally's people to slaughter.
Tightening sanctions on the North, another prospect the Bush administration has considered, would be less devastating than war but sadly ineffective. As Marcus Noland, a Korea expert at the Institute for International Economics, has noted, the value of impoverished North Korea's illicit exports--drugs, counterfeit money, weapons technology--exceeds the value of those legitimate exports that sanctions would restrict. Kim Jong Il and his close circle have not been affected by the North's economic collapse: Kim has purchased hundreds of $100,000 Mercedes cars and would feel no personal pain from an economic embargo. China, the one country whose trade really matters to Pyongyang, refuses to even contemplate imposing sanctions.
Given the inefficacy of sanctions and the nightmare of war, starting immediate, comprehensive bilateral negotiations with the North is the best of a bad set of options. The only kind of talks the Bush administration has been willing to contemplate are multilateral. (As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, many in Washington have shied away from bilateral talks because they give Kim Jong Il too much credit as a negotiator, even though he has made major mistakes.) But no other country in the region has embraced such talks. And, in waiting for the unlikely multilateral option to present itself, the White House allows Kim Jong Il to determine the pace and tenor of the standoff and runs the risk that, by the time serious discussions begin, he will possess several more nuclear bombs.
Bilateral negotiations would not constitute a return to the 1994 agreement--to negotiate in order to get back to that place would be to give in explicitly to North Korean blackmail. Instead, the White House could ask the North to not just freeze but also verifiably end nuclear programs, something the 1994 deal only required in the distant future. Any plutonium fuel rods the North possesses would be destroyed. And, unlike the 1994 agreement, these talks would be all or nothing: Pyongyang could only gain rewards by rapidly fulfilling all the conditions set.
What's more, to verify that the North is ridding itself of its nuclear ambitions, the White House should insist that inspection teams be made up not merely of IAEA appointees but of American delegates, who would monitor the destruction of the North's nuclear programs. And, unlike the 1994 deal, which restricted the inspectors to sites where the North had started reprocessing uranium or plutonium, thereby blinding them to any new facilities Kim Jong Il might be developing, this new agreement would allow inspectors access to any site they considered suspect.
In return, Washington could recognize North Korean sovereignty, promise not to invade, and move rapidly toward political and economic normalization, including helping the North develop energy sources--though not, as it did in 1994, nuclear ones.
Though Kim Jong Il's behavior is highly unpredictable, there is at least some reason to believe such an approach could work. In recent years, he has shown some limited willingness to accept changes that did not threaten his rule, such as approving economic reforms that liberalized some price controls and created free-market special economic zones and reaching out to Japan by apologizing for North Korea's past abductions of Japanese citizens. As several Korea experts have suggested, the paranoid, perennially frightened leadership in Pyongyang has repeatedly emphasized its craving for long-term security, which the United States would be providing via a guarantee and an armistice. And, as Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution has noted, with the secretive, isolated North Korean regime, foreign countries can only get their messages across via grand gestures that grab the attention of the North's leaders--as China did in 1994 by threatening to slash aid to the North, which helped push Pyongyang to make a deal with the Clinton administration that year--and offer them a vision for the future.
Skeptics rightly note that Pyongyang cheated on that deal by secretly pursuing a uranium-enrichment program. But it's also possible that this cheating was partly prompted by the North's feeling--as early as 1995--that, by not normalizing economic and diplomatic relations, the United States was reneging on the deal itself.
Although other countries in the region have rejected multilateral negotiations, embarking on bilateral talks actually could strengthen America's position vis-à-vis its allies. While segments of the population in South Korea and Japan, including new South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun, have recently expressed doubts about ties to the United States, ultimately all three nations are working toward the same goal of disarming the North. Bilateral talks conducted with the quiet support of South Korea and Japan would allow Roh Moo Hyun, who is still gaining his footing, to work behind the scenes to bolster negotiations while not appearing to blindly support the United States, an image that angers South Koreans. After all, as Victor Cha, a Korea expert at Georgetown, has suggested, Roh Moo Hyun may not prove anti-American. His predecessor, Kim Dae Jung, was also perceived as suspicious of Washington when entering office but wound up being extremely pro-American, despite tensions with the Bush team at the end of his term.
While negotiating, the United States and its allies should simultaneously bolster efforts to control Pyongyang's proliferation--efforts that do not directly target the North Korean army or regime and are therefore less likely to provoke a conflict. Working with the Japanese and Australians, the two main naval powers among our allies in Asia, the White House could initiate a more concerted program to check and intercept North Korean missile exports on the high seas, something the United States should have done when it discovered in December that North Korea was shipping missiles to Yemen.
Washington also could help organize a regional consortium of financial institutions in Asia and Europe designed to track and block North Korea's revenues from drug smuggling, gun-running, counterfeiting, and, most worryingly, potentially selling fissile material on the black market. As financial institutions have begun to do with the accounts of various terrorist organizations, this consortium could institute more comprehensive checks on Pyongyang's accounts overseas to prevent them from peddling fissile material and other illegal products. As Joshua Kurlantzick writes in this issue ("Traffic Pattern," page 12), the United States also could pressure foreign governments to more thoroughly investigate North Korean diplomats residing in their countries before allowing them residence and, essentially, diplomatic immunity from most criminal investigations. And the United States could encourage a refugee exodus from the North, which might weaken Kim Jong Il's hold on power. The United States could have administration officials give speeches highlighting the refugees and offer China financial incentives to provide legal status and safe haven for them. Washington could also push Beijing and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to deploy refugee specialists to the North Korea-China border area to help refugees win safe passage without fear of being forcibly repatriated to the North by the Chinese security services.
Negotiating does not mean abandoning the possibility of ever using force. The armies on the Korean peninsula have been dug in to basically the same spot for five decades, and there is little potential for surprise, so a conventional war six months or a year from now would probably look little different from a conventional war with the North in one month. And, if the White House demonstrated that it had first tried to negotiate with the North in good faith, it would be easier to fight Pyongyang with the backing of key allies South Korea and Japan.
Favoring bilateral negotiations and a counter-proliferation regime, rather than combat, does not imply viewing North Korea as a lesser threat than Iraq. To the contrary, it's precisely because Pyongyang--which may already have a nuclear weapon--poses a greater threat than Baghdad that military force is today not a serious option.
In Iraq, with its far weaker military, war is difficult but possible. In North Korea, the consequences--in human lives, in the destruction of U.S. credibility in Northeast Asia and the world--are too vast to contemplate currently.
In Iraq, negotiations and inspections are problematic, unpalatable, and the United States has a better alternative. In North Korea, they are problematic, unpalatable, and our only hope. Let's hope the Bush administration grasps the distinction.
