North Korea To Keep Nukes Till Reunification

Courtesy Of: The Australian
Peter Alford, Tokyo Correspondent
19 feb 07
theaustralian

IT'S increasingly likely North Korea will retain and even build its nuclear arsenal until it is reunified with the South, reports a high-powered US study group, including former top Bush administration foreign policy officials.

Reunification is likely to be happening by 2020, says the report, but it could be under unstable conditions that make securing Pyongyang's weapons difficult, and the burden of absorbing a disintegrating North might threaten South Korea's democracy and prosperity.

The report, titled "The US-Japan alliance, getting it right in Asia through 2020", paints an ominous backdrop to last week's six-party agreement to negotiate a nuclear disarmament pact with Kim Jong-il's regime.

Written by Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state in George W.Bush's first administration, and Joseph Nye, a Clinton-era senior defence official, the report clearly assumes that a disarmed North Korea is not a realistic objective.

A contained rogue nuclear state is the best likely outcome.

In that case, the chief virtue of the deal US envoy Christopher Hill brought back from Beijing last week is that it starts reversing another huge strategic miscalculation by the Bush White House.

..."We are quite sceptical on the ability of North Korea to come clean ... so the US and Japan must consider whether North Korea will retain its nuclear weapons," he said.

The report focuses not on the Korean Peninsula but on the US-Japan alliance as the fulcrum of Washington's Asia-Pacific security arrangements.

However, nuclear North Korea is a large preoccupation of the alliance and potentially a fierce irritant to it - one aspect of affairs the study group diplomatically avoided.

...Six years ago, the US hardliners' proposals for handling North Korea were untested: to play as recalcitrant as the Pyongyang regime, to refuse any concession before the regime accepted "complete, verifiable and irreversible" (CVI) disarmament, to refuse any bilateral discussions and to negotiate only with China, South Korea, Japan and Russia as full partners.

...When Jim Kelly told the North Koreans in October 2002 that the Americans knew they had cheated by running a clandestine highly enriched uranium program, that completed the wrecking of the Clinton administration's 1994 Agreed Framework and cleared the way for the six-party process.

At that stage, the regime's Yongbyon nuclear complex was shut and sealed. However, the containment pond still held the 8000 irradiated fuel rods the North Koreans had threatened to reprocess for weapons-grade plutonium in 1993.

Pyongyang was suspected of holding one or two crude, pre-1993 atomic bombs but had never tested them. It was a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors were on-site at Yongbyon, although the regime had made their work almost impossible.

By October last year, the North Koreans had expelled the inspectors, quit the NPT,
recommissioned Yongbyon, removed and reprocessed the 8000 rods, unloaded another 2000 rods from the reactor and probably reprocessed them too.

They had, it was estimated, the material for six to 10 nuclear devices, if not the bombs.

The North Koreans had given a "nuclear breakout" strategy lesson, and almost certainly material help, to Iran, the next aspiring nuclear anti-Western state.

On October 9, they detonated a small bomb, their first test explosion.

Notwithstanding the UN Security Council sanctions that followed, and the rift that opened between Pyongyang and its allies in Beijing, the CVI approach had demonstrably failed.

...Ironically, given the original circumstances, the demise of the CVI strategy has give the six-party process a new vitality and urgency. Instead of the customary long break after last week's session and North Korea refusing to commit to a resumption date, the delegations have agreed the sixth round will happen on March 19, and officials have been left behind in Beijing to keep the work going.

But the negotiating agreement has changed the dynamic in highly unpredictable ways.

How long will the US-China co-operation that brought the North Koreans back to the table last?

Is Beijing back with some firm influence over Pyongyang or, as some Chinese analysts suggest, does Kim's regime remain antagonistic and semi-estranged?

How long will Hill and Rice be allowed their free hand by the White House beyond the first 60-day stage of the negotiations, when Pyongyang inevitably tries to hedge its obligations?

How much access will the IAEA be allowed when its inspectors return to Yongbyon?

When will the North Koreans make the "complete declaration of all existing nuclear facilities" required by the agreement?

What about the already existing nuclear bombs that simply aren't discussed by the agreement?

The Americans and Japanese will want to restrict economic aid to keep the pressure on North Korea to meet its obligations.

But how much bilateral aid will the Chinese and South Koreans now give?

The South Koreans have already given their answer: unlimited.

As well as agreeing to shoulder most of the burden of the six-party aid package, President Roh Moo-hyun moved immediately to resume the food and fertiliser aid reluctantly frozen when the North tested ballistic missiles last July.

Roh likened South Korea's task to the Americans' Marshall Plan after World War II.

...And what of the Japanese, who are acutely aware of the considerations Roh ignores?

...The Armitage-Nye report does not directly address the consequences of Japan losing faith in the US's handling of North Korea or, worse, of the adequacy of the American alliance to protect it from attack.

...But the scenario of a "contained" nuclear North Korea is one that also would have to include Japan asking fundamental questions about its security arrangements.

Under that scenario there would most likely be one more nuclear state in northeast Asia. And none of them would be talking about disarmament.