On Dealing with Nuclear North Korea

“I was stunned by the sight of 2000 centrifuges in two cascade halls and an ultramodern control room. But it was not until the long drive back to Pyongyang that the political implications of these findings hit me. It will be more important than ever to limit Pyongyang’s nuclear programme and calm tensions in the Korean peninsula.”

—American Scientist Dr Siegfried S. Hecker in Foreign Affairs, December 2010, after visiting the new uranium enriching plant in North Korea

North Korea was high on the agenda of the US-China Summit at the beginning of the year. North Korea is considered in Washington circles as an “imminent threat” especially as a “nuclear rogue”. On the eve of the visit of the Summit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: “We want to see more cooperation dealing with the very thorny problem of North Korea, its nuclear ambitions, its provocative behaviour that is destabilising North-East Asia.” In an interview just three days prior to the Summit President Hu Jintao called for an early resumption of the six-party talks expressing hope that the relevant parties will seize the opportunity to engage in active interaction, to resume the process of dialogue and consultations as soon as possible and ensure that the situation on the peninsula will move forward in a positive direction.

Dr Hecker wrote in the article mentioned above:

North Korea’s centrifuge facilities appear to be more sophisticated than what Iran has shown to international inspectors but it is well-known that Tehran is developing next generation centrifuges. Moreover North Korea has much greater experience in uranium processing and reactor technologies than Iran, raising concerns that such expertise could flow from Pyongyang to Tehran.

Senior US and South Korean officials concluded that the new plant could not have been constructed so rapidly unless there was a sophisticated network of other secret sites and perhaps a fully operating uranium enrichment plan. Glyn Davies, American Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said “there was a clear likelihood that North Korea has built other uranium-enrichment-related facilities in its territory”. American, South Korean and Chinese officials have acknowledged that despite their intense focus on North Korea’s efforts to obtain uranium enrichment technology, they all missed the assembly of the plant at Yongbeon, North Korea’s main nuclear complex.

Senior American officials have stated that they were most concerned that the real intent of showing of the new capacity in November 2010 to a Stanford expert, Siegfried Hecker, a former Director of the Los Almos National Laboratory and two of his colleagues, was to “advertise North Korea’s wares to others”. The overriding concern of the US with regard to North Korea’s nuclear program for some time has been about proliferation rather than about any direct threat to South Korea.

Gary Samore, President Barack Obama’s chief nuclear adviser, soon after the Hecker visit, said for the first time that the North Korean nuclear programme appeared to be much more advanced and efficient than the Iranian programme which is running into problems. He said that the new North Korean centrifuges could be attractive to other nations. He added that a critical element of American strategy must now be “to ensure that the North Koreans don’t sell to Middle East”.

The general assessment is that North Korea no longer relies only on plutonium to make nuclear weapons. Rather, within a few years at most, they will have the ability to make highly enriched uranium and, as Peter Hayes claims, “they will be able to build a ‘multi-generational nuclear weapon state’ that will be handed over to Kim Jong Un, son of the current DPRK leader Kin Jong Il”.

Rodong Sinmun, the North Korean newspaper, reported that nuclear energy development projects will become more active for peaceful purposes in the future quoting the official news agency KCNA. Hecker and his colleagues also reported on an experimental light water reactor (LWR) under construction. Hecker said that while the new facilities appeared primarily aimed at civilian nuclear power, it could be readily converted to highly enriched uranium fuel.

When Robert Gates during his visit to Seoul in early January, expressed qualified openness to negotiations with North Korea, South Korean President Lee reminded him of the need to settle the North Korean nuclear issue before the North celebrates the 100th birth anniversary of its late ‘Great Leader’ Kim Il Sung in April 2012. Gates had said renewed talks with North Korea were possible if the North ceased “dangerous provocations” and took “concrete steps” to meet its obligations. In these rather strong words from Secretary Gates, South Korean leaders found one serious omission—no mention of North’s nuclear programme as a prelude to resuming six-party talks that North Korea has called for “without preconditions”.

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IT is interesting to note that in recent years the nuclear problem in the Korean peninsula is solely linked to the nuclear programme of North Korea. It may therefore be useful to look at the background. North Korea’s surprise admission in early October 2002 to a secret nuclear weapon programme based on uranium enrichment triggered a cascading breakdown of the 1994 Agreed Framework Structure that had kept North Korea’s more advanced plutonium program in limbo. The admission caused considerable embarrassment to the US Administration. The information was made public only on October 16, five days after the Congress voted to authorise military action against Iraq. The Administration had no option except to deny that there was a crisis. The White House was not ready to deal with a second ‘nuclear’ crisis.

The American Administration probably believed that the aggressive policy towards Iraq would send a message of confrontational intimidation to North Korea, another member of the ‘axis of evil’. Pyongyang apparently read the message differently. As long as the US was preparing for a major war in West Asia, US threats to resort to the same kind of coercion of North Korea were far less credible. The North Korean Government probably also concluded that only a credible nuclear weapon progamme could spare North Korea from Iraq’ fate.

This was one of the fascinating ironies of the famous War on Terror. While the Americans went to war against Iraq alleging that it possessed nuclear weapons—an allegation which was false—it could virtually do nothing, at least militarily, against North Korea which admitted it had a nuclear weapons programme.

There was another important factor. The classified Nuclear Posture Review of the USA, details of which appeared in the media in the second week of March 2002, revealed the Pentagon’s ambitious nuclear battle plans, redefined the role of nuclear weapons as fundamental to the US defence policy, placed new emphasis on the utility of nuclear weapons in the US military doctrine and strategy and changed the very notion of deterrence. ‘First use’ and ‘first strike’ were writ large on the agenda of the US. Among the situations listed in the Review where the US would be ready to use nuclear weapons “in the event of surprising developments” was a possible attack on South Korea by North Korea. Here the message was explicit. It was a sharp reminder of the long-standing US nuclear threat to North Korea.

In an editorial “America as Nuclear Rogue”, the New York Times wrote on March 12, 2002:

If another country was planning to develop new nuclear weapons and contemplating pre-emptive strikes against a list of non-nuclear powers, Washington would rightly label that nation a dangerous rogue, for such is the course recommended to President Bush by a new Pentagon paper.

It will be interesting to pose the question whether a nuclear war is more likely or less likely today in the Korean peninsula than at the height of the Cold War. US Army General Edward Meyer said in 1980 while visiting Seoul that escalation to nuclear war is “far simpler here than in Europe where consultations have to be made with fifteen different sovereign countries”. It was presumed that the Soviets were less likely to intervene in a Korean war than one in Europe. A second crucial difference was that unlike in Europe, the adversary in North Korea was not nuclear-armed. By that time North Korea had been subjected to a nuclear threat for a longer period and with greater intensity than any other non-nuclear state.

US nuclear weapons began to be deployed in South Korea from the beginning of 1958. American nuclear threats against North Korea intensified during the Reagan Administration. US Secretary of State Casper Weinberger reiterated in 1986 that the US nuclear umbrella provided added security to the Republic of Korea. The South Korean military had long been integrated into American nuclear operational planning exercises and war plans in Korea.

While North Korea claimed that nuclear weapons were necessary to “bolster defence” US President Obama signed a Joint Statement with South Korean President Lee on June 16 following the 2009 May nuclear test by North Korea reiterating the US commitment to extended deterrence, including the US nuclear umbrella, thus reinforcing the assurance to South Korea.

With the revelations about more advanced and sophisticated nuclear facilities in North Korea, many officials in South Korea are not satisfied with “the extended deterrence” to which the US is committed. The Defence Minister, Kim Tae-Yong, told a Parliamentary Committee that the government would consider asking the US to redeploy tactical nuclear weapons which were withdrawn from the country in 1991. The withdrawal was the result of President George H. Bush’s unilateral disarmament initiative in September 1991 which withdrew tactical weapons from all overseas locations except from half-a-dozen NATO countries. There had been also mounting popular opposition in South Korea against the stationing of American nuclear weapons there.
Washington officials claim some success in moving Beijing into much closer alignment with the US on dealing with North Korea during the Hu visit. North Korea dominated the intimate dinner that Obama held for Hu on January 20. Obama focused on the North’s recently disclosed uranium enrichment plant saying that it was one part of a three-pronged strategy that included the North’s production of plutonium bombs and development of inter-continental ballistic missiles.

But a closer look at the known results of the Summit gives the impression that Beijing succeeded in moving Washington to its position on North Korea. South Korea, which had till now refused to talk to North Korea, has now agreed to high level talks with the North after the joint US-China call. The North had made several offers for talks earlier in January but they were all rebuffed by the South. Again, China had been calling for multilateral talks on the North Korean issues but the US was not ready for it especially because the North had called for six-party negotiations “without preconditions”. At the Summit the two leaders called for measures that would lead to the early resumption of multilateral talks. The agreement by South Korea for talks with the North is clearly one such measure.

Dr Ninan Koshy, formerly a Visiting Fellow, Harvard Law School, USA, is the author of The War on Terror—Reordering the World and Under the Empire—India’s New Foreign Policy.