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A Nuclear Reaction to North Korea

by Ted Galen Carpenter

December 12, 2002

Ted Galen Carpenter is vice-president for defence and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

If the announcement by North Korea in October that it was pursuing a uranium enrichment programme left any doubt that the country is the ultimate rogue state, there can be none now. This week, a North Korean freighter carrying scud missiles was intercepted on route to Yemen. On Thursday, news emerged that Pyongyang has threatened to reactivate the plutonium reactor that was explicitly mothballed under the 1994 framework agreement to freeze the country's nuclear programme.

There is widespread and justifiable anger at North Korea's perfidy. But anger does nothing to solve the problem of what to do now. Unfortunately, none of the available options is particularly desirable.

One option is to attempt to salvage the 1994 framework agreement and try to get North Korea to make a new commitment to renounce nuclear weapons. There are several problems with that approach, however. North Korea has already signed a solemn agreement to freeze its nuclear programme and has received significant inducements to do so. Giving Pyongyang more rewards in the hope that it will live up to an agreement it has already violated would seem to be an extraordinarily naive strategy.

The second option is the opposite of the first. Instead of proposing to increase the bribe to North Korea, the strategy would be to threaten military action if it did not immediately abandon its nuclear programme and turn over any weapons it had produced. Indeed, if one takes seriously the "pre-emptive self defence" provisions of the new national security strategy the Bush administration promulgated in September, Washington should already be threatening Pyongyang with dire consequences. After all, the US is prepared to go to war against Iraq because of the mere possibility that Iraq might some day do what North Korea has already done.

But there are compelling reasons for not threatening North Korea. Even the most hawkish foreign policy experts seem to realise that adopting that course could easily engulf the Korean peninsula in war - possibly with nuclear implications. US intelligence sources believe that Pyongyang may already have built one or two nuclear weapons at the time it agreed to freeze its programme. And Beijing reputedly believes that the North may have four or five such weapons.

If the US launched pre-emptive military strikes against North Korea's nuclear installations, there would be a serious risk that mushroom clouds could sprout above Seoul and Tokyo. It is not coincidental that both South Korea and Japan are strongly opposed to a confrontational strategy by the US. Likewise, it is revealing that, in contrast to 1993 and 1994, when hawks inside and outside the Clinton administration hinted darkly about the possibility of pre-emptive strikes, almost no one recommends that course today.

A third option is to try to organise a multilateral regime of economic sanctions to put pressure on Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Washington's apparently successful effort to persuade its allies to join the US in suspending fuel oil shipments to the North may be the initial stage in such a strategy. But that approach has limited prospects for success. Trying to isolate further one of the most economically isolated countries is a little like threatening to deprive a monk of worldly pleasures.

There is another possibility. North Korea's motives for pursuing a nuclear-weapons capability cannot be determined with certainty. But one likely explanation is that Pyongyang believes that it could then intimidate its non-nuclear neighbours - primarily Japan and South Korea - into making political and economic concessions. Washington ought to convey the message that Pyongyang is mistaken if it assumes that it will have a nuclear monopoly in north-east Asia.

Pyongyang is counting on the US to prevent Japan and South Korea from even considering the option of going nuclear. US officials should inform North Korea that, if it insists on gatecrashing the global nuclear weapons club, Washington will urge Tokyo and Seoul to make their own decisions about whether to acquire strategic deterrents. That would come as an unpleasant surprise to North Korea.

The prospect of additional nuclear weapons proliferation in north-east Asia is obviously not an ideal outcome. But offsetting the North's illicit advantage may be the best of a set of bad options. The one chance of getting the North to abandon its current course is if it becomes clear that Pyongyang may have to deal with nuclear neighbours.

If the US does not adopt that approach, it is almost certain to be stuck with the responsibility of shielding non-nuclear allies from a volatile, nuclear-armed North Korea. More proliferation may be a troubling outcome but it beats that nightmare scenario.

This article originally appeared in The Financial Times on December 12, 2002.