Year of the rooster — North Korea crows nukes!
UNITED NATIONS — The Rooster in Pyongyang has crowed that it has nuclear weapons! What an inauspicious start to the year of the Rooster — traditionally known to herald a new dawn. But this provocative admission by the North Koreans that they possess nuclear weapons, evokes an eerie sense of diplomatic déjà vu. We have heard this claim before albeit not with the total specificity.
Now look at the timing. North Korea’s self proclaimed “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il felt threatened by being placed in President Bush’s Axis of Evil in 2002. Recent statements by Secretary of State Condi Rice labeling the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) “an outpost of tyranny” did not lessen his paranoia. Pyongyang has also pulled out from multilateral talks aimed at resolving the long-simmering nuclear crisis.
During last year’s UN General Assembly North Korean delegate Choe Su Hon told the assembled delegates, “The nuclear deterrent of the DPRK constitutes a legitimate self-defensive means to counter ever-growing US nuclear threat and aggression against the DPRK and reliably defend sovereignty, peace and security of the country…if the US renounces practically its hostile policy on the DPRK including the creation of nuclear threats, the DPRK also is willing to scrap its nuclear deterrent accordingly.” This statement was made on 27 September.
Naturally suspicions and propaganda claims by Pyongyang have to be sorted out from circumstantial evidence and actual capabilities. Given that North Korea’s hermetically closed society is oft-described as an intelligence black hole, who really knows what is going on the communist Kingdom of Kim Jong-il?
A little background to this percolating crisis. Already in the early 1990’s the North Koreans were working on nuclear weapons at the notorious Yongbyon facility. This issue came to a serious confrontation in the UN Security Council when American Ambassador Madeleine Albright painted herself into a diplomatic corner by trying to pass a tepid resolution which the DPPK deemed an act of war. Given the lack of support from the People’s Republic of China, the U.S. wisely withdrew the draft resolution.
Then in 1994 the Clinton Administration’s myopic diplomatic deal with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was supposed to have stopped this proliferation, the Framework Agreement actually placed a reckless degree of trust in a rogue regime. The deal proved classic style over substance diplomacy which has come back to haunt us.
By reopening the Yongbyon complex in October 2002, Pyongyang now has the opportunity to produce additional plutonium to build a few additional nuclear devices. North Korea equally deploys a moderately effective medium range missile capability which could carry warheads to regional targets — most especially Japan.
The original standoff between Washington and Pyongyang in the early stages of the Bush Administration soon evolved into a multilateral diplomatic formula in which the U.S., South Korea, Japan, Russia and People’s China have held a series of discussions with North Korea aimed at defusing the nuclear issue. Pyongyang provocatively holds its nuclear trump card for a political price.
The Korean peninsula forms the vortex of competing , coinciding, and often conflicting power interests among China, Japan, Russia, and the USA. Once again, the powers are being pulled into the geopolitical vortex over North Korea’s predictable unpredictability.
Significantly the regional powers share an interest in not having a bellicose and isolated regime in North Korea playing with the geopolitical balance of power. Moreover, having Pyongyang’s erstwhile comrades in Moscow and Beijing pressuring for non-proliferation would seem makes a better case than Washington alone going at loggerheads with Pyongyang and demanding nuclear disarmament.
A DPRK diplomat at the UN demands that the USA establish bilateral talks with North Korea to resolve the crisis. Though some pundits advise one-on-one negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang, this risky strategy could likely falter over a plethora of political issues. Then what? The U.S. gets blamed for a rise in regional tensions. Thus the six party disarmament talks spread the political risk for all the neighboring states, and thus offer a predictable diplomatic formula for crisis management.
Prof. Bradley Martin speaking at the prestigious Korea Society in New York on the verge of this renewed crisis, advised that despite the implacable hostility between the Bush Administration and Kim Jong-il, that President George W. Bush, like Richard Nixon’s historic opening to Mainland China, is uniquely poised to engineer a political overture to North Korea. Possible, but somehow I think not probable.
The DPRK’s declaration that they “had manufactured nukes for self-defense” came on the eve of birthday celebrations for “Dear Leader” General Kim Jong-il (16 February) which also could have a role in the timing. Whether the Year of the Rooster will herald a new start or a new crisis remains to be seen.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense
issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.  |
