But that's not all. Now experts are saying North Korea might also fire off a few missiles into the West or Yellow Sea, just to bolster its barrage of rhetorical defiance of the Northern Limit Line set by the United Nations Command after the Korean War. What better way to show that Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il is not only alive and recovered from whatever terrible medical event laid him low in August Ñ but is fully ready to celebrate his 67th birthday on February 16.
It's not at all likely Kim will be seen blowing 68 candles off a cake Ñ Koreans count the day you're born as the first birthday Ñ or bowing before a throng of well-wishers. There's not a chance he'll actually appear in public, waving his hands to prove the reports of a slight paralysis on the left side were all nonsense.
Lately, though, he's been visiting military units, construction sites and factories to give the impression that he's all there and would like nothing better than to accept birthday plaudits to prove he still means business. He could at least appear in a still photograph, against a backdrop of missiles
The few missile shots threatened by the North could serve as a warm-up to a serious assault on South Korea's defense of the Northern Limit Line, which was challenged in bloody shootouts at the height of the spring crabbing season in June 1999 and June 2002.
Eyes-in-the-sky were following the movement by rail of the Taepodong-2 to the launchpad well before it occurred to intelligence analysts that South Korea has a lot more to worry about from North Korea's Scuds and Rodongs. The Taepodong-2 has a range of 6,700 kilometers, but no one imagines North Korea is thinking of firing it off to Alaska or Hawaii, both seen as highly abstract targets.
The only reason to make a show of the Taepodong-2 is to suggest what the North could do "if" it developed a warhead small enough to fix to the tip of a missile, or "if" a maniacal military leader with nothing to lose would nuke an American target in an advanced version of the September 11, 2001, or Pearl Harbor attacks.
The risk of a non-nuclear missile strike on targets much closer to hand is not quite as far-fetched as that of a Taepodong menacing North America. The Scud can travel 700 kilometers, enough to hit just about any target in South Korea, while the Rodong, a souped-up Scud, can go nearly three times the distance. This means it would pose a threat to Japan, including the American marine and air force bases on Okinawa.
One dividend of a missile launch over the Yellow or West Sea would no doubt be to fuel the debate in the South about the conservative outlook of President Lee Myung-bak, who's portrayed as "hardline" despite calling for patience every time North Korea attacks him as a "traitor" and "lackey.".
Lee's already in hot water over the economy and bills he's trying to ram through a fractious National Assembly. Several thousand policemen are highly visible, day and night, marching here and there around central Seoul, pouring from hundreds of police buses. Many of the buses are shiny new models put into service in place of the scores of buses that were trashed by demonstrators in the three months of protest last summer and autumn against the import of U.S. beef products.
Alice in Wonderland, having read stories of North Korean threats to reduce the South "to rubble", might be forgiven for thinking the show of force had something to do with the North Korean threat, which has nothing to do with anything on the streets of Seoul. The real imminent fear, as far as the government is concerned, is that activists, led by leftist labor unions and political groupings, will go on the rampage again. This time to block passage of the government program, including a free-trade agreement with the U.S. and deregulation of restraints on the chaebol (conglomerates) to expand their empires, notably into banking.
The ultimate show of force, the real attention-getter, would be another nuclear test. U.S. analysts dismissed the first test, on October 9, 2006, as almost as big a failure as the launch of Taepodong-2. The underground blast was far smaller than anticipated and may well have been a relative failure Ñ evidence the North was not, as the Americans have been insisting, a nuclear power at all.
Now, however, no one's quite sure. Leon Panetta, who's about to become director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, hinted that perhaps the U.S. might end up accepting North Korea as a member of the nuclear club after all. He remarked at a confirmation hearing that "We know North Korea detonated a nuclear weapon" but "we don't know whether Kim Jong-Il is prepared to give up that nuclear capability once and for all".
It was easy for Panetta to list North Korea as a high-priority concern, but it may be a lot more difficult for him to be clear about what to do. Nowhere in his background as a politician and Washington insider is there anything to suggest a day's experience in foreign affairs, except possibly during the presidency of Bill Clinton. It was presumably during this time that he got a little acquainted with North Korea while Clinton's people were wrapping up the failed Geneva framework agreement in October 1994 Ñ three months after he became Clinton's chief of staff.
"Koreans are following Panetta's remarks very carefully," said Kim Sung-hak, a foreign affairs analyst at Hanyang University who is conducting research on Kim Jong-Il's nuclear program. "Recognition of North Korea as a nuclear state would change the nuclear map of Northeast Asia. We will have to concede and give more to North Korea in order to weaken or dismantle North Korea's nuclear status."
President Lee will learn much more about the latest thinking in Washington when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton drops by in two weeks on the third stop of a whirlwind tour that will take her from Japan to Indonesia, then here and on to Beijing. Clinton, of course, knows Panetta very well from her days as First Lady, and she and her husband may have had something to do with his appointment as an unlikely choice to run the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
It's safe to assume she'll come up with the usual platitudes about the need to get on with six-party talks and get North Korea to give up its nukes. She'll certainly endorse the US-Korean alliance, as did President Barack Obama in a telephone chat the other day with President Lee, and she'll talk up the need for North Korea to call off the rhetoric and stop upsetting everyone with intimations of a missile if not a nuclear strike.
Neither Clinton nor Panetta nor Obama nor Lee, however, may have the last word. That may be up to Kim Jong-Il if he decides the timing is all too perfect, between his birthday and Clinton's visit, to press the button on a few missiles Ñ all a prelude to scaring everybody into thinking, next time we may explode the Big One, the bad dream from which Alice would hope to wake up just in time.
