Informed Speculation

Writing in the Times of London, Gerard Baker explains why North Korea’s nuclear status is so much worse than that of those who preceded it:

Stripped of the grandiose claims by Kim’s minions, the objective scientific evidence for a nuclear explosion is sketchy. The explosive yield, according to military analysts, was something less than a kiloton. A plutonium device such as that first used by the US in 1945 produces a yield in the range of 20 kilotons. Some warheads in the US nuclear arsenal now can deliver an impact about 1,000 times that of Hiroshima. Remember too that in July, the Koreans launched an “ intercontinental” ballistic missile that fell into the sea about a minute into its flight and you have a sense of the truly exiguous scale of the country’s capabilities. If the Soviet Union was memorably nicknamed Upper Volta with Rockets, it’s probably fair to think of North Korea as Togo with a Chemistry Set. So why worry? Here’s why. Unlike all previous nuclear nativities, North Korea’s efforts this week have truly propelled the world into a new and much more dangerous age. There’s no good strategic reason for Pyongyang even to claim to have a nuclear weapon, as China, Israel, Pakistan and India had.

It will be the first nuclear power to be headed by a crazed monomaniac who boasts of his commercial interest in shipping nuclear weapons to terrorist groups. The sheer unpredictability of North Korea terrifies everyone in its neighbourhood in a way that none of those other countries ever did. Its actions this week will almost certainly escalate into a nuclear arms race.

In the process this accelerated proliferation will prompt the most important change in US military posture since the advent of the Bomb. A senior administration official told me this week that with nuclear powers in North East Asia and, heaven forbid, in Iran, the nuclear threshold on which the US has operated for the past 50 years will be lowered. Confronted with the growing probability of nuclear attack, the US will reorient its own military nuclear capabilities towards a more tactical stance. The currently sky-high threshold for a US nuclear attack will be lowered sharply to take account of the new threats. That in itself will prompt a beggar-my-neighbour downward global shift in the conditions under which the bomb might be used and an upward shift in the probability of nuclear strikes.

Baker deflects blame from the U.S.:

The problem with North Korea has not been an insufficiency of multilateralist diplomacy in the past ten years but an overabundance. Beginning in 1994, the Clinton Administration started the US down a course of an engagement with Pyongyang that was all carrots and no sticks. Every time the North Koreans thumbed their noses at the US and its allies, they were punished with — what? Sharp intakes of breath and shakes of the head.

Not only was the US unwilling to make good on its threats, but effective multilateral action also required serious efforts by other countries with real leverage over North Korea to do something. But for the past six years China has been playing a dangerous double game. It never wanted North Korea to become a nuclear power but it was quite happy that its ally kept the US, Japan and South Korea off balance with its burgeoning ambitions.

The same story of hand-wringing futility has been played out with Iran. Russia and China have both placed short-term diplomatic and commercial gain over long-term stability. The Europeans were, well, European.

As for Iraq, I don’t recall the Russians, Chinese or Europeans urging the US to divert its regime-changing attentions to North Korea. They wanted the US to perform the same foot-dragging, futile, pointless dance with Baghdad that they were pursuing over Pyongyang. Would that have been any better? Now, belatedly, the talk is of tough UN sanctions against Iran and North Korea. But it is too late. Out of a combination of fear, opportunism and cynicism, the world’s so-called powers have ridden a tiger for the past decade. Now the tiger has turned on them. Blaming America may make them feel better about it. It won’t change the bleak and terrifying new reality.

Fred Kaplan of Slate is having none of it: it’s George W. Bush who’s at fault, not Kim Jong Il:

In the spring of 1994, barely a year into Bill Clinton’s presidency, the North Koreans announced that they were about to remove the fuel rods from their nuclear reactor (as a first step to reprocessing them into plutonium), cancel their commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (which they had signed in 1985), and expel the international weapons inspectors (who had been guarding the rods under the treaty’s authority).

Did Clinton “reward” them for doing these things, as McCain claims? Far from it. Not only did he push the U.N. Security Council to consider sanctions, he also ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draw up plans to send 50,000 additional troops to South Korea—bolstering the 37,000 already there—along with more than 400 combat jets, 50 ships, and several battalions of Apache helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles, multiple-launch rockets, and Patriot air-defense missiles. He also sent in an advance team of 250 soldiers to set up logistical headquarters for the influx of troops and gear.

He sent an explicit signal that removing the fuel rods would cross a “red line.” Several of his former aides insist that if North Korea had crossed that line, he would have launched an airstrike on the Yongbyon reactor, even knowing that it might lead to war.

At the same time, Clinton set up a diplomatic backchannel, sending former President Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang for direct talks with Kim Il-Sung, then North Korea’s dictator and the father of its present “dear leader,” Kim Jong-il. (The official Washington line held that Carter made the trip on his own, but a recent memoir by three former U.S. officials, Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis, acknowledges that Clinton asked him to go.)

This combination of sticks and carrots led Kim Il-Sung to call off his threats—the fuel rods weren’t removed, the inspectors weren’t kicked out—and, a few months later, to the signing of the Agreed Framework.

McCain called the accord a “failure.” This appraisal isn’t quite as dead wrong as his claim that Clinton did nothing but toss Kim flowers. But it’s highly misleading, to say the least.

The Agreed Framework of Oct. 21, 1994—a document that many cite but almost nobody seems to read—actually bottled up North Korea’s nuclear program for eight years. Under its terms, Pyongyang kept the fuel rods locked up and kept the international inspectors on-site. In exchange, a multinational consortium, led by the United States and South Korea, was to provide North Korea with two light-water reactors to generate electricity. Gradually, Washington and Pyongyang were to establish diplomatic and trade relations. In an annex to the accord, drafted by the consortium and signed by all parties in June 1995, it was agreed that the nuclear fuel from the light-water reactors would be exported to a third country for recycling. (This, by the way, is what President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin recently proposed that Iran do with its nuclear fuel.)

The accord fell apart, but not for the reasons that McCain and others have suggested. First, the U.S.-led consortium never provided the light-water reactors. (So much for the wild claims I’ve heard lately that North Korea got the bomb through Clinton-supplied technology.) Congress never authorized the money; the South Koreans, who were led by a harder-line government than the one in power now, scuttled the deal after a North Korean spy submarine washed up on their shores.

Second, when President George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, he made it clear, right off, that the Agreed Framework was dead and that he had no interest in further talks with the North Korean regime; his view was that you don’t negotiate with evil, you defeat it or wait for it to crumble.

Third, a few months into Bush’s term, evidence mounted that the North Koreans had been … not quite violating the Agreed Framework but certainly maneuvering around it. Confronted by U.S. intelligence data in October 2002, Pyongyang officials admitted that they’d been enriching uranium—an alternative route (though much slower than plutonium) to getting a bomb.

It should be noted that the bomb that the North Koreans set off on Sunday was apparently a plutonium bomb, not a uranium bomb. In other words, it was a bomb made entirely in Bush’s time, not at all in Clinton’s.

After the disclosure about the uranium, Bush hardened his stance against negotiations. The North Koreans tried to replay the events of 1994. They threatened to unlock the fuel rods, expel the inspectors, and quit the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Meanwhile, through back channels (former ambassadors Bill Richardson and Donald Gregg), they signaled a willingness to back off if the Agreed Framework was resuscitated. Bush wasn’t interested in playing the game. Everything fell apart.

At the end of 2002, when the North Koreans really did unlock the rods and kick out the inspectors—when they crossed what Clinton had called the “red line”—Bush didn’t take military action, he didn’t call for sanctions, nor did he try diplomacy. It’s Bush, not Clinton, who did nothing.

Kaplan’s is a strange version, positing a North Korean leader who, through no fault of his own, was tricked by changing U.S. policies into taking this gravely dangerous step. He does provide a necessary corrective to those who say Clinton did nothing, but he does so by taking the equally ludicrous path of saying Bush did nothing.

The truth is that North Korea did the diplomatic dance when it suited them, and rattled the sabre when that suited them.  Had Clinton succeeded, Kim wouldn’t have the bomb; same goes for Bush.  The question is what do we do about it now, and the answer appears to be: very little.  Japan has been tough, but the UN is preparing to pass, today or tomorrow, a toothless slap on the wrist that will certainly do nothing to change Kim’s mind.

More action is needed…and I’m going to once again stress the need for a new multilateral approach (and organization, if need be) devoted to, not just the North Korean problem, but the whole issue of the threat of nuclear terror…