A credible threat? Or just trademark North Korean bluster? By all accounts, Pyongyang possesses neither nuclear warheads nor rockets to carry them over the Pacific. But its missile program, already a supplier to rogue states like Iran and Syria, is on the fast track. And last year U.S. spy satellites spotted an excavation in the North that bears the markings of a nuclear facility in the making. Washington wants to inspect the site to verify that Pyongyang’s freeze still holds. The North calls the request an insult and demands $300 million in ““compensation’’ for a one-time look.
The row topped the agenda when U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen visited Japan and South Korea for an annual security review last week. In Tokyo, Cohen pointedly suggested that Pyongyang’s rocket test fully justified Washington’s promise to help Japan develop a missile defense system. But he also signaled that Washington wants a broader dialogue, not a standoff, with Pyongyang. ““What we hope to do is dissuade the North Koreans from engaging in the type of conduct which contributes to destabilization,’’ he said.
Reasoning with the world’s last Stalinist holdout is always a grueling exercise. Current negotiations, like the latest round of U.S.-North Korea talks underway this week in Geneva, are proving particularly difficult because U.S. allies differ on strategy. As anti-Pyongyang rhetoric grows more shrill by the day in Washington, Tokyo is bracing for a new Korean crisis. Seoul, by contrast, has abandoned years of strident anti-communism in favor of a radically softer approach in its dealings across the 38th parallel. South Korea now urges the United States to broaden ties with the North as a way to preserve the 1994 deal. ““Pyongyang’s aim is a U.S. guarantee not to undermine its system,’’ says Yu Suk Ryul, a veteran North Korea watcher at Seoul’s Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security. ““It’s the only scenario for the North’s survival.''
The roots of this standoff go back nearly a decade, when the fall of the Soviet Union deprived North Korea of a key ally and aid supplier. While Pyongyang’s neighboring enemies in South Korea and Japan had reached the upper ranks of global economic power, North Korea had only its uncertain ties with China and an imploding domestic economy to sustain it. Iraq’s strategy after its loss in the gulf war suggested a way to survive: like Saddam’s regime, Pyongyang reasoned, it could stay relevant by threatening to go nuclear. ““The lesson of the gulf war,’’ says Yonsei University political scientist Lee Chung Min, ““is that you need not troops but weapons of mass destruction.’’ In 1992 the International Atomic Energy Agency caught Pyongyang as it tried to divert reprocessed plutonium from research reactors in Yongbyon–clear evidence of a secret nuclear program.
The 1994 deal at least defused the crisis. Washington promised Pyongyang two light-water nuclear reactors valued at $5.1 billion plus 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil a year in exchange for shutting down Yongbyon. Initially, some Korea watchers said the details didn’t matter much; they assumed that the North would crumble before the reactors were built. Yet so far Kim Jong Il’s regime has defied predictions of its demise amid a crippling famine and economic collapse. A tit-for-tat escalation began last year, when Pyongyang tested its missile and was caught digging the suspicious underground facility. In response, the U.S. Congress vowed to withhold $20 million budgeted for fuel oil in 1999 until Pyongyang permits inspections and halts its missile program.
Japan, too, is taking a hard line with the North. After the August missile launch, Tokyo temporarily suspended aid to Pyongyang, stepped up cooperation with Washington on a theater missile defense system and announced plans to launch spy satellites positioned to look down on North Korea. Japan’s largest newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, last week called on the government to do even more to ““reinforce its national defenses.’’ Observers in Tokyo speculate that Pyongyang might launch another Taepodong missile over Japan on Feb. 16, Kim Jong Il’s birthday.
All the same, South Korea’s President Kim Dae Jung hopes to tame the North with carrots, not sticks. His ““sunshine policy’’ promotes tourism, trade and investment across the 38th parallel even as it ignores periodic infiltrations by North Korean submarines, commandos and an attack boat. In Washington recently, Kim asked the Clinton administration to lift trade sanctions on the North and begin talks aimed at normalizing diplomatic relations. Next week a five-member South Korean legislative delegation will visit Washington to advocate ““sunshine’’ on Capitol Hill. Lawmaker Yang Sung Chul hopes to persuade his American counterparts not to treat North Korea like the Iraq of East Asia. ““We need war deterrence,’’ he told NEWSWEEK, ““not pre-emptive strikes.''
Despite all the bluster, policymakers in Seoul believe, Pyongyang gains most by keeping its end of the 1994 bargain. Washington, too, seems content to see if sunshine works. Yet the generals are plotting contingencies. Meeting with Cohen last week in Seoul, senior South Korean commanders outlined plans for a new psychological-warfare unit to be established in case of conflict. One of its tasks: prepare leaflets that explain democracy to North Koreans–who, of course, have been indoctrinated with propaganda like Pyongyang’s new missile posters. There’s no limit to South Korea’s fond hopes.
