Living with the unthinkable: how to Coexist with a Nuclear North Korea

THERE IS A pervasive desire in the United States and throughout East Asia to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear-armed power, for the prospect of Kim Jong-il's bizarre and unpredictable regime having such a capability is profoundly disturbing. Two factions have emerged in the United States about how to deal with the crisis, and they embrace sharply different strategies. Yet they share an important underlying assumption: that North Korea is using its nuclear program merely as a negotiating ploy, and that Pyongyang can eventually be induced to give up that program.

One group thinks that Washington's top policy objective should be to entice Pyongyang to return to the 1994 Agreed Framework, under which the North Koreans agreed to freeze their nuclear program in exchange for fuel oil shipments and Western assistance in constructing proliferation resistant lightwater reactors for power generation. These advocates of dialogue think the United States should meet North Korea's demand for a non-aggression pact and provide other concessions to resolve the nuclear crisis. Individuals as politically diverse as former President Jimmy Carter, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) have issued impassioned calls for a strategy of dialogue and concessions. Those who advocate that strategy ignore an important point, however: The United States has negotiated with North Korea before, but each understanding or formal agreement seems merely to pave the way for a new round of cheating and a new crisis.

The Bush Administration and most conservatives form the competing faction, which is decidedly more skeptical about the efficacy of offering concessions to Pyongyang. Moreover, it is apparent that the administration has no interest in merely restoring the Agreed Framework. Washington's goal is an agreement that would include comprehensive "on demand" inspections of all possible nuclear weapons sites. Indeed, it was that demand that contributed to an impasse in the six-party talks (involving Japan, South Korea, China, Russia, the United States and North Korea) in August.

The administration's approach combines a willingness to engage in multilateral talks with a determination to tighten the screws economically. One manifestation of the latter component is the Proliferation Security Initiative, which enlists the support of allies to interdict North Korea's trade in ballistic missiles, nuclear technology, illegal drugs and other contraband. The core of Washington's strategy is to forge a united diplomatic and economic front with the nations of East Asia to pressure North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.

But if the advocates of negotiations and concessions are naive, proponents of diplomatic pressure and economic coercion may not be much more realistic. It is not at all clear that even comprehensive economic sanctions would produce the desired policy changes. UNICEF has concluded that, because North Korea is already so desperately poor, economic sanctions would have a slight impact. Trying to further isolate one of the world's most economically isolated countries is a little like threatening to deprive a monk of worldly pleasures. Tightening economic sanctions may cause additional suffering among North Korea's destitute masses, but such an approach is unlikely to alter the regime's behavior on the nuclear issue.

Ultimately, the competing strategies of dialogue and economic/diplomatic pressure are based on the same assumption: that the right policy mix will cause the North to give up its nuclear ambitions. But what if that assumption is wrong? CIA director George Tenet concedes that North Korea may believe there is no contradiction between continuing to pursue a nuclear weapons program and seeking a "normal relationship" with the United States--a relationship that would entail substantial concessions from Washington. "Kim Jong-il's attempts to parlay the North's nuclear program into political leverage suggest he is trying to negotiate a fundamentally different relationship with Washington, one that implicitly tolerates the North's nuclear weapons program", Tenet concludes. (1) Robert Madsen, a fellow at Stanford University's Asia/Pacific Research Center is even more skeptical of the conventional wisdom that North Korea is using the nuclear program solely as a bargaining chip. As he argued in the Financial Times,

   The problem with this analysis is that
   Pyongyang probably does not intend to trade
   its nuclear weapons for foreign concessions.
   To the contrary, an examination of North
   Korea's national interests suggests the acquisition
   of a sizeable nuclear arsenal is a perfectly
   rational objective.

Given the way the United States has treated non-nuclear adversaries such as Serbia and Iraq, such a conclusion by North Korean leaders would not be all that surprising.

Pyongyang's long-standing pattern of making agreements to remain non-nuclear and then systematically violating those agreements also casts doubt on the bargaining chip thesis. In addition to violating the 1994 Agreed Framework, the North violated its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (which Pyongyang joined in 1985) and the 1991 joint declaration with South Korea to keep the peninsula non-nuclear. Such repeated cheating raises a very disturbing possibility: Perhaps North Korea is determined to become a nuclear power and has engaged in diplomatic obfuscation to confuse or lull its adversaries. If that is the case, the United States and the countries of East Asia may have to deal with the reality of a nuclear-armed North Korea.

Pre-emption vs. Containment

THE POLICY options available to forestall this dangerous development are all rather unpleasant, but one is decidedly worse and significantly more frightening than the others: the possibility that the United States might use military force to prevent North Korea from building its nuclear arsenal. Hawks in the American foreign policy community are already broaching that possibility. Citing Israel's raid on Iraq's Osirak reactor, Richard Perle, the influential former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, warns that no one can "exclude the kind of surgical strike we saw in 1981." Moreover, in what should sound alarm bells in Tokyo and Seoul, he makes it clear that America's allies should not expect to exercise a veto over that decision. (2)

Many advocates of pre-emptive military action are confident that such a course would not trigger a major war in East Asia. Those who embrace that optimistic scenario fail to explain why the North Korean elite would assume that a passive response to an American pre-emptive strike would enhance the prospects for regime survival. Given the way the United States treated Iraq, the North Koreans would more likely conclude that an attack on the country's nuclear installations would be merely a prelude to a larger military offensive to achieve regime change. The fact that some political allies of the Bush Administration openly talk about pushing regime change certainly does not reassure Pyongyang on that score.

Using military force to eradicate North Korea's nuclear program would be a high-risk venture that could easily engulf the Korean Peninsula in a major war. Indeed, it could be a war with nuclear implications. North Korea boasts that it already possesses some nuclear weapons, and U.S. intelligence sources have long believed that Pyongyang already may have built one or two weapons by the time it agreed to freeze its program in 1994. An assessment by China's intelligence agency is even more alarming. Beijing reportedly believes the North may have four or five such weapons. Worse still, press reports contend that U.S. officials have told their Japanese counterparts that North Korea is working to develop "several" nuclear warheads that can be loaded onto ballistic missiles. North Korea itself has announced that it has completed reprocessing the spent fuel rods in the Yongbyon reactor and is now building more nuclear weapons. If true, Pyongyang will soon have a deployable arsenal, not merely one or two crude nuclear devices.

A pre-emptive strike is not the answer. The nuclear variable in the pre-emption equation is too uncertain to warrant the risk for at least this simple reason: It is not at all certain that the United States has identified all of the installations, much less that it could successfully eradicate them. North Korea has had years to build installations deep underground and to disperse any weapons it has built.

It is unlikely that North Korea would passively accept the blow against its sovereignty that even a surgical strike against the Yongbyon reactor complex or other targets would entail. At the very least, Washington would have to expect terrorist retaliation by North Korean operatives against U.S. targets overseas and, possibly, in the homeland itself. North Korea might even retaliate by launching full-scale military operations against South Korea--a development that would put U.S. forces stationed in that country in immediate danger. Indeed, in a worst-case scenario, mushroom clouds could blossom above Seoul and Tokyo--or above U.S. bases in South Korea or Okinawa.

It is conceivable, of course, that Kim Jong-il's regime would fulminate about an Osirak-like strike but not escalate the crisis to full-scale war. Or perhaps North Korea's military would unravel under stress and not be able to mount a coherent offensive. But that is not the way to bet. Even a U.S. military buildup in the region designed to intimidate Pyongyang could trigger a catastrophe. "Bold Sentinel"--a war game organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in May 2003, featuring a mock National Security Council comprised of individuals who held senior policy positions in previous administrations--reached the conclusion that North Korea would likely launch a pre-emptive strike in response to such a buildup. This assessment is shared by a senior North Korean defector, Cho Myung-chul, who estimates the chances of general war to be 80 percent in response to even a limited strike on Yongbyon.

Aside from its possible nuclear (and chemical and biological) weapons, Pyongyang possesses other impressive capabilities. In addition to its army of more than a million soldiers, North Korea deploys up to 600 Scud missiles and additional longer-range Nodong missiles. The Seoul-Inchon metropolitan area (which hosts roughly half of South Korea's population) is less than forty miles from the DMZ. Pyongyang is thought to be capable of firing between 300,000 and 500,000 artillery shells an hour into Seoul in the event of war. Even if the North were ultimately defeated, which would be almost inevitable, the destruction to South Korea would be horrific. Estimates of the number of likely casualties from a full-scale North Korean attack range from 100,000 to more than one million. That fact alone should take the military option off the table, yet the Bush Administration has publicly--and, what is worse, privately--declined to do so.

INSTEAD OF placing faith in the efficacy of negotiations with a country that has violated every agreement it has ever signed on the nuclear issue or considering the dangerous option of pre-emptive war, the United States needs a strategy to deal with the prospect of North Korea's emergence as a nuclear power. Washington should pursue a two-pronged strategy, since there are two serious problems that must be addressed. One problem is the possibility that Pyongyang might be aiming to become a regional nuclear power with a significant arsenal that could pose a threat to its neighbors and, ultimately, to the American homeland. The latter is not an immediate danger, but a North Korean capability to do so over the longer-term is a problem Washington must anticipate.

Countering the threat of a "bolt out of the blue" attack on the United States is relatively straightforward. America retains the largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal in the world, as well as a decisive edge in all conventional military capabilities. The North Korean regime surely knows (although it might behoove the administration to make the point explicitly) that any attack on American soil would mean the obliteration of the regime. The United States successfully deterred a succession of aggressive and odious Soviet leaders from using nuclear weapons, and it did the same thing with a nuclear-armed China under Mao Zedong. It is therefore highly probable that Kim Jong-il's North Korea, which would possess a much smaller nuclear arsenal than either the Soviet Union and China, can be deterred as well. As an insurance policy to protect the American population in the highly unlikely event that deterrence fails, and for other reasons besides, Washington should continue developing a shield against ballistic missiles.

To counter North Korea's possible threat to East Asia, Washington should convey the message that Pyongyang would be making a serious miscalculation by assuming it will possess a nuclear monopoly in northeast Asia. North Korea's rulers are counting on the United States to prevent Japan and South Korea from even considering the option of going nuclear. American officials should inform Pyongyang that, if the North insists on joining the global nuclear weapons club, Washington will urge Tokyo and Seoul to re-evaluate their earlier decisions to decline to acquire strategic nuclear deterrents. Even the possibility that South Korea and Japan might do so would come as an extremely unpleasant wakeup call to North Korea.

The United States does not need to press Tokyo and Seoul to go nuclear. It is sufficient if Washington informs those governments that the United States would not object to them developing nuclear weapons. That by itself would be a major change in U.S. policy. In addition, Washington needs to let Seoul and Tokyo know that the United States intends to withdraw its forces from South Korea and Japan. In an environment with a nuclear-armed North Korea, those forward-deployed forces are not military assets; they are nuclear hostages.

Faced with a dangerous neighbor possessing nuclear capabilities and a more limited U.S. military commitment to the region, Japan or South Korea (or perhaps both countries) might well decide to build a nuclear deterrent. The prospect of additional nuclear proliferation in northeast Asia is obviously not an ideal outcome. But offsetting the North's illicit advantage may be the best of a set of bad options. Simply trying to renegotiate the 1994 Agreed Framework is unlikely to induce North Korea to return to non-nuclear status. Diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions are not likely to achieve that goal either. And pre-emptive military strikes are too dangerous.

The one chance to get the North to abandon its current course is for Washington and its allies to make clear to Pyongyang that it may have to deal with nuclear neighbors (translation: the North would no longer be able to intimidate them in the same strategically advantageous way). Indeed, Pyongyang could face the prospect of confronting more prosperous adversaries possessing a greater capacity to build larger and more sophisticated nuclear arsenals than North Korea could hope to do. The North may conclude that ending its cheating strategy and keeping the region non-nuclear would be a more productive approach. Even if Pyongyang does not do so, a nuclear balance of power--a MAD for northeast Asia--would likely emerge instead of a North Korean nuclear monopoly.

Additionally, the prospect of a nuclear-armed Japan is the one factor that could galvanize Beijing to put serious diplomatic and economic pressure on Pyongyang to relinquish its nuclear ambitions. Charles Krautharnmer has expressed this thesis starkly in the Washington Post:

   We should go to the Chinese and tell them
   plainly that if they do not join us in squeezing
   North Korea and thus stopping its march to
   go nuclear, we will endorse any Japanese
   attempt to create a nuclear deterrent of its
   own. Even better, we would sympathetically
   regard any request by Japan to acquire
   American nuclear missiles as an immediate
   and interim deterrent. If our nightmare is a
   nuclear North Korea, China's is a nuclear
   Japan. It's time to share the nightmares.

Even if one does not embrace Krauthammer's approach, the reality is that, if the United States blocks the emergence of a northeast Asian nuclear balance, it may well 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.

But some of the most hawkish members of the U.S. foreign policy community are terrified at the prospect of America's democratic allies in East Asia building nuclear deterrents. Neoconservative activists Robert Kagan and William Kristol, writing in the Weekly Standard, expressed horror about the possibility of such proliferation: "The possibility that Japan, and perhaps even Taiwan, might respond to North Korea's actions by producing their own nuclear weapons, thus spurring an East Asian nuclear arms race ... is something that should send chills up the spine of any sensible American strategist." This attitude misconstrues the problem. The real threat to East Asia is if an aggressive and erratic North Korean regime gets nukes. Nuclear arsenals in the hands of stable, democratic, status quo powers such as Japan and South Korea do not threaten the peace of the region. Kagan and Kristol, and other likeminded Americans, embrace a moral equivalency between a potential aggressor and its potential victims.

The other component of the North Korean nuclear problem is even more troubling. The United States and North Korea's neighbors can probably learn to live with Pyongyang's possession of a small nuclear arsenal. What the United States cannot tolerate is North Korea's becoming the global distributor of nuclear technology, potentially selling a nuclear weapon or fissile material to Al-Qaeda or other anti-American terrorist organizations. Pyongyang has shown a willingness to sell anything that will raise revenue for the financially hard-pressed regime. North Korea earned $560 million in 2001 alone in missile sales--including sales to some of the most virulently anti-American regimes (3)--while, in the spring of 2003, evidence emerged of extensive North Korean involvement in the heroin trade. (4) As Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage remarked before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early-February 2003, "the arms race in North Korea pales next to the possibility ... that she would pass on fissile material and other nuclear technology to either transnational actors or to rogue states."

Preventing that development, which is clearly the goal of the Proliferation Security Initiative, will certainly not be easy. Successful interdiction as a general policy is a long shot at best. The utter failure to halt the trafficking in illegal drugs using that method does not bode well for intercepting nuclear contraband. It would be difficult to seal off North Korea in the face of a concerted smuggling campaign. Indeed, it is especially daunting when one realizes that the amount of plutonium needed to build a nuclear weapon could be smuggled in a container the size of a bread box.

SINCE interdiction is unlikely to prove successful except on fortuitous occasions, the United States needs to adopt another approach. First, Washington should communicate to North Korea, both in private and publicly, that selling nuclear material--much less an assembled nuclear weapon--to terrorist organizations or hostile governments will be regarded as a threat to America's vital security interests. Indeed, the United States should treat such a transaction as the equivalent of a threatened attack on America by North Korea. Such a threat would warrant military action to remove the North Korean regime. Pyongyang must be told in no uncertain terms that trafficking in nuclear materials is a bright red line that it dare not cross if the regime wishes to survive.

That warning should be the large stick in Washington's policy mix. The carrot should consist of a willingness to extend diplomatic recognition to, and lift all economic sanctions on, North Korea. Making that country's economy more prosperous is the most realistic prospect for ensuring that North Korea can derive sufficient income from legitimate sources and thus will not be tempted to engage in nuclear proliferation. That, of course, will require extensive economic reforms by North Korea along the lines adopted by the People's Republic of China over the past quarter-century.

Lifting economic sanctions is certainly no guarantee that North Korean leaders will have the prudence to adopt the required reforms, but Pyongyang has shown some signs in recent years of modifying its ideology of Juche (self-sufficiency) and opening itself to the outside world economically. In the spring of 2003, the North Korean regime started building market halls around the country to encourage the activity of private merchants, and it loosened rules about who may do business and what may be sold. Surprisingly, even foreigners will be allowed to sell their products in the new markets. "Before, they were tolerating private business. Now, they are encouraging it", concluded Cho Myong Choi, a North Korean defector who once taught economics at Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang. (5) True, these are initial--and somewhat hesitant--steps on a long path, and Washington cannot do much to advance North Korea's economic reforms. The North Koreans will have to do the bulk of the work. At the very least, though, the United States should not put obstacles in the path of reform.

A policy mix of such carrots and sticks would hardly produce a perfect outcome. The strategy would, however, trump the alternative of vainly trying to bribe or pressure Pyongyang to relinquish its nuclear ambitions, even as evidence mounts to the contrary. And it certainly beats the reckless option of launching a pre-emptive war. As is often the case, the best a policy can ultimately accomplish is less than ideal. What matters instead is that it works.

(1) Quoted in the New York Times, February 13, 2003 (emphasis added).

(2) "U.S. Can't Rule Out N. Korea Strike, Perle Says", Reuters, June 11, 2003.

(3) The North has developed a sophisticated sales network for marketing its military wares. See Bertil Lintner and Steve Stecklow, "Paper Trail Exposes Missile Merchants", Far Eastern Economic Review, February 13, 2003, pp. 12-15.

(4) See "Heroin Trail Leads to North Korea", Washington Post, May 12, 2003; "U.S. Fears Heroin Paying for Nukes", Washington Times, May 21, 2003; and "North Korea Is Said to Export Drugs to Get Foreign Currency", New York Times, May 21, 2003.

(5) Quoted in "Communist State Pushes Free Enterprise", Los Angeles Times, June 19, 2003.

Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is the co-author of Korean Conundrum: America's Troubled Relations with North and South Korea, which is forthcoming from Palgrave/Macmillan.

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