We must not go soft on the nuclear ambitions of North Korea

Financial Times ^ | Nov. 23, 2006 | Victor Mallet

[Schnucki]

How quickly we forget. It is less than two months since the North Korean government of Kim Jong-il - a notoriously secretive and unstable regime - detonated a nuclear device in an underground test and celebrated its emergence as the world's ninth nuclear power. The United Nations, with the backing even of Pyongyang's allies in China and South Korea, responded to the October 9 test by imposing economic sanctions and demanding an end to all North Korea's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes.

Christopher Hill, Washington's chief negotiator for North Korea, declared boldly that the world was not going to live with a nuclear North Korea. "It [North Korea] can have a future or it can have these weapons," he said. "It cannot have both."

These now look like empty words. Amid the turmoil in the Middle East, attempts to curb another nuclear programme - this one in Iran - and the change of power in the US Congress after the mid-term elections, the North Korean threat has been all but forgotten. The 21-nation Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation forum issued the feeblest of appeals to North Korea at its summit last weekend in Hanoi.

Mr Hill and the Chinese want to reconvene the six-party talks in Beijing to end the North Korean nuclear crisis but the North Koreans are defiant. Kang Sok-ju, Pyongyang's deputy foreign minister, was only stating the obvious on a stopover in Beijing yesterday when he asked scornfully: "Why would we abandon nuclear weapons? . . . Are you saying we conducted a nu-clear test in order to abandon them?"

Far from dropping their nuclear ambitions, the North Koreans are likely to prepare a second test after what seems to have been the partial failure of the first. Unless the Pyongyang regime is toppled or the two Koreas are reunified, it is almost inconceivable that the Korean peninsula can be freed of nuclear weapons.

Given the improbability of any US-led military action to overthrowMr Kim, this grim reality means that South Korea will be obliged to play a more active part in trying to change North Korea and to denuclearise their shared peninsula. China, which borders North Korea, remains a key influence, but the possibility of economic collapse or a military coup in the North followed by a refugee crisis and eventual reunification places a heavy burden of responsibility on Seoul.

South Korea, however, is in a state of confusion following the shock of the North's nuclear test, as I saw on a recent visit to Seoul. Many South Koreans, including politicians loyal to Roh Moo-hyun, the left-leaning president, argue that the hardline, "axis of evil" approach adopted by George W. Bush, US president, was so counterproductive that it may actually have provoked the North into testing the bomb.

There are two problems with this argument. First, the Americans have long since softened their tone and conceded the need to negotiate directly with the North Koreans on the sidelines of the six-party talks. Second, South Korea's warm and fuzzy "sunshine policy" and the subsequent "engagement policy" have proved to be at least as naive and ineffective as the Manichean US approach.

South Korea, even within the Roh administration, is now deeply divided on the issue of North Korea. Yet President Roh insists that continued engagement is the only way forward and wants to downplay the nuclear threat.

It is easy to see the attractions of engagement and to understand South Korea's reluctance to impose strict sanctions or close its flagship projects in the North, the Kaesong industrial park and the Mount Kumgang tourist site. Both have been criticised for funnelling cash to Mr Kim's regime.

In common with the western companies that defied sanctions to invest in South Africa in the apartheid era, the South Koreans argue they are a force for liberalisation and change. Unfortunately, the incorrigible Mr Kim and his colleagues have so far been immune to such viruses. South Korean policy is riddled with contradictions. Mr Roh's confidants will tell you there is little reason to fear nuclear weapons because the 10,000 conventional artillery pieces pointed at Seoul from across the demilitarised zone could wreak just as much havoc as an atomic explosion. This is a puzzling argument to deploy in defence of engagement, because it shows that the real problem is Kim Jong-il and and that he is a dangerous neighbour - regardless of his choice of weapons. His arsenal, lest we forget, now includes a nuclear device. No one, even in vulnerable South Korea, is doing enough to stop him building more atomic bombs.

[quesney]

So what do you expect us to do about it? We have our hands ful and this is South Korea, China and Japan's primary responsibility anyway. It's long past time they pulled their own weight. Japan needs to abandon its pacifist Constitution stat. Unfortunately, this world doesn't accommodate pacificism without extortion and subjugation.