OPINION_ Nuclear standoff: North Korea’s Kim unlikely to risk war

THE AUSTRALIAN

Nuclear standoff: North Korea’s Kim unlikely to risk war

Paul Monk The Australian
January 12, 2016 12:00AM

North Korea’s four tests since 2006 suggest it has only nuclear firecrackers, not thermonuclear weapons. Yet the ugly nature of the Kim family tyranny and its bellicose rhetoric make its possession of even small nuclear weapons unsettling.

The perennial worry is that Pyongyang will finally lose the plot altogether and trigger a catastrophic war in northeast Asia.

All efforts to induce it to end its nuclear program, reform its grossly distorted economy and come out of the cold have failed. It regularly issues bizarre threats and continues to defy international sanctions and standards. Yet it remains confined to its bleak and impoverished bunker, incapable of much more than brutal bluster. All these things make it, from a detached point of view, a fascinating study in the nature of international security affairs and diplomacy.

A generation ago, before North Korea had in fact become a nuclear power, I was Japan and Koreas desk officer in the Defence Intelligence Organisation. This gave me a ringside seat to watch the drama that developed, after the end of the Cold War, in the context of North Korea’s nuclear program.

For a while, in 1991-92, it looked as if North Korea would play by the rules. It joined the UN and the Non-proliferation Treaty and agreed to inspections of its nuclear plant at Yongbyon by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Throughout 1993, however, the IAEA reported a long series of discrepancies and evasions in North Korea’s compliance with the safeguards agreement.

The resultant tension built up through to March 1994, then appeared to be resolved, with North Korea seemingly reaching an agreement to accept inspections in exchange for assistance in developing peaceful nuclear technology and being supplied with quantities of fuel for its energy sector.

It’s a matter of history now that the agreements reached in late 1994 and early 1995 unravelled. North Korea proceeded to repudiate all non-proliferation commitments and develop nuclear weapons. In the current context of uncertainties and misgivings about the nuclear agreement with Iran, it is worth revisiting the failure of the agreement with North Korea 20 years ago.

The best account of this can be found in a book by Joel Wit, Daniel Poneman and Robert Gallucci, Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis (Brookings Institution Press, 2004).

From within the intelligence world in 1994 I followed the excruciating complexities of the case and concentrated on an effort to understand what was driving North Korean behaviour. As tensions reached a critical point in early 1994, I was asked to brief the secretary of Defence and the Chiefs of Staff Committee on North Korea’s nuclear program.

A number of senior figures in Canberra feared there could be a war in Korea, with the aged North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung opting to go out with a bang. My task was to help them think it through.

I drew attention to three central drivers of North Korean behaviour.

First, by the 1980s, when North Korea began to build a nuclear reactor, South Korea was leaving the North behind economically.

While the North was spending 25 per cent of its GDP on the military and the South “only” 6 per cent (compared with our current 1.8 per cent), the South was spending twice as much in absolute terms, because its economy was so much bigger — and there was nothing the North could do to close that gap. It began, therefore, to seek a strategic equaliser.

Second, in 1989-91, the North watched with astonishment and dismay as the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe collapsed, the US brushed aside Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, and then the Soviet Union itself fell apart. There were those who thought that North Korea would soon follow.

In Pyongyang they had other ideas. The nuclear program was a key part of the strategy to survive by threat and bluff.

Third, I told the chiefs that we should not expect Kim Il-sung to go to war. In 1950, with everything in his favour, he did so and suffered a crushing defeat. Only Chinese intervention saved him from extinction.

Had he been itching to have another crack at it, he might have done so in 1975 or 1978, with the US on the back foot after Vietnam, and Jimmy Carter in the White House. As an old man with no allies and strong enemies, he was extremely unlikely to do so in 1994.

Twenty years on, the US-led West looks less formidable and self-assured than immediately after the Cold War. North Korea’s only ally, China, is displeased with it.

North Korea remains deeply insecure. Old Kim’s grandson, Kim Jong-un, is a brutal and immature despot, but is unlikely to start a war he cannot win.

There is no easy or pleasant solution to dealing with him. Such is the nature of international affairs. Spare a thought for those whose job it is to deal with such matters.

Paul Monk is a former senior intelligence analyst. His latest book is Credo and Twelve Poems: A Cosmological Manifesto (www.echobooks.com.au).

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