| The diplomatic impasse gets dicier as North Korea restarts a nuclear reactor and threatens "total war"
Seoul resident Chung Woo Shik, 62, was a boy when the Korean War ended a half-century ago, and he still remembers the horror of a conflict that left more than a million Koreans dead. But as he strolled through Seoul last week, holding onto his 2-year-old grandson with one hand and balancing a pizza box with the other, he seemed remarkably unruffled by the vitriol spewing from Stalinist North Korea just 40 kilometers away. After taking another step toward mass production of nuclear weapons by announcing it was restarting a plutonium-producing reactor, North Korea last week vowed to unleash "total war" if the U.S. bombed the Yongbyon nuclear complex. That threat was followed by another: if America beefs up its military presence in the region, the peninsula "will be reduced to ashes, and the Koreans will not escape horrible nuclear disasters." South Koreans are all in the line of fire, but Chung is sanguine. "North Korea is just bluffing," he says. "I'm not worried at all."
Elsewhere in Asia, the escalating tension has everybody scrambling to figure out how worried they should be. North Korean despot Kim Jong Il is known for using belligerent histrionics to blackmail his neighbors for the aid he needs to stay in power. He's got the missiles and the million-man army to make threatening gestures credible. The world is keenly aware that the country is a cornered, starving wolf, short of fuel, food and just about everything else. But with a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis still nowhere in sight and Pyongyang stating it is fully capable of making the first military move, the question becomes: is Kim crazy enough to pull the trigger?
According to experts who have spent years trying to peer across the demilitarized zone that isolates North Korea, the short answer is: not yet. "It is still at the level of rhetoric," says one Western diplomat. "It is still theater." Last week, Washington said it was prepared to bolster its bomber force in the Pacific to keep North Korea in check if the U.S. military is occupied in a war with Iraq. But the nations that have most to fear from the North—Japan and South Korea, which harbor U.S. troops and are within range of North Korean ordnance—are not on military alert. Japan's Defense Agency denied press reports last week that it is considering deploying two Aegis-class destroyers in the Sea of Japan to detect missile launches by Pyongyang. "Practically, it is very difficult for North Korea to start a total war against the U.S.," says Jiro Okuyama, assistant press secretary for Japan's Foreign Ministry. "They are not ready for that."
Even in Pyongyang, there is no activity suggesting the country is on a war footing. During a trip to the capital and to economic-development projects in North Korea last week, a Time correspondent observed that the state-controlled media has cranked up anti-American rhetoric for its domestic audience—a recent TV segment just before the evening news featured grisly photos of dead babies allegedly killed by U.S. bombing during the Korean War. There were also reports of air-raid sirens during a civil-defense drill in Pyongyang last week. But there was no sign of other unusual activity in the quiet capital or on either side of the demilitarized zone.
Some believe, however, that the disjointed diplomatic tango between Washington and Pyongyang could yet spin out of control. Already the crisis seems to have advanced further than a similar U.S.-North Korea impasse in the 1990s. That encounter—also centered on North Korea's nuclear-weapons ambitions and characterized by a series of alarming moves by the North—was eventually resolved in 1994 when the U.S. came to the bargaining table. North Korea agreed not to build bombs, and a coalition of nations agreed to supply the North with aid.
In October, North Korea admitted it was violating the 1994 accord by continuing with a secret nuclear-weapons program, triggering a new crisis. This time around, instead of merely threatening to pull out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, North Korea has actually done so. And a new U.S. administration appears disinclined to parley unless North Korea agrees to dismantle its nukes as a precondition to talks. Last week, while warning the U.S. Congress that North Korea could be capable of supplying nuclear weapons to terrorists within months, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage offered assurances that "we're going to have direct talks with the North Koreans; there's no question about it." Days later, however, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared to contradict him, saying "no military option's been taken off the table, although we have no intention of attacking North Korea as a nation." Korea analyst Leon Sigal, whose book Disarming Strangers chronicles the first nuclear crisis, says U.S. intransigence and North Korea's belligerence equal "a very dangerous spiral."
For now, the greatest risk is that with the U.S. preoccupied by Iraq, the two sides will continue talking past each other. That will allow room for a misstep or accident to be dangerously misinterpreted by the other side. As tension builds, it might not take more than a few bullets fired in the DMZ or a patrol boat straying across a disputed demarcation line to trigger full mobilization. North Korea's next move could be the test firing of a missile like the one that flew over Japan in 1998. Other even more dangerous provocations are possible. Gordon Flake, a Korea expert at the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs in Washington, fully expects Pyongyang to test a nuclear device or declare itself a nuclear power before any fighting starts in the Gulf, or shortly thereafter. "The danger of a North Korean miscalculation is growing every day," he says.
This doesn't seem to have registered in Seoul, where the escalating crisis hasn't deterred South Korea from pushing ahead with plans to funnel more economic aid to the North. Last week, executives from South Korea's Hyundai Asan, a subsidiary of the giant Hyundai conglomerate, were taken in buses across the border on a road built to improve access to a tourism development in the North. The caravan over the first new route across the DMZ since the end of the Korean War was a poignant, intensely emotional moment for Koreans. Hyundai Asan plans to pour $250 million—for starters—into a planned industrial park and tourist project in Kaesong, a city barely an hour from Seoul. Says Kaesong city councilor Jong Yong Chol: "The U.S. maneuvers against our country are getting more and more severe. But the people of the North and the South see this project as crucial to reunification."
In fact, all of North Korea's neighbors—China, Japan, Russia and South Korea—have been urging the U.S. to abandon its hard-line policy and hold direct talks with Pyongyang. The Bush Administration's frustration that it can't get support from allies only grew last week when a high-level delegation from South Korean President-elect Roh Moo Hyun visited Washington. At one meeting with top U.S. experts on Korea, Yun Young Gwan, a Roh advisor on foreign affairs, stunned his audience by announcing Seoul would rather see North Korea with nukes than see it collapse. Appalled, one participant described the South Korean delegation as "naive, sentimental, illogical and dissembling." (A Roh spokesman said he couldn't confirm Yun's remarks.)
What really shocked participants was that Roh's envoy made it clear South Korea is not prepared to exert any kind of diplomatic pressure on the North, the kind of pressure the U.S. thinks could peacefully halt the North's nuclear program. Says one U.S. academic in the talks: "Do they understand that in the long run, the alternative is a nuclear Japan, and in the short term the alternative is a U.S. strike against Yongbyon? No."
The time for diplomatic posturing may be rapidly drawing to a close, as the standoff enters a more dangerous phase. "Personally, I think North Korea has gone beyond merely playing games," says Hideshi Takesada, deputy director of Japan's National Institute for Defense Studies. "Gradually, people are beginning to realize that missiles might soon be flying over their heads." If that happens, all anyone can do is hope the starving wolf of North Korea has a bark worse than its bite. | |
