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October
24, 2002, 9:00 a.m. By Henry Sokolski |
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North Korea's angry admission that it had been cheating on its earlier
pledges not to make nuclear weapons, the bitter fruit of nearly a decade
of U.S. diplomatic dithering against the world's worst nuclear cheater
came due. Clearly, the U.S. now will have to do more than stop bribing
Pyongyang to behave or concoct some new, contrived horse trade in the
name of nonproliferation. Instead, President Bush must come clean with
the American public on what went wrong by explaining what truly heady
trouble is ahead if North Korea continues to build. We must also recount
how we got into this mess to make sure we don't repeat ourselves.
Certainly, North Korea with its enrichment program is now even more able and anxious to deal. Four times burnt — on Pyongyang's l985 nuclear nonproliferation pledge to open up to nuclear inspections by l987, its l992 commitment to Seoul not to build a plutonium chemical separation plant, its International Atomic Energy Agency agreement to be open to full inspections in l992, and its l994 pledge to not obtain or store nuclear weapons — we need to listen but should offer nothing.
Paying extortion, as we did for these pledges, by endorsing Pyongyang's "safeguarded" nuclear program in l985, withdrawing our tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea in l991, and offering Pyongyang advanced U.S.-designed reactors, diplomatic normalization, and hundreds of millions of dollars of fuel oil and food aid in l994 and l998, may well have been diplomatically expedient. But whenever you rush into blackmail, pay too much for it, do it too long, glorify it, or willfully ignore that you are failing to fend off what you are paying to prevent, then, it becomes a terrible (and an-all-too-addictive) mistake. Certainly, Congress needs to be vigilant lest our diplomats "misengage" again.
This, then, leads to the next imperative — to clarify the costs of further dithering. North Korea is believed already to have one or two bombs. It can chemically strip out enough plutonium on a one-time basis from its known reserves of spent fuel to produce another six. In addition, it can produce a bomb's worth of plutonium a year from its one completed reactor. Finally, 12 months from now it is likely to complete an enrichment plant capable of producing six bombs worth of weapons uranium a year. Mate these numbers with North Korea's missile arsenal and in 36 months you have an armory of over 20 nuclear missiles capable of targeting all of Japan (including U.S. troops in Okinawa), a good part of the Pacific, and military facilities in the U.S. territory of Guam.
This is bad for the U.S., the region, and the world. It means that our ability to defend our friends and interests in one of the globe's richest regions will increasingly come within the crosshairs of a hostile nuclear sniper. Nor should we assume that South Korea, which has already tried to go nuclear once, or Japan, which sits on thousands of bombs worth of plutonium, will sit by idly if we do. China, moreover, has a reserve of nearly 2,000 bombs worth of weapons material that it has not yet weaponized but could, and likely would, if others in the neighborhood ever tried to. Unlike proliferation in the Middle East, nuclear rivalries here will be measured in weapons numbers that could easily keep the U.S. (and Russia) from reducing their own massive stockpiles.
This suggests that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is not just another multilateral charade for the U.S. to blow off. Certainly, if we want to avoid further nuclear threats, theft, and terrorism in Eurasia, the Pacific, and the Middle East, we actually need to concede that Amy Carter was right and, for the first time, actually work to enforce the NPT.
This not only means that the U.S. and its allies must penalize Saddam for deceiving inspectors and trying to get the bomb, but make North Korea pay a price (beyond unplugging our misguided nuclear and oil bribes) for its nuclear cheating on the NPT. We certainly should not fool ourselves again into thinking that further bribes or continuing our current energy payoffs to Pyongyang will earn anything but its contempt and more cheating.
Instead, the U.S. and like-minded nations should go to the U.N. (before North Korea threatens to pull out of the NPT — again) and insist that it quickly open up and disarm. If it refuses, we must engage our friends (rather than Pyongyang) to isolate and contain North Korea until the regime and the nuclear threat it presents goes the way of the Soviet Empire.
Finally, with regard to the upcoming U.S.-China summit this Friday, Bush should invite Jiang Zemin to join us to disarm North Korea out of informed self-interest. China, like the U.S., should have an interest in avoiding a rearmed Japan or a nuclear Korea. Bush should calmly explain, however, that if China does not choose to join us, we and our security allies in Asia will do our best — as we did before we ever engaged Pyongyang — without Beijing's help.
— Henry Sokolski directs the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., and is author of Best of Intentions: America's Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation.