If Looks Could Kill: South and North Korean soldiers face off at the DMZ
When the Soviet Union collapsed and the cold war ended, the Pentagon made a decision to reorient the U.S. military. Instead of being tooled for a single conflict against a rival superpower, U.S. forces needed the ability to wage two wars simultaneously against "rogue states" in different parts of the world. The most commonly cited pair of potential enemies: Iraq and North Korea.
The great gulping sound heard across Asia last week was the fear that just such a scenario could come to pass. In its quickening preparations for war in the Persian Gulf, the Bush Administration has stated repeatedly that it wants no military conflict with North Korea—not now, nor in the foreseeable future. But that assurance fell on the deaf ears of Kim Jong Il, North Korea's reliably unpredictable dictator, who continues to pursue a deliberate collision course with the outside world. Kim has already pulled out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and tossed weapons inspectors out of his country. Last week a U.S. intelligence source revealed that North Korea had activated a coal-fired steam plant connected to its reprocessing unit at Yongbyon, a sign that Kim is now getting ready to cook up some plutonium. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) passed the North Korean nuclear football to the U.N. Security Council last week, saying it was the Council's turn to do something about Kim's cranked-up weapons program. Meanwhile in Washington, CIA director George Tenet reminded a Senate committee that North Korea has a missile, untested as of yet, designed to reach the U.S. West Coast. Then, at the end of the week, constitutionally passive Japan drew a shocking line in the sand: Defense Agency director Shigeru Ishiba told a news agency that if Tokyo were to receive intelligence that North Korea was preparing a missile attack, Japan would have the legal right to launch a strike in self-defense. Suddenly the continent seemed that much closer to everyone's worst-case scenario: war in Asia, with nuclear-armed North Korea on one side, Japan and the U.S. on the other, and South Korea perilously trapped in the middle.
With Iraq occupying the mind share of the Bush Administration and the U.N., North Korea has become the problem that refuses to simmer gently on the back burner. A scarier possibility is that a fire has broken out in the kitchen, and all the parties involved—except Pyongyang—are refusing to smell the smoke. Since U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly confronted North Korea last October with evidence that it was building a uranium-enrichment plant, contravening the spirit of a 1994 agreement that shuttered the country's nuclear program, the reigning theory has been that Dear Leader Kim was adroitly using the row, and Washington's Iraq distraction, to prop up his regime. He was playing a game of brinksmanship—pulling out of the NPT, throwing out the inspectors—to get fuel oil, food and some kind of normalization of relations with the U.S., which had been dangled before him in the waning days of the Clinton Administration.
That theory is giving way to a more troubling idea: Kim may realize that the ultimate brinksman needs the ultimate weapon. Japan's Defense Agency's Chief of Military Intelligence, Fumio Ota, came to that conclusion in a briefing to parliamentarians last week: Kim wants nukes, not some new carrots from the West. For North Asia, that renders irrelevant the debate over who is a bigger threat to the world—Kim Jong Il or far-off Saddam Hussein. If North Korea gets a nuclear armory, technologically advanced Japan and South Korea will also be tempted to build atom bombs. And Kim, with his boilersuits and bouffant hairdo, could succeed in dismantling the whole postwar security structure of the region and the attendant and prosperous economic ties that peace has fostered. As the CIA's Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee last week: "The domino theory of the 21st century may well be nuclear."
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