NORTH KOREA

What Does Kim Jong Il Really Want?

After months of mixed signals, North Korea acknowledges that it has nuclear weapons

By Michael Duffy

Days before Kim Jong Il's 63rd birthday, his government announced that, as has long been suspected by U.S. intelligence, North Korea has indeed built nuclear weapons "for self-defense." Pyongyang also announced it was pulling out of joint talks with the United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea to keep the Korean peninsula nuclear-free. Hoping to play down the news, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, called the announcement "unfortunate."

For more than a decade, the U.S. and its allies have insisted that they would not allow Kim to acquire nuclear weapons, out of fear that he would sell nukes to anyone willing to pay for them. Pyongyang's declaration, while impossible to confirm, means Kim has probably realized his quest. A nuclear-armed North Korea means that President Bush's multilateral strategy for preventing Pyongyang from acquiring nukes has failed just as dramatically as President Bill Clinton's policy of direct engagement did a decade ago. At a time when the Bush Administration is trying to increase pressure on Iran over its purported ambitions to obtain the bomb, Washington confronts a more immediate crisis with a country that claims to have it already.

One explanation for the announcement is that Pyongyang needed to change the subject. In early February, the White House secretly dispatched two National Security Council (NSC) aides to Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul armed with evidence that North Korea may have supplied a uranium compound to Libya for its weapons labs. The new evidence was apparently strong enough to help the two nsc aides win an audience with Chinese President Hu Jintao. U.S. officials would not detail Hu's reaction to the briefing, but one told TIME, "It made an impression."

What alternatives does the U.S. have? Given that a pre-emptive military strike against potential weapons sites would be fraught with complications—who knows how the situation might escalate, especially considering North Korea's substantial conventional arsenal—even anti-Kim hard-liners acknowledge that diplomacy remains the most palatable option. Kim has repeated his demand for bilateral negotiations with Washington, a prospect the Administration rejects out of hand. The U.S. still hopes to confront the North Koreans in a multilateral setting, and the linchpin of that strategy is China. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Beijing has been North Korea's closest ally, funneling oil and food. China would have to absorb many refugees if Kim's regime failed.

James Lilley, who was ambassador to both China and South Korea in the 1980s, says Pyongyang's tactics are designed to stall for time and force concessions from outsiders before sitting down to talk again. The only way to counter it, he believes, is to take swift action both jointly and alone. Unless the U.S. and its allies get tough and together in a hurry, the world may soon find itself worried less about how fast Kim is building nuclear bombs than about how we're going to live with them. —from TIME, February 21, 2005

Questions

1. Why did the White House secretly dispatch two nsc aides to Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul?

2. What do observers, including hard-liners, see as the only way to deal with North Korea?