10 October 2006David E. Sanger
North Korea may be a starving, friendless, authoritarian nation of 23 million people, but its apparently successful explosion of a small nuclear device in the mountains above the town of Kilju on Monday represents a defiant bid for survival and respect. For Washington and its allies, it illuminates a failure of nearly two decades of atomic diplomacy.
North Korea is more than just another nation joining the nuclear club. It has never developed a weapons system it did not ultimately sell on the world market, and it has periodically threatened to sell its nuclear technology. So the end of ambiguity about its nuclear capacity foreshadows a very different era, in which the concern may not be where a nation’s warheads are aimed, but in whose hands its weapons and skill end up.
As Democrats were quick to note on Monday, four weeks before a critical national election, President Bush and his aides never gave as much priority to countering a new era of proliferation as they did to overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Bush and his aides contend that Iraq was the more urgent threat, in a volatile neighborhood. But the North’s reported nuclear test now raises the question of whether it is too late for the president to make good on his promise that he would never let the world’s “worst dictators” obtain the world’s most dangerous weapons.
“What it tells you is that we started at the wrong end of the ‘axis of evil,’ ” former Senator Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who has spent his post-Congressional career trying to halt a new age of proliferation, said in an interview. “We started with the least dangerous of the countries, Iraq, and we knew it at the time. And now we have to deal with that.”
Mr. Bush’s top national security aides declined Monday to be interviewed about whether a different strategy over the past five years might have yielded different results. But Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, has described the administration’s approach to North Korea as the mirror image of its dealings with Iraq. “You’ll recall that we were criticized daily for being too unilateral” in dealing with Saddam Hussein, Mr. Hadley said. “So here we are, working with our allies and friends, stressing diplomacy.”
But at the same time, he said the administration had made a conscious decision not to draw “red lines” in dealing with Kim Jong-il’s government because “the North Koreans just walk right up to them and then step over them,” just to show they can. Other aides say that, lines or no lines, the North simply decided to race for a bomb — and finally made it.
North Korea announced its nuclear breakout in early 2003, kicking out international nuclear inspectors and very publicly beginning its drive to turn its stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel rods into a small arsenal of weapons. Focused then on the coming war with Iraq, Mr. Bush and his administration chose to set no limits.
But foreign policy, as Mr. Nunn says, is “all about priorities,” and until Monday the closest Mr. Bush came to drawing a red line for the North was in May 2003, when he declared that the United States and South Korea “will not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea.”
The Central Intelligence Agency’s estimates in the years since have been that the United States has been tolerating exactly that — a small arsenal of nuclear fuel sufficient to produce six or more weapons.
Notably, Mr. Bush did not repeat that threat on Monday morning. Instead, he drew a new red line, one that appeared to tacitly acknowledge the North’s possession of weapons. The United States would regard as a “grave threat,” he said, any transfer by North Korea of nuclear material to other countries or terrorist groups, and would hold Mr. Kim’s government “fully accountable for the consequences of such actions.”
To critics of Mr. Bush’s counterproliferation policy, this seemed a recognition that the North had successfully defied American, Chinese and Japanese warnings about building weapons and testing them, and was now simply trying to manage the aftermath. North Korea, it appears, is taking a page from Pakistan’s strategic playbook: it exploded its first nuclear device in 1998, endured three years of sanctions, and now has emerged as a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States.
Mr. Bush’s aides say that if Mr. Kim believes he, too, can expect the world to impose a few sanctions and then lose interest in the issue, he is wrong. “He is really going to rue the day he made this decision,” Christopher R. Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said of Mr. Kim on Monday. But Mr. Bush’s critics charge that the threat may be empty. As they see it, Mr. Kim watched the Iraq war and drew a simple lesson: that broken countries armed with nuclear weapons do not get invaded, and do not have to worry about regime change.
“Think about the consequences of having declared something ‘intolerable’ and, last week, ‘unacceptable,’ and then having North Korea defy the world’s sole superpower and the Chinese and the Japanese,” said Graham Allison, the Harvard professor who has studied nuclear showdowns since the Cuban missile crisis. “What does that communicate to Iran, and then the rest of the world? Is it possible to communicate to Kim credibly that if he sells a bomb to Osama bin Laden, that’s it?”
Mr. Allison was touching on the central dilemma facing Washington as it tries to extract itself from the morass of Iraq. Whether accurately or not, other countries around the world perceive Washington as tied down, unable or unwilling to challenge them while 140,000 troops are trying to tame a sectarian war.
Divining North Korea’s true intentions is always difficult; there is no more closed society on earth. But the broad assumption inside and outside the United States government is that Mr. Kim’s first priority is the survival of his government. And the second is that without a nuclear weapon, he believes his government would have no way of staving off the larger, richer powers around it: China, Japan, South Korea and the United States.
All have fought over control of the Korean Peninsula in decades past, and to Mr. Kim’s mind, presumably, the prospect that the North could lash out is the only reason they have stayed at bay.
Mr. Kim may have calculated, many experts believe, that at this point there is little more that the Bush administration can do to him. The United States has imposed sanctions on his country since the end of the Korean War. The new crackdown on the banks through which the North conducts many of its illicit activities — counterfeiting, missile sales, trade in small arms — are being choked off, a step the North Korean leaders presumably see as part of a strategy of bringing them down.
It may be years, or decades, before historians know whether Iraq played into Mr. Kim’s calculations about when to conduct a nuclear test. But clearly, managing simultaneous crises around the world is straining the system in Washington, and posing the Bush administration with more direct challenges than many believe it can handle at one moment.
That returns Mr. Bush to the problem he faced when he came to office, and that his aides have never stopped arguing about: whether the best way to contain North Korea is to further isolate it, or to draw it out of its paranoid shell. The nuclear test may force Washington to pick a strategy.
