North Korea on the Brink
Wednesday, 19 May, 2010
No-one can be unaware of the ongoing standoff on the Korean Peninsula that regularly threatens to become a global crisis with Weapons of Mass Destruction available to both sides. There are neo-con voices in Washington that would see an Iraq style solution with enforced regime change. Others close to the Obama Administration have practiced a policy of what Pyongyang sees as malign neglect that has left them isolated and off the global agenda. The result has been that The North has engaged in a series of provocative actions with missile launches, nuclear tests and armed clashes.
There was a third launch in April last year of Taepodong-2 with another attempt to put a Kwangmyonsong communications satellite into orbit. As with the first launch back in August 1998 the third-stage failed to properly ignite and the satellite failed to achieve orbit. The second launch in 2006 barely made it off the launch pad, failing 42 seconds after launch, possibly aborted by mission control, and falling into the East Sea. Yet even in failure these demonstrate Pyongyang's future capacity to develop an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (IBCM) capable of reaching Hawaii, Alaska and possibly West Coast USA. At the same time the payload would need to be raised sharply if it were to be tipped with a Hiroshima sized nuclear weapon. Currently Taepodong would struggle to get the 70 volumes of the Complete Works of Kim Il Sung off the ground at its maximum range incapable of carrying a nuclear warhead over any distance.
North Korea has twice tested plutonium based nuclear weapons, first in October 2006 and then in April 2009. Both went off with a 'fizzle' rather than a bang, the cores breaking up before the chain-reaction had fully gone to completion resulting in low yields, the first at one kiloton and the second a little bigger. While the North Koreans at the moment only have enough weapons grade plutonium for 6-8 weapons, the recent refusal by Washington to recognize Pyongyang as a nuclear state in the context of the Non-Proliferation Treaty talks - despite the view of Mohamed El Baradei, Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency
To put their current capacity into context, if Taepodong-2 was to successfully launch for the first time, boosted to carry one of their current weapons and it was as powerful as their second nuclear test, without sophisticated gyroscopic guidance technology which they lack, the chances are with such a random strike in the US, the death toll would be less than ten, although if it landed centre-field on Super Bowl Sunday it would be 100,000.
The armed clashes have been naval engagements on the West coast of the Peninsula around the Northern Limit Line (NLL) the seaward extension of the Armistice Line agreed in 1953. While the Armistice line is absolutely clear on the land side the maritime boundary is much less clear and even the US does not fully agree with Seoul's partisan interpretation. There were two deadly clashes in 1999 and 2002 that left, in the first case a more than a dozen North Korean sailors dead when their ship caught fire and on the second occasion, thirty North Koreans and four South Koreans. In March this year the intensity steadily increased when the South Korean corvette 'Cheonan' sunk following an explosion when close to the NLL. Although no North Korean naval units were reported in the area, Seoul is increasingly pointing the finger towards the North. Attempts to internationalize the inquiry have been gently rebuffed by some countries such as the UK and Sweden not fully convinced that science and politics can be kept apart.
Thus we have a ticking bomb. The Six Party Talks, currently suspended, have not moved the world closer to a solution. Nor have bilateral sanctions, UN Security Council resolutions or threats to interdict North Korean vessels on the high seas. What might help is a bridge building exercise by some group outside the normal actors. One candidate could be the EU with its post-Lisbon enhanced Foreign Policy role and it's new High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy.
In contrast to Washington, Brussels and the European Union (EU) has adopted over the last decade a different stance that privileges critical engagement with a view of encouraging a changing regime. The EU has put its money where its mouth is with almost €500 million of assistance over this period. To a degree Pyongyang has responded in kind. It supports further
European Integration and the Lisbon Treaty, while making the euro the foreign currency of choice in the North. Equally 'Rodong Sinmun', the daily paper of the Central Committee of the Korean Workers Party, published a series of editorials that made the point that the EU was the only hegemonic power capable of challenging the United States. Thus potentially the EU has opportunities for engagement that others lack, plus the experience.
What might the EU try to do? There are three areas that seem obvious, apart from continuing with humanitarian and development assistance. First, to help the Peninsula learn the lessons - both positive and negative - from the experience of German re-unification in Europe. Second, to try to resolve the troubled historical legacies across East Asia. The problem is not just North Korea versus Japan, but draws in China and South Korea. The European Model of the Franco-German Text Book Commission might slowly help a move towards a common history and reconciliation. Third, the experience of the European Confidence and Security Measures that recognized the 'status quo' either side of the European divide and utilized 'semi-neutral' parties to built bridges between the two that acknowledged the areas of common interest and the need for mutual security, including energy security, while recognizing the necessity of ultimately engaging the United States.
(MEP 1984-2009 and Author of 'North Korea on the Brink', Pluto Press, 2008)
