|
|
|
|
COMMENTARY
Restore US
nukes to South Korea
By John
Parker
BANGKOK - It's the counter strategy
that dares not speak its name: return US tactical
nuclear weapons to South Korea.
North
Korea's announcement on February 10 that it had
nuclear weapons only surprised those who were not
paying attention. After all, the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has a history of
nuclear research dating to the 1950s, and is
believed to have initiated nuclear weapons
development programs in the late 1970s. [1]
When the North pulled out of the 1994
Agreed Framework agreement in 2002 and ejected
United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency
observers from its Yongbyon nuclear complex, the
regime gained unimpeded access to enough plutonium
to make at least a handful of implosion warheads,
and the manufacture of the actual devices has been
only a matter of time.
Much of the
commentary on the North Korean announcement,
hypnotized by anti-American schadenfreude,
has focused on the difficulties that a nuclear
North Korea poses for American policymakers. What
all these writers have missed is the availability
of an obvious counterstrategy to a nuclear DPRK.
While this strategy would admittedly be very
controversial, especially in the current "if a
tree falls in the forest, it's [US President]
George W Bush's fault" climate, it has many
advantages, including:
It would maintain peace on the Korean
peninsula by making a North Korean attack on the
South basically impossible;
It could initiate a chain of events that would
lead directly to a collapse of the Kim Jong-Il
regime and the peaceful reunification of Korea.
Turning back the clock to
1991
The strategy is simple: re-introduce
nuclear weapons to South Korea. As drastic as such
a step might seem, it would in fact be
stabilizing, and hardly unprecedented. Although
some readers will not realize this, several dozen
tactical nuclear warheads - mainly B-61 gravity
bombs - were routinely kept on secure bases in the
Republic of Korea (ROK) until October 1991, when
the first (president George H W) Bush
administration withdrew them as part of a global
withdrawal of all US ground- and sea-based
tactical nuclear weapons throughout the world.
(This action was one clause of an arms control
treaty reached with then-Soviet president Mikhail
Gorbachev.)
Ostensibly, these weapons
could have been used to destroy North Korean
armored formations moving southward through the
open plains north of Seoul. However, given the
potency of conventional US and ROK anti-armor
munitions and the dreadful humanitarian and
political consequences of using nuclear weapons,
it is actually highly doubtful they would have
been used even if a war had taken place. The more
sensible justification for their presence was
deterrence: by making it nearly impossible for a
North Korean attack to succeed, they helped to
maintain the status quo on the peninsula.
Their removal in 1991 was justified both
by the specific characteristics of tactical
nuclear weapons and by the general logic of arms
control. Tactical nukes were considered
particularly risky due to their proximity to
frontline areas, the greater difficulty of storing
them securely (compared to, say, land- and
sea-based missile forces), and the fact that a
frontline commander might be tempted to use the
weapons rather than be overrun by enemy forces.
Also, in the arms control context, the removal of
frontline nuclear weapons contributed to a
reduction of tension, which then made it possible
to consider reductions in strategic forces. For
the record, in the circumstances of the early
1990s, this writer enthusiastically supported both
the decision to withdraw tactical nukes, and arms
control measures in general.
The risks
of a DPRK nuclear monopoly
However, that
was then, this is now; the current situation has
several features that make it highly dangerous
compared with the early 1990s:
First, obviously, North Korea is now
officially a nuclear-weapons state (even if
certain parties that should know better still
refuse to acknowledge this).
Second, rampant anti-American sentiment in
South Korea has eviscerated the ROK army's will to
fight, making it dangerously vulnerable to a DPRK
attack (this assertion will be controversial, but
it is based on firsthand accounts from US Forces
Korea - USFK- soldiers who train with ROK
soldiers).
Third, the US is overextended in Iraq and,
partly because of this, has been withdrawing
forces from South Korea.
Fourth, of course, the US has been openly
advocating regime change in the North, and
Pyongyang leader Kim Jong-Il no doubt fears that
he might be next on the list after Iraq's Saddam
Hussein.
All these factors may tempt North
Korea to attack the South in the belief that, if
war is inevitable, they might as well get the
advantage of striking first. In support of this
notion, DPRK officials have explicitly said,
during meetings with US officials, that "we aren't
going to let you do a buildup" (referring to the
first Gulf War). More shocking, North Korea's war
strategy, as revealed by the high-level defector
Hwang Jeong-yeop [2], is not merely to overrun the
South so rapidly that reinforcement would become
impossible, as is commonly believed. Rather, the
DPRK's strategy is to prevent reinforcement from
ever taking place by threatening to use nuclear
weapons against Japan, should the US intervene
(this very possibility is a major, though
little-understood reason why relations between
Tokyo and Pyongyang have been so frigid of late).
For the DPRK, such a threat is now reasonably
credible, and will become more so as the
reliability of the North's missile forces improves
over time. In the event of war, the North would
stage a massive conventional attack, and prevent
(it believes) US reinforcement of the peninsula,
or use of nuclear weapons, by means of the
aforementioned threat.
Would the US bow to
nuclear blackmail and allow North Korea to annex
the South? This is doubtful, but then, president
Gerald R Ford had the forces available - on paper
- to reverse North Vietnam's conventional invasion
of South Vietnam in 1975, but did not use them,
due to a rational calculation that the benefits of
intervention were not worth the costs (political
and otherwise). The North Koreans may well be
making an analogous calculation today, and drawing
the dangerous conclusion that an attack could
succeed. If the cost to the US of sending
conventional forces back into South Vietnam was
too high, what about the cost of losing Los
Angeles and San Francisco? Bear in mind that the
missile defense system authorized by Bush is not
yet operational.
Advantages of the
restoration gambit
The value of
reintroducing nukes to the South lies largely in
that it would neutralize North Korea's likely war
strategy, thus deterring any attack and
maintaining peace. Pyongyang knows full well that
it would face certain annihilation in a nuclear
exchange with the US, and if US theater commanders
had ready access to tactical nuclear weapons, this
would become much more likely. If the ROK-based
nuclear weapons were restored, the perilous status
quo would be transformed into a
mutual-assured-destruction (MAD) situation, much
like the one that characterized the US/Soviet
Union standoff during the Cold War. Although MAD
has very real dangers, such as accidental weapons
releases, these risks are surely preferable to a
nuclear exchange in Northeast Asia, which becomes
more likely - not less - if the DPRK is allowed to
have a nuclear weapons monopoly on the peninsula.
Needless to say, certain segments of the
South Korean public, especially its astoundingly
gullible younger generation, would hysterically
oppose any such suggestion, using the unassailable
logic that "we don't like George Bush, and George
Bush suggested this, so therefore we must oppose
it". However, what Seoul's official reaction would
be is another question entirely. Most South Korean
government officials, in contrast to their naive
offspring, are realistic enough to recognize that
their continuance in power ultimately depends on
American military protection. And historically,
the ROK government has never declined to procure
more powerful weapons systems when they were
offered (although the US has, as a conscious
policy, limited South Korean access to
cutting-edge hardware; for example, the ROK has
been provided with 1970s-vintage F-16 fighters,
but not the current-generation F-22). President
Roh Moo-hyun is known for his pacifist
inclinations, but it is difficult to believe that
he would refuse if Bush offered to return the
B-61s (aircraft-delivered gravity bombs) to the
South - especially since Kim Jong-il has helpfully
provided Roh with the perfect political cover for
taking such a step, and every newspaper in South
Korea is loudly demanding firm action in response
to the North's nuclear status.
The biggest
advantage of the strategy suggested, however, is
not simply that it would maintain the peace. Its
biggest advantage may be that it could start an
arms race that would lead directly to the collapse
of the DPRK. The reason for this is simple. North
Korea's Achilles' heel is obviously its economic
weakness. The struggling North, chained to
anachronistic Marxist dogmas that the rest of the
world rejected long ago, has already bankrupted
itself just to build the handful of primitive
plutonium bombs that it has. Suppose Bush now says
to the North, "OK, Kim Jong-il, we tried
everything to get you to listen to reason on your
nuclear weapons program, and you refused. Of
course you cannot expect us to simply sit on our
hands and accept your nuclear monopoly in Korea.
So we will simply use our vast wealth to produce
and transfer just enough nuclear warheads to the
South to maintain a continuous 10-to-1 advantage
over your pathetic arsenal. Now, what are you
going to do about it?"
Naturally, such a
pronouncement (even if couched in diplomatic
language) would inspire the usual bloodcurdling
pre-adolescent hysteria from the North's media
outlets. But once the spleen-venting speeches have
passed, what can Kim Jong-il do to counter Bush?
He would have three options, all of them bad.
First, he could take no action, which would
mean that the North would have just spent
virtually its last dollar to obtain weapons from
which it gained precisely no strategic advantage;
in fact, its existing strategic disadvantage would
only have been exacerbated. Furthermore, the
introduction of nukes would have made Korean
reunification under North Korean control - which
has been the DPRK's sacred goal for as long as
there has been a DPRK - utterly impossible. If
there is ever a time when generals in the North
would be tempted to overthrow the "dear leader",
this would surely be the time.
Second, the North Korean dictator could try to
match the US warheads in the South by building
more bombs. But this would lead to an even worse
result: economic collapse. Nuclear warheads are
staggeringly expensive, and the delivery systems
required to send them to their targets are even
more costly: ruinously so, in fact, for a country
in the DPRK's economic straits. Ask yourself: if
the former Soviet Union, with its vast territory
and resources, could not even come close to
maintaining military parity with the US, how could
North Korea?
Third, Kim might respond with threatened or
actual nuclear proliferation. In my opinion, this
would be a mortal error. If the US government
concluded that Kim was seriously considering
selling a nuclear device to a terrorist group, the
Pentagon would be drawing up war plans before the
day was out. As ghastly as a nuclear Korean war
would be for everyone involved, if forced to
choose, the US would prefer it to a nuclear
September 11, 2001.
The Chinese
aspect
China's possible reaction to such a
policy change must be discussed, if only because
it is the People's Republic of China (PRC), not
the US, that truly has the ability to resolve the
Korean crisis any time it wishes. China basically
has two goals in Northeast Asia: to avoid another
Korean War, especially a nuclear one, and to avert
a nuclear arms race in the region that could
result in Japan, or - God forbid - Taiwan becoming
nuclear states. While China doesn't want the
humiliation of having its erstwhile North Korean
ally absorbed by the democratic South, that
doesn't mean it wants to prop up the DPRK at the
cost of losing Taiwan, and a nuclear DPRK could
have precisely that result. Given these factors,
China would have little to lose by accepting a
return to the pre-1991 situation in Korea. A
nuclear standoff on the peninsula could mean that
its division would become permanent; but this
means nothing to China, which enjoys good
relations with both Koreas, and would prefer to
save its forces for a possible war over Taiwan.
A nuclear-restoration policy wouldn't even
necessarily have to be implemented in order to be
useful. Just a suggestion from Bush to President
Hu Jintao that such a move was being considered
might be enough to spur the Chinese to useful
action. And if the Chinese were slow to understand
the risks to their interests that could result
from the nuclear DPRK-nuclear ROK-nuclear
Japan-nuclear Taiwan scenario, then Bush might
hint that he was considering giving the South
Koreans warheads under their own command. It would
be somewhat awkward, internationally, for the
Chinese to oppose even this more extreme option:
after all, if China's Korean ally can have nuclear
weapons, then why can't America's?
The
advantage of pressuring China is that China holds
the key to this crisis. And why is that? Because
all Hu has to do to solve the North Korean nuclear
crisis is pick up the phone.
The
one-phone-call solution
All Hu would have
to do is dial up Kim Jong-il and say some (more
polite) version of the following: "If you don't
play ball and get back to the six-party talks
pronto, I'm going to announce that we are
dissolving our alliance with you, that we will
fully support the South in any future Korean
crisis, and we'll privately tell the Americans
that they are free to do as they like, while our
soldiers sit on the north bank of the Yalu and
roast Beijing duck on the glowing coals of your
regime."
Now of course, anyone can
immediately think of a hundred reasons why the
Chinese could never do this - in effect, switch
sides. But what they forget is that the PRC
observes probably the most ruthlessly pragmatic
foreign policy of any nation on earth. For every
argument one could make against China supporting
the South, a rebuttal is readily at hand.
"China wouldn't abandon its North Korean
ally." Well, if doing so is in its national
interest - and in this case, it is - why not?
Abandoning allies is practically a tradition for
the PRC: Mao Zedong snubbed the Soviet Union to
meet with president Richard Nixon; Deng Xiaoping
stiffed Kim Il-sung so China could do business
deals with South Korea; and former president Jiang
Zemin abandoned Albania (a historic friend of
China) to support the Serbs during the Kosovo war.
"The Chinese military would oppose any such
step." Well, there are ways for Hu to get his
generals on board. He could just say, "You know,
guys, this sticks in my craw, too, but think about
it. If you have to fight the United States, would
you rather do it in Korea or on Taiwan? By letting
the Americans take care of the North, we can solve
this annoying Korean problem once and for all, and
save our forces for Taiwan."
"The US is China's strategic enemy, and China
can't change sides because that would help the
US." In fact, Chinese and American interests may
be opposed in some cases, but are quite compatible
in others - and Korea happens to be one of the
areas where they are the most compatible. More
importantly, as argued below, it is far from clear
whether a Chinese shift in loyalty would benefit
the US in the long run.
For the Chinese,
the chance to avoid frittering away their military
strength in another pointless Korean war isn't
even the best part of aligning itself with Seoul.
The best part is that changing sides would mean
that the ROK will owe China a huge favor. And the
PRC could ask for a lot of things to repay this
debt. But what they actually will ask for - you
can bet on this - is one specific thing: they will
make switching sides contingent on American troops
leaving a reunified Korea.
For any South
Korean president, now or in the future, such a
bargain would prove irresistible: if China
supported the South, you could get everything you
ever wanted - a reunified, democratic Korea under
Seoul's control, an end to the nuclear crisis, a
new source of cheap labor (namely, the
underdeveloped northern provinces) to rev up the
Korean economy, land transportation links with
China, Russia and Europe - and in exchange, the
Americans, whom you don't exactly adore anyway,
have to go. One cannot imagine any ROK government
that would reject such an offer. And the South
Korean public? They are hopelessly infatuated with
China already, and would jump at the chance to
become a Chinese vassal state once again; any
second thoughts ("Hey, these mainland Chinese
don't exactly believe in democracy, do they?")
would come too late.
For the Chinese
military, the South's covert acceptance of such an
offer would probably cement the bargain. Save your
forces for Taiwan and get the Americans out of
Korea? Quite the foreign policy coup. And once Hu
made his phone call, the end of the Kim Jong-il
regime would be at hand: the Chinese food aid and
natural gas that has been keeping the North afloat
would suddenly stop, and he would be at the mercy
of his sworn enemies, the South Koreans and the
Americans. True, the Dear Leader has proven
himself to be a survivor; but one can't see how he
would get out of this one with his regime intact.
At the very least, he would have to come to terms
on the nuclear issue.
'Fool's gold' for
the Dear Leader
In October 2002,
then-secretary of state Colin Powell observed: "No
North Korean child can eat enriched uranium. No
North Korean peasant is going to get a job
enriching uranium. It is fool's gold for North
Korea." Powell was right. Nuclear weapons are,
after all, weapons, and the decision to procure
any weapon should ultimately be based on whether
the buyer can reasonably expect to obtain
strategic advantage over its likely adversaries,
or at least retain strategic parity with them. For
the DPRK, nuclear weapons will do neither, because
of the readily available counter strategy
described. So in fact, what the rest of the world
- even Muammar Gaddafi - has been saying to the
North for years is correct: "Don't go nuclear,
it's not going to help you."
But this
raises a question: if not for strategic advantage,
why did the North proceed with its nuclear
program? And there can only be one answer: for the
same reason states such as Israel and South Africa
did - the need for self-preservation at any cost.
The North Korean regime has always had two
paramount goals: self-preservation, and
reunification under its own terms. When the DPRK
decided, during the (US president) Bill Clinton
administration, to secretly pursue uranium
enrichment (contrary to popular and exceedingly
ill-informed belief, this decision cannot be
blamed on George Bush, simply because he was not
yet president when the decision was made), it
faced a fork in the road: it could attain
self-preservation, but only by placing the second
goal in the highest jeopardy, since reintroduction
of nuclear weapons to the South, resulting in a
nuclear stalemate on the peninsula, would make
reunification militarily unattainable. And Kim
Jong-il didn't hesitate: he chose regime survival
over the hope of reunification.
This is
what is so ironic about the doltish reaction of
some South Korean youth to the North's nuclear
program, who cheered the North's warheads on the
grounds that "they are Korean": by going nuclear,
Kim Jong-il made a mockery of the DPRK's entire
ideology, which holds that reunification is the
highest goal of the nation. Kim's warheads prove,
once and for all, that his highest goal is to
continue holding disturbingly inappropriate film
festivals, eating authentic Italian pizza [3], and
fondling abducted South Korean movie actresses,
while outside his charmed circle, the desperate
population scrapes for roots and berries to
survive.
'Two kingdoms'
forever?
After almost 60 years of division,
Korea now finds itself at a crucial watershed. The
nuclear cat is well and truly out of the bag,
which means that the military option for
reunification has slipped from Seoul's fingers for
good; and will only be possible for Pyongyang if
the US pulls out of South Korea completely without
leaving any nuclear weapons behind - still a very
unlikely scenario, recent force cuts
notwithstanding. That leaves two options for
reunification: a negotiated settlement; and the
end-of-the-Soviet Union scenario outlined earlier.
Regarding the first option, one would like to
believe that a negotiated confederation of some
type is possible, but in the entire history of
Korea, no government has peacefully given up its
sovereignty.
That leaves the other option:
restore nuclear weapons to the South in full
awareness that this could start an arms race which
might lead to the collapse of the DPRK. One doubts
that the ROK government has the stomach to
actually go ahead with this. But who knows? If the
alternative is to accept a divided Korea until the
end of time, shouldn't any true Korean patriot be
willing to at least consider it?
Notes
[1] Skeptical
readers can refer to Alexandre Mansourov's
definitive article, published in 1995 in the Nonproliferation Review.
[2] See excerpts
[3] See I made pizza for Kim Jong-il
John Parker (BS, MS)
is a freelance writer based in Thailand.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
All material on this
website is copyright and may not be republished in any form without written
permission.
© Copyright 1999 - 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd.
|
|
Head
Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook St., Kowloon, Hong
Kong
Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
Asian Sex Gazette Korean Sex News
|
|
|
