Korea’s nuclear tripwire

It is increasingly apparent North Korea does not intend to give up its aspirations for nuclear arms regardless of concessions by the United States, South Korea and Japan. Many U.S. intelligence analysts concur in this conclusion.

When this realization sinks in, policymakers in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo will need to forge new foreign policies and security postures to cope with a nuclear-armed North Korea. Even more, China will have to exert any influence it can over its roguish ally in Pyongyang.

For weeks, the North Koreans have grasped every opportunity imaginable to assert they will not return to the six-party negotiations in Beijing led by China and including, besides North Korea, the U.S., South Korea, Japan and Russia.

Among its latest pronouncements, a spokesman for Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry blamed the “hostile policy” of the United States for a stalemate in negotiations. He said North Korea — the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) — “felt no need to explain what it [hostile policy] meant.”

A diplomat in North Korea’s mission at the United Nations contended the U.S. was scheming to overthrow his government. “We cannot talk with the United States,” Han Song-ryol said, “whether it is in the six-nation talks or a bilateral dialogue.”

Nor does it matter who wins the American election in November — President Bush, the Republican who continues to advocating multinational talks with North Korea, or Sen. John Kerry, the Democrat who argues the United States should negotiate with North Korea bilaterally.

As Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency says: “The DPRK does not care who becomes president in the U.S.”

Living with a nuclear-armed North Korea will have immediate, midterm and long-range consequences.

In the immediate future, the U.S. will still be capable of massive retaliation if North Korea launches a nuclear or conventional attack against U.S. forces in Asia or its allies in South Korea or Japan. In that case, U.S. doctrine under Republican or Democratic administrations has long called explicitly for destruction of the North Korean regime.

Politically, North Korea will lose the bargaining leverage its nuclear programs have provided when negotiations end. Pyongyang will not get the diplomatic recognition from the U.S it urgently desires, and probably not from Tokyo. Reconciliation with Seoul may be set back.

Economically, sanctions against Pyongyang will remain and the aid and trade North Korea desperately needs for its starving people will not be forthcoming from the U.S. or Japan.

In the midterm, the international nuclear nonproliferation effort to prevent the spread of nuclear arms will be dealt another blow. Israel, Pakistan and India have already damaged that effort; Iraq’s nuclear plans, whatever they were, have stopped but Iran’s nuclear plans are believed to be moving ahead.

South Korea, which sought nuclear arms in the 1970s but was dissuaded by the United States, may reconsider. A dozen years ago, when North Korea’s nuclear plans became known, senior South Korean officials said, as one put it: “If they have them, we must have them.”

Nuclear arms in North Korea will undoubtedly stimulate more discussion in Japan about obtaining nuclear arms. But that’s as far as it is likely to go since Japan still has a strong nuclear allergy, the legacy of the two atomic bombs the U.S. used against it in World War II. Moreover, basing such weapons, most likely at sea, would be difficult and costly.

The key element precluding Japan from going nuclear is American’s protective umbrella. The U.S. may need to reassure Japan it will be secure without nuclear arms of its own.

The long-term consequences of a nuclear-armed North Korea are the most frightening as Pyongyang could easily market those weapons in terrorist networks in the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and maybe Latin America.

Tracing and deterring sales shipments would be harder than discouraging a North Korean attack on South Korea. Targets in North Korea are known and have been marked. Discovering air or sea shipments of nuclear-weapons components would be next to impossible.

Coping with that threat will be more a chore for China than the United States and its allies. China shares the U.S., South Korean and Japanese aversion to seeing terrorists allied with pirates in the South China Sea to endanger their oil lifeline from the Middle East or shipping lanes to export markets everywhere.

Richard Halloran is a free-lance writer and former New York Times correspondent based in Honolulu.