Does North Korea Really Have Nuclear Weapons?

Interesting article in the January/February Foreign Affairs magazine concerning the possibility that Washington may be wrong about North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, much the same way they were wrong about Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of WMD.

Much has been written about the North Korean nuclear danger, but one crucial issue has been ignored: just how much credible evidence is there to back up Washington’s uranium accusation? Although it is now widely recognized that the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the intelligence data it used to justify the invasion of Iraq, most observers have accepted at face value the assessments the administration has used to reverse the previously established U.S. policy toward North Korea.

A review of the available evidence suggests that this is just what happened. Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did on Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons. This failure to distinguish between civilian and military uranium-enrichment capabilities has greatly complicated what would, in any case, have been difficult negotiations to end all existing North Korean nuclear weapons programs and to prevent any future efforts through rigorous inspection.

The writer of the article Selig Harrison also believes the Bush Administration created the nuclear crisis to prevent a warming of relations between South Korea and Japan with North Korea. Any warming of relations between the countries would mean that North Korea policy would be driven by those two countries more than the United States.

American anxieties only grew, however, when, on September 17, 2002, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Pyongyang to discuss the normalization of relations–a visit that Japan had been quietly exploring for more than nine months without telling the United States. Washington, in fact, found out about the trip only three weeks before it occurred, when Koizumi presented the upcoming visit as a fait accompli to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Koizumi did not ask for U.S. permission to go to North Korea, and he refused to call off the trip even after Armitage revealed Washington’s suspicions about a secret North Korean uranium program.

Faced with the prospect that the North Korea policies of South Korea and Japan had slipped out of its control, the Bush administration “saw a real possibility that its options on the [Korean] peninsula would increasingly be driven by the policy agendas of others,” wrote Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College in the summer of 2003. Plans for Kelly’s visit to Pyongyang were accelerated, and his showdown with North Korean leaders came less than three weeks after Koizumi’s meeting with Kim Jong Il.

I do have to admit that the timing of the crisis was a little strange considering Koizumi had just visited the country. When the crisis first materialized, I thought it was really weird because the US had another crisis on its hands with North Korea at the same time it was preparing for war with Iraq. I’m making an assumption here that the US must of knew about the nuclear cheating for a while before going public with it, so Mr. Harrison at least offers a theory about why the information was made public at that time and that was to keep strong Washington influence in all North Korea policy.

I tend to disagree, I think the crisis came up at the time to strengthen the pre-emptive strike doctrine to eliminate thug dictators trying to aquire WMD before they get them. Kim Jong Il already had them so we can’t do much with him but Saddam hasn’t gotten nukes yet so we need to take him out now. I think any concerns about influence in North Korea policy was secondary at best.

The article continues on to make a strong argument that North Korea’s nuclear program is not as advanced as the public is made to believe. I only hope Mr. Harrison is right about this because a nuclearized North Korea is a scary proposition. The upcoming year should prove interesting on how this issue is resolved.

The author of the article Selig Harrison is Director of the Asia Program and Chairman of the Task Force on U.S. Korea Policy at the Center for International Policy. He is also a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of Korean Endgame. What that all means I don’t know but I assume he is a pretty smart guy so check out his article and judge for yourself.