Opinion - News Analysis   

North Korea and a new nuclear order

P.S. Suryanarayana

Pyongyang's October 9 action may turn out to be the first step towards a "multi-polar nuclear world."

Photo: AP

In this September 13, 2005, file photo, negotiators for the six-party talks over North Korea's nuclear crisis, from left, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Alexeyev, Director-General of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau Kenichiro Sasae, Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister Wu Dawei, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, North Korean Vice-Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, and South Korea's Deputy Foreign Minister Song Min-soon, join hands before the start of a banquet meeting in Beijing.

NORTH KOREA'S nuclear weapon test on October 9 galvanised the United Nations Security Council into making efforts to preserve and protect the existing non-proliferation order. Faced with this stark reality, Pyongyang announced on November 1 its willingness to rejoin the stalled six-party talks on denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.

The punch line in these talks, expected to restart later this month or in December, will be that the United States, the high priest of nuclear non-proliferation, and China, the proactive host of these parleys, do not accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state. This has been amplified by the U.S., after China brokered on October 31 a diplomatic breakthrough that might "soon" revive the six-party process. While China did so by holding informal talks with the U.S. and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), the others in this process — South Korea, Japan, and Russia — are also opposed to accepting Pyongyang as a nuclear-armed player.

The Security Council had, in a unanimous vote on October 14, imposed arms-related and financial sanctions on the DPRK. Thereafter, with the U.S. authenticating the DPRK's test as a genuine nuclear detonation, Pyongyang reaffirmed on October 17 that it viewed these sanctions as "a declaration of war."

However, the U.S. has now emphatically told the DPRK that these "U.N. sanctions stay." The message is that Pyongyang's decision to re-engage its interlocutors in dialogue does not nullify either the U.N. sanctions or indeed the joint statement that the six parties had agreed to in September 2005.

The centrepiece of the joint statement is North Korea's commitment to dismantle its nuclear-weapons programme in a complete, verifiable, and irreversible fashion. In the context of a possible resumption of the six-party process, some interlocutors such as the U.S. and Japan have emphasised that North Korea needs to abandon its programme and also eliminate its stockpile of atomic weapons.

Rice's `shuttle diplomacy'

A related question is whether North Korea will keep open its "option" of conducting more nuclear-weapon tests. Shortly after the first test, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice completed a round of "shuttle diplomacy" across northeast Asia, engaging the DPRK's neighbours such as China and South Korea besides Japan. When she was still in the region, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il received China's State Councillor and Special Envoy Tang Jiaxuan. It soon transpired that Mr. Kim did indicate to China his inclination to refrain from a second nuclear test without giving up his country's rights in this regard.

The political overtones of Pyongyang's confrontation with Washington cannot be missed, regardless of the possibility of a revival of the six-party process. The U.S. was the first to develop nuclear weapons, and it is still the only power to have used them in war. However, the U.S. has cast itself in recent decades as the chief non-proliferation activist in regard to all weapons of mass destruction (WMD). And, the U.S. is by far the dominant player in the present "nuclear order." In these circumstances, Pyongyang says its chief adversary is the U.S., although the two had in 1994 entered into an essentially bilateral Framework Agreement. That accord, in tatters for several years now, centred on the issue of compensating the DPRK for giving up its "right" to develop or acquire and deploy nuclear weapons.

In political terms, the genesis of the DPRK's quest for nuclear weapons can be traced back to the1950-53 Korean War.

It was fought in the shadow of the unimaginable devastation the U.S. had inflicted on Japan by using the atom bomb twice during the Second World War. The Korean War ended in an armistice accord as different from a political settlement or a peace treaty. That outcome is also a critical and historical factor in the DPRK's quest for an atomic arsenal.

The political division of the ethnically homogeneous Korean peninsula crystallised in the wake of the 1950-53 War. And, for most part of the Cold War that ended by the early 1990s, the DPRK witnessed in its neighbourhood a phenomenal rise of American military power. The U.S.-Japan alliance and the Washington-Seoul military ties have, to this day, exposed North Korea to an acute sense of vulnerability, especially after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

China's rise

At the same time, Pyongyang has not been able to comprehend the global significance of China's rapid rise, in recent decades. Notable, in spite of this, are China's massive doses of energy-related and humanitarian help to North Korea, which has by all accounts bungled on its economic front while building up its military profile. While the latest U.N. sanctions do not apply to purely humanitarian help, such niceties are not of great relevance to Pyongyang's nuclear arms calculations.

China, as a rising global power, has made no secret of its commitment to non-proliferation. Relevant to this commitment is the fact that China was the first nuclear power to have pledged itself ab initio to the principle of no-first-use of atomic weapons. However, the DPRK under-estimated China's non-proliferation agenda and tested the atom bomb in a geopolitical region where Washington is recalibrating its ties with Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul.

Not surprisingly in this context, China has clarified its position after first disfavouring the U.S.-sponsored U.N. proposal that cargo to and from North Korea be inspected to prevent it from proliferating WMD. The U.S. tends to view these U.N. sanctions as an endorsement of the controversial Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). So, China's Permanent Representative at the U.N., Wang Guangya, noted, on October 16, that different countries would carry out their relevant tasks under the U.N. sanctions in different ways.

Authoritative Chinese sources say Beijing, if it were to accept the PSI-like cargo inspections, will then be left with "no diplomatic room" to continue addressing the current North Korean nuclear crisis. Nor is it in the interest of the larger international community to lose such "influence" as China has now exerted over the DPRK in persuading it to agree to resume the dialogue process.

What are the geopolitical consequences of North Korea's nuclear test? The DPRK'S action serves as a reminder to the U.S. that it can now explore, more usefully than before, its own option of adopting a policy of "non-containment" towards China. The relevant reasoning is that the U.S. now needs China's help more than before to solve the North Korean nuclear crisis.

On a related front, Seoul is seeking fresh guarantees from the U.S. about its nuclear umbrella for South Korea. For the present, Official Japan has ruled out plans to take to the nuclear weapons path for neutralising the DPRK. But the issue is gaining political resonance among sections of the Japanese people.

In this complex situation, Pyongyang's October 9 action may turn out to be the first step towards a "multi-polar nuclear world" as envisioned by Harvard Professor Stephen Peter Rosen and others, who have begun to see the emergence of a "post-proliferation" global order.

To rein in North Korea as a state with no viable nuclear weapons, the U.S. will need to refashion its existing nuclear umbrellas that protect Japan and South Korea, two countries of prime interest to Pyongyang. Alternatively, will the U.S. settle for the "second best" course of just preventing the DPRK from exporting its nuclear arms know-how and hardware to other players? The implication in this scenario will be a recognition of North Korea's current status as a "grey-zone" nuclear power.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Open the A 9, with safeguards
A hopelessly lost cause
Peoples' experiments in politics
North Korea and a new nuclear order
Academics as spies to combat terror?
Law-abiding, yet treated as criminals
Corrections and clarifications
Serious lapse
Appalling
The CO trouble
Shocking incident

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu