Monday, January 17, 2011

A few thought's on North Korea's Nuclear Arsenal


"I think they"--North Korea--"will come to the point where they can no longer sustain the burden of military expenditures," Chun Yung-woo [South Korean nuclear envoy] told "PBS NewsHour.

Chun's statement above could be nothing more than a show of unconcern in the face of a growing North Korean nuclear potential. On the other hand though, it just might show a real understanding of North Korea's reason's for bringing China, the U.S., Russia, Japan and South Korea to the bargaining table: North Korea apparently needs everything....

North Korea's "Army First" policy appears, at least according to the news, to have made that country pre-existingly poor, even for a Marxist state, and a recent set of destructive floods cannot have helped them to rise above that poverty. Worse though, according to a report on NPR a few months ago, defectors from The People's Republic of That Place Next to China have reported corruption rife enough to be the most important source of income for most officials; the waste of even the few economic resources available for recovery must be vast!

North Korean leader Kim Il-Jong probably has his hands tied in dealing with these problems. No government, especially not an authoritarian one such as his, has ever seemed to find the real markets (read: the real material needs) of its society through legislation. The process is just too slow and clumsy. Worse, the large number of regulations and laws normally imposed on any effort at production in such a country will hinder and perhaps even halt any initiative for the re-development of even poorly directed production. The corruption is, of course, just the rancid icing on the out-of-date cake. It may actually be nothing more than a final superfluous barrier to an already impossible goal.

Some experts see Kim as too deluded to understand his country's situation or too self-serving to care, but he could also just fit Kissinger's description of many Asian leaders, a follower of Confucius attemting to rule though some self-perceived virtue and assuming the inevitability of a positive outcome given this trait. In any of these cases though--in fact in any case other than his complete recognition of his supposed situation--Jong will not go down without a fight, and given a North Korean nuclear capacity, that could be a hard fight indeed.

The fight, though, just might be a diplomatic one. Jong might be using the threat of developing nuclear weaponry as a means to drag the super-powers and the countries most vulnerable to his threat to the bargaining table to extort aid. Even a lunatic, a nepotist or a Son of Heaven would see the pragmatic benefit of such a plan, and it would spare him the expense of actually developing nukes.

Given this situation, we probably don't have to give in to his demands, though. With China as his backer, he, like China, may lack any real delivery system for his bombs. Furthermore, the mysterious launching of a missile from the West Coast last November may have been a message to Jong on our own capacity and willingness to vaporize his cities and defenses in the face of his supposed threat. Certainly he stopped rattling nuclear sabers after that launch. We can bargain with him, then, from a position of strength, and our position may only strengthen with time. Japan and South Korea may be somewhat afraid of North Korea, but China and Russia seem tired of the whole damn nation. The Russians are probably too busy with their own problems to turn their attention to China's half-pint, and since the breakdown of Korean forces brought the American Army to the Chinese border in 1950, the Chinese at least seem to have viewed their southern neighbor as a political liability. Rather than risk confrontation with the U.S. over the interests of another state then, China and Russia may be more likely to pressure their fellow communist state into being less of a headache. In other words, North Korea may end up trying to negotiate without any support for its interests other than its possibly disproven nuclear threat. She may be in no position to demand anything at all.

Just a few thoughts....