Making sense of N Korea’s bombshell

So why should North Korea think that it can get away with nuclear blackmail with a hardline US? North Korea had been looking for nuclear technologies for a long time but, until the 1980s, there was little evidence it was aiming at military uses. There was no need to do so as the security agreements with the USSR and China provided an adequate nuclear umbrella. But the dismantling of the Cold War power structure and changes within the country in the late 80s contributed to triggering Kim Il-Sung’s ambitions for nuclear weapons.

North Korea’s ruling elite soon realised how it could use nuclear weapons as a tool to attract US attention. It saw the high priority Washington placed on the nuclear issue and realised the leverage its nuclear weapons would give it against the US to gain substantive economic concessions. At the same time, it also hoped to bring nuclear power plants on line to alleviate its energy problems. The Agreed Framework Accord (AFA) was signed between the US and North Korea in October 1994, after a period of high tension. The US negotiators hoped that the accord would serve as a framework, not only to freeze North Korea’s existing nuclear programme but also as a means to denuclearise the peninsula. Instead, its implementation has actually set in motion a series of new tensions, not only between the US and North Korea but also between the US and South Korea. This is because the Clinton government was only trying to seek a temporary solution to the crisis until the North Korean regime collapsed — of which it was convinced. Consequently, the AFA was a very short sighted and flawed agreement.

To begin with, it was very limited in scope, addressing only the production of the fissile material at Yongbyon and Taechon but not the weaponisation of fissile material that North Korea may have produced earlier. Nor were US concerns about North Korea’s exports of ballistic missiles and chemical weapons to Iraq, Iran and other regimes of concern addressed. Also, while the agreement included clear timetables for action relating to the light water reactor(LWR) project, it did not link the nuclear aspects to other actions called for in the agreement, like a dialogue between North and South Korea.

One of the provisions of the AFA was that North Korea would be supplied with two pressurised-water-type LWRs for generating electricity in lieu of its abandoning the existing graphite-moderated nuclear research reactors. However, these LWRs were not suitable for the existing transmission and distribution system in North Korea. This required updating of the existing system to ensure a stable source of backup power. Likewise, the total capacity of generation of the existing grid is too small to support two nuclear units of 1000-plus megawatts of electricity (mwe) each.

Reconstruction of the grid is currently estimated to cost a further $3-5 billion. Moreover, just installing a large power plant without addressing other related problems like fuel supply, improving the efficiency of the equipment, plugging the transmission and distribution problem, training its labour, working out the modalities of how North Korea was going to meet the operating expenses, and so on, was sure to leave a lot of issues unresolved.

The question to ask, therefore, is that if North Korea can get so much more by simply ironing out the flaws in the AFA, why should it opt for a policy that is bound to annoy the US? There are two possibilities. One is that North Korea has really been caught out and has decided to own up in the hope that this is a better strategy. The other is that it is the US which, having bracketed North Korea along with Iraq, is now seeking to broaden its justification for attacking Iraq. The truth will be known in a few weeks.

(The writer is at the North East Asian Studies, JNU)