North Korea Declares It Has Nukes, Withdraws from Talks
On behalf of hard-liners everywhere, I would like to thank Kim Jong Il for making this day possible, for this is the day George W. Bush will make the decisions that will send Kim Jong Il off to the ash heap of history.
Today, we get this double-whammy from Porky, starting in order of greatest significance:
North Korea on Thursday announced for the first time that it has nuclear arms . . . saying it needs the weapons as protection against an increasingly hostile United States.
The communist state’s pronouncement dramatically raised the stakes in the two-year-old nuclear confrontation and posed a grave challenge to President Bush, who started his second term with a vow to end North Korea’s nuclear program through six-nation talks.
“We … have manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration’s ever more undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the (North),” the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
None of this is really new, actually, except for North Korea’s open declaration of the fact, which makes it that much harder for everyone to ignore. Then, of course, is the fact that a statement of Fact X by the North Korean government doesn’t necessarily make Fact X true. But hey, at least we’re not going to have a long debate over who has weapons of mass destruction, right? No Condi Rice holding up satellite photos at the U.N. Building this time. George Bush ought to count his blessings; for now, the U.S. is furiously consulting its “allies.” Moving on:
North Korea will stay away from talks on its nuclear programme for an “indefinite period”, according to the nation’s foreign ministry. Pyongyang said there was no point in the talks since the US had termed North Korea an “outpost of tyranny”.
Someone must be smiling in Iran.
It may prove to be one the new century’s first great historical blunders.
In one ill-considered statement, Kim Jong Il has sawed open the two Gordian knots that had hobbled any decisive action against his regime: disbelief and diplomacy. By admitting his nuclear arsenal and eschewing further talks, Kim Jong Il has thrown the argument to those who would slip a noose beneath his chins and dispatch the Seventh Fleet to his coasts. George W. Bush will be spared the sight of Michel Barnier’s self-satisfied smirk while Condi Rice holds up satellite photographs and plays recorded intercepts in front of the General Assembly, Porter Goss by her side. Roh Moo-Hyun and Ban Ki-Moon have lost their chance to say that we could all have peace in our time, if only President Bush would do this-or-that. Kim Jong Il has given George W. Bush everything he needs except China’s abstention on the Security Council.
You have to wonder what the North Koreans were (or weren’t) thinking. I suppose it went something like this: the United States concluded that Libya had gotten its UF6 from the North Koreans and sent its NSC people to China with an ultimatum (something involving a Security Council referral, sanctions, a blockade, and/or new measures to fuel internal dissent). China forwarded the ultimatum to North Korea, and we all know how famously even-tempered the North Koreans are. It all seems rather more emotional than calculated.
Here is how a calculating tyrant would have analyzed this: America is paralyzed by doubts about evidence of WMD and whether we’ve made sufficient efforts at diplomacy before resorting to “regime change.” No matter the depths of evil to which a tyrant resorts, no matter how brazen the mendacity in which they engage, there will always be the tweed-and-turtleneck crowd, fools with Ph.D.’s who will apply the full force of their intellect to navigating a circuitous lane between the Scylla of damning facts and the Charibdis of obvious conclusions.
As any competent tryrant knows, turtlenecks are disproportionately represented in the U.S. State Department and on editorial pages. One such turtleneck is Nicholas Kristof, and the Damning Facts consist of North Korea’s violations of the 1994 Agreed Framework, which must the single worst piece of U.S. diplomacy since Yalta. Nick recently tried to review a book loaded with Damning Facts about North Korea, but on reading his piece, you are struck by how little of it is actually about the book itself. Confronted with the Damning Facts, Nick was overcome by the compulsion to defend his own position from the devastation they wrought upon it, and thus, a a book review became a lengthy defense of the Agreed Framework. Before you read it, refresh yourself on the timeline of how the Agreed Framework failed (yes, I wrote this):
A 1994 disarmament agreement with North Korea collapsed after the United States accused North Korea of violating the agreement, known as the Agreed Framework. The Clinton Administration, which signed the agreement with North Korea, had also suspected North Korea of violating it since at least 1999. In 2001, the new Bush Administration ordered a policy review, concluded that North Korea had violated the agreement, and halted deliveries of fuel oil to North Korea. North Korea then expelled all IAEA inspectors and unilaterally withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). U.S. negotiators say that their North Korean counterparts later admitted that Pyongyang had an undeclared uranium enrichment program, which would violate the North’s NPT obligations–obligations it had reaffirmed in the 1994 agreement. Pyongyang has since denied making the admission.
Here’s Nick’s inauspicious beginning to his argument:
The North did indeed freeze its plutonium program, but it secretly pursued another path to nuclear weapons by enriching uranium.
Sophisticated reader, meet Damning Fact 1, and go no further until I . . . hey! Look over there!
The Agreed Framework, of course, was not only about plutonium. It applied equally to uranium and plutonium. The greater point, however, goes to the heart of diplomacy itself, which is predicated upon the good faith of the parties. That’s especially true where there is really no means of enforcement if one party violates the terms and the other party is expected to overlook the other party’s violations. Since North Korea obviously lacked the will to comply and possessed (and still possesses) the means to conceal its noncompliance, what possible purpose can there be to deal with North Korea? Enter Obvious Conclusion A.
Meanwhile, the US didn’t live up to its promises either, for it never lifted sanctions or extended diplomatic recognition.
Wrong, Nick. The Agreed Framework required the U.S. to “move toward” lifting sanctions and extending diplomatic recognition, and the Clinton Administration clearly did both, despite our knowledge that North Korea was already violating the Agreed Framework.
Remember when Clinton eased trade sanctions? Or when Madeleine Albright sipped bubbly at Porky’s Taepodong show? Or when Clinton himself nearly made a last-minute visit to Pyongyang at the end of his administration (he opted to pardon lesser felons instead). President Bush ordered his policy review only after the Clinton Administration had willfully ignored Pyongyang’s violations and continued to give North Korea the benefit of a bargain it would not keep. What Kristof is really saying is that he expects the United States to tolerate North Korea’s cheating and serve up heaping platters of unilateral, asymmetical compliance with broken agreements.
Swallow that last bite of your lunch before you read this next bit:
The 1994 agreement is constantly cited by administration hawks as proof that there’s no point to reaching agreements with North Koreans, because they cheat. But such statements are made mostly by people who mix up the two ways to make nuclear weapons. In fact, the 1994 agreement achieved plenty.
Yes, plenty . . . for Kim Jong Il. Watch Nick try to navigate between Damning Fact 1 and Obvious Conclusion A. There’s no point in making deals with secretive despots who break their agreements, right? Which is such an obvious conclusion that only such unwashed unsophisticates as “administration hawks” would light upon it. Very well, then–there are two different ways to make nuclear weapons. Next he’ll probably tell us that there are two completely different ways to decontaminate urban blast zones, since that distinction is equally lost on me.
[The Agreed Framework] halted North Korea’s efforts to make nuclear weapons by using plutonium, although it’s true that it did secretly continue to enrich uranium. But that route is less threatening than the plutonium route, which makes a larger volume of weapons possible. If it weren’t for the 1994 agreement, North Korea would now have at least one hundred nuclear weapons, perhaps two hundred.
First, merely freezing North Korea’s reactor at Yongbyon left them in a position to turn the used fuel into six or eight bombs almost immediately the moment they chose to declare themselves justified by some perceived slight. They did that, of course, and frosted the cake by pulling out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. That last act by the North Koreans must be an uncomfortable excess for Mr. Kristof, given his attempt to paint a picture of morally equivalent violations of the Agreed Framework by both the U.S. and North Korea. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t mention it. Meet Damning Fact 2. Obvious Conclusion B is that North Korea wasn’t driven out of the loving arms of peaceful disarmament by Yankee stalling; its cheating and its withdrawal from the NPT were mapped milestones on the road to its premeditated nuclear ambitions.
Second, what exactly is the functional difference between North Korea with a hundred nukes, six nukes, or one nuke? The impact on our strategic options is functionally identical. If they have one nuke and one missile that can carry it to Seoul in five minutes, our forces in Korea are just as stalemated (yet another reason to get them out).
In a sense, the same is true of proliferation–have we really accomplished our minimal security objectives if North Korea only sells one nuke to a shadowy international syndicate whose customers may have no fear of mutually assured destruction, and who are perfectly content to skip the nuclear physics of fission and plant a dirty bomb at L’Enfant Plaza? It couldn’t be clearer how little protection the Agreed Framework bought us against proliferation. In the month or so since Kristof sailed his rickety raft between the swirling waters and the snapping jaws, we have learned that North Korea transferred enriched uranium to a shadowy network that then supplied it to Libya–and G-d knows who else–at a time when Libya was one of the world’s foremost suppliers and sponsors of terrorism. Meet Damning Fact 3.
Nor does the fact that North Korea sold enriched uranium instead of plutonium (as far as we know, at least) comfort me in the slightest. It’s simply not within our margin of tolerance that we allowed North Korea to cheat its way to having any nuclear capability. Bill Clinton gets most of the blame for knowingly let them do it, but if Nick wants to pull George H.W. Bush into the dock, too, then fine. None of it matters now, of course. All we can do at this point is stop them cold by some means not proven to be a complete failure.
Proven failures like buying more lies with cash that only fuels the crisis, f’rinstance.
Given that smarter despots have bought themselves many years of survival by playing on the very paralyzing doubts advanced by turtlenecks like Kristof, Jack Pritchard, and Selig Harrison, my question is this: why remove them? Out of sheer, blinding stupidity? We now find ourselves in an exceedingly dangerous situation, and that’s the bad news. No one can rule out North Korea taking some drastic action, but what they’re already doing now could well have the same medium-term consequences. The good news, if there is some, is that Kim Jong Il’s own inexplicably fortuitous idiocy has forced us to confront him before he becomes an even greater, more direct danger to the United States.