Why Pyongyang Causes Anxiety : Unseen nuclear program threatens peninsula

The decision to suspend the planned withdrawal a few years hence of some thousands of American troops from South Korea will not prompt North Korea to abandon its nuclear-weapons program, nor was it intended to. It aims instead at underscoring how seriously Washington and Seoul regard the North Korean effort, even as it raises an implicit reminder that the two allies do not lack the military means to use force if need be to deal with the nuclear threat from the north. For now, though, the preferred modes of response rightly remain diplomatic and economic pressures. Both approaches must be stepped up.

THE THREAT: No one in the region is, or can afford to be, relaxed about Pyongyang’s nuclear program. China, the Soviet Union and Japan have all joined with Washington to express concern and to support the goal of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. U.S. policy to denuclearize Korea has been expressed in the decision to withdraw the tactical nuclear weapons that have been based in the south since the Korean War ended 38 years ago. South Korea has taken the commendable step of promising not to develop its own nuclear weapons. None of this has yet achieved what is so urgently being sought: agreement by Pyongyang to open its facilities to inspection, as it is obligated to do by its adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and to terminate the nuclear-weapons program it swears, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, it is not pursuing.

International anxieties are understandably deepened by North Korea’s sordid record of reckless, aggressive, terroristic behavior. In 1983, its assassins came very close to killing much of the Seoul Cabinet while it was on an official visit to Burma. In 1987 it carried out the in-flight bombing of a South Korean airliner that killed 115 people. Kim Il Sung, now nearing 80 and the world’s senior surviving communist dictator, has been the unchallenged leader of North Korea for more than 45 years, the focus of a personality cult whose excesses would probably have stunned even Josef Stalin or Mao Tse-tung. Yet the near-term stability of northeast Asia to a great extent rests on the decisions about nuclear weapons made by this one man, or his no-less-insular successors.

THE LESSON: Iraq has driven home the lesson that the world dare not underestimate the ability of determined authoritarian countries to acquire nuclear arms, at whatever costs to their deprived citizens. Former Defense Secretary Harold Brown has put it well: North Korea is “a rogue state that sees the changes in the rest of the world as a threat, not an opportunity to reform and prosper.” Rogue states are dangerous states, and the danger has to be met on an international scale. The United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency are the key vehicles to force the north to behave responsibly, and a full diplomatic and economic embargo should be among the approaches threatened. It hardly has to be added that the time for action is now, before North Korea’s growing nuclear potential becomes a frightening reality.