Summit Shoots a Hole in Missile Defense Argument

For U.S. advocates of a robust national missile defense system, the images emanating from the historic Korean summit spell trouble.

Photos and TV footage from the summit show a smiling, relaxed North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, hosting his South Korean counterpart, Kim Dae Jung. More important, they depict the reclusive Communist ruler acting in an apparently rational manner.

Kim Jong Il’s behavior at the summit in Pyongyang, his nation’s capital, cuts against the grain of a key argument used to justify such a defense system’s speedy deployment: the need to counter a potential nuclear threat wielded by an irrational, unpredictable North Korean leader so obsessed with damaging the United States that he’d be willing to risk his own--and his country’s--annihilation.

Reinforcing the inclination to reevaluate the enigmatic Kim, the world’s first extended look at the North Korean leader comes amid a series of recent diplomatic initiatives by Pyongyang seemingly aimed at ending decades of political isolation.

Since the beginning of the year, North Korea has normalized diplomatic relations with Italy and Australia. It is preparing to host Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in the first state visit by a Russian leader. Last month, Kim traveled to Beijing, his first publicized trip outside North Korea since assuming power after the 1994 death of his father, Kim Il Sung.

“It becomes much harder now to point to this guy as an irrational nut and say that’s why we need a national missile defense right now,” said Jon Wolfsthal, an arms control specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

“A lot of politicians and people in the military are very concerned about North Korea, and there is good reason for this,” Wolfsthal said. “But if the threat associated with his behavior diminishes, then the zeal and pressure for national missile defense will diminish too.”

President Clinton is expected to decide later this year whether to order development of a limited national missile defense system consisting of 100 Alaskan-based interceptors designed to attack missiles approaching the U.S. The threat of a possible North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile attack--a possibility that U.S. intelligence reports say could emerge as early as 2005--is an oft-cited factor driving the decision-making timetable.

If Clinton gives the go-ahead, construction of the system could start next spring.

The images of a smiling, seemingly accommodating Kim represent the latest in a series of difficulties encountered by advocates of the system, labeled NMD. Last month, publicly disclosed details from a CIA-led secret report being written for the White House suggested that NMD could trigger a domino-style nuclear buildup, beginning with China and quickly followed by India and Pakistan.

The report raised the prospect that NMD might lead to a net reduction of security for the United States.

America’s European allies have become more vocal in their opposition to a missile defense system they fear might leave them unprotected and spell the end of the Atlantic alliance. Even before this week’s Korean summit, many European security specialists argued that the idea of the system is based on an inflated assessment of the possibility that an attack might occur.

No one is suggesting that the regional and strategic threats posed by North Korea have vanished.

“These are the most totalitarian people on the face of the Earth,” said James R. Lilley, former U.S. ambassador to South Korea and China. “They were before the summit, they still are today and will continue to be tomorrow.”

Lilley and others noted that the summit touched neither on the controversial North Korean ballistic missile program nor on the mass of the regime’s troops deployed along the border dividing the two Korean states.

“I don’t think we see in this a seed of anything that would change the possibility of a missile threat to the United States that we would have to deal with,” said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

NMD advocates stressed that North Korea is not the only state presenting a potential missile threat to the U.S.

“Iran is moving forward smartly, and the worry about accidental launches from Russia and China are immediate threats,” said Baker Spring, an arms control specialist at the Heritage Foundation, a political think tank known for its conservative views.

Even so, some experts predict that missile defense advocates will find it harder in the wake of this week’s summit to invoke North Korea as the prime reason for rapid deployment of a costly system still plagued by technological question marks.

Expressing a view held by others, Lilley said he believes NMD advocates have used North Korea as a justification for building a system that in reality is aimed against China.

“We don’t want to upset the Chinese, so everyone talks about North Korea,” he said. “It’s not going to be as easy to do that as it has been.”