SINGAPORE: Wing tip to wing tip, North Korean fighters buzzed a lumbering US reconnaissance plane in an airborne encounter over the Sea of Japan. If the foes had touched, virtually no channels exist to calm the ensuing crisis.
That means one false move in the brinkmanship game could escalate into a full-blown conflict. Such a move was a hair’s breadth away when the North Korean jets sped within 50 feet (15 metres) of a huge US air force RC-135 reconnaissance plane on Sunday.
“This is a very serious game,” said Ralph Cossa, president of the Pacific Forum CSIS based in Hawaii. “They wanted to send a message and they certainly got everyone’s attention.”
The fighters intercepted the US plane over the Sea of Japan while shadowing it in the closest encounter since the North shot down a US EC-121 in the same area in 1969, killing 31 people.
The incident — a whisker away from disaster in the air in one of the world’s most militarized regions — followed repeated assertions by North Korea’s state media that RC-135s had been flying sorties inside its airspace.
But the rare encounter took place 240 kms off the coast of North Korea, well outside its airspace. It marked an unusually long excursion for the North Korean fighters, which seldom venture so far because of fuel shortages and the issue of whether pilots can be trusted to come home, said Korea experts.
“This is another way of escalating,” said Cossa. “(North Korean leader) Kim Jong-il feels he must do something to get back on the front pages.
“They are clearly trying to keep attention riveted on them.”
But such attention-seeking could be very costly.“There would be incredible pressure on (US President George W.) Bush to take military action to respond if American lives were lost,” said Cossa.
And his opponent is an isolated communist state racing to make nuclear weapons and known to possess biological and chemical arms.
LOSING CONTROL: North Korea has said repeatedly that the crisis sparked by its nuclear ambitions can be resolved only by bilateral negotiations with the United States. Washington says it will talk, but only after Pyongyang dismantles its nuclear programmes.
In 2001, airborne acrobatics killed a Chinese top gun and forced the US spy plane he clipped into an emergency landing on a Chinese runway. Diplomats leapt into action and solved the crisis.
No formal means exist to talk with isolated North Korea.
Still, the reclusive state may be increasingly desperate to push the United States into talks before it crosses what analysts say could be a “red line” for Washington by reopening a nuclear reprocessing plant that could develop weapons.
What analysts say is unclear is whether North Korea really wants talks with Washington and economic rewards for its bad behaviour or to drive a wedge between the United States and South Korea just as a new president takes office who espouses his predecessor’s “sunshine policy” towards the North.
“This is a war dance,” said Andrew Lankov of the China and Korea Centre at the Australian National University.
“The North Koreans want to get something and I believe their real demand is to get back the crude-oil shipments and to get the light-water reactors as soon as possible,” he said, noting work on the reactors promised by the United States as a way to end a previous nuclear crisis in 1994 was still going on.
North Korea expert Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington says the younger Kim may believe following his father’s game may convince the United States to revive the 1994 Agreed Framework that ended that crisis.—Reuters
