WASHINGTON, Oct 10: Experts in the United States fear that North Korea’s nuclear test could set off a chain reaction, encouraging other nations to follow the path.
“This could be the event that tips the scales, that sends a nuclear chain reaction careening though the region and around the world,” says Joe Cirincione, who advises the US Congress on national security and nuclear proliferation.
The detonation “automatically puts Japan into a defensive, military mode and will then set off a chain reaction,” warns Dr Jungmin Seo, University of Hawaii’s Professor of Political Science in Asia.
David Rapkin, Associate Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, believes that Japan might start its own nuclear programme.
“If Japan has nuclear weapons, the Chinese also may feel the need to build up their own which would cause India and then Pakistan wanting to upgrade their nuclear arsenal,” says Prof Rapkin. “Anyway you look at it, the chain reaction could be disastrous.”
Rev Dr Samuel Kobia, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, sent a letter to the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council asking them to ensure that the North Korean test does not lead to “a chain reaction involving Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and possibly others such as Indonesia and Australia.”
Dr Seo fears that the test could also revive a cold war scenario. The North Korean move can “trigger Chinese military… kinds of modernization, investment, everything. That will trigger American hardline against China,” says Dr Seo. “The worst scenario for North Korea is the US, Japan, South Korea, and China having the same position.”
These and other commentators, appearing in news talk shows, point out that South Korea had a nuclear programme in the 1970s which was stopped under US pressure. The North Korean test can encourage the South to start recalculating its nuclear options.
Taiwan, similarly, had a programme which it abandoned. Japan is sitting on top of about 23 tons of weapon-usable plutonium, enough for about 8,000 nuclear weapons.
The commentators, however, believe that it’s still not too late to stop this chain reaction. There’s still a possibility of nudging North Korea back from the nuclear brink through ‘positive persuasion’. “There is no military option here, any strike in the Korean peninsula risks peninsular-wide war, hundreds of thousands of South Koreans would die in the first few hours of that war,” says Mr Cirincione.
He believes that economic sanctions will also fail to coerce North Korea into capitulation. The US, he says, can make Pyongyang reconsider the nuclear option by not coercing a surrender but by prodding North Korea back to negotiating table.
“We might use the offices of the new UN secretary-general, a South Korean, Ban Ki-Moon, who’s offered to mediate. Let him. That might be the kind of face-saving device that the North Koreans would be open to.”
Dr Cirincione advises the US to involve the Chinese and the South Koreans in persuading the North Koreans back to the table.
Other commentators note that North Korea has long wanted bilateral talks with the US. The Bush administration, however, forced them to back out by imposing sanctions.
“You can’t have diplomacy with one foot on the brake and one on the gas. You’ve got to end this divide, and you’ve got to end it now,” says Dr Cirincione.
