WASHINGTON: In 1994, when the Korean Peninsula last faced a crisis over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, two former officials in the first Bush administration wrote an influential opinion article in which they argued for “decisive action” — a military strike against a nuclear reprocessing facility designed to convert fuel rods into weapons-grade material.
The Clinton administration was already contemplating a military buildup in the region. The Pentagon produced a contingency plan for bombing the facilities, concluding that it could take them out quickly without widespread radiation.
Today, there is virtually no support for military action, even in an administration that has enshrined “preemption” as part of its national security strategy. Indeed, the prospects for a military solution have shrunk even as the administration asserts that North Korea likely has crossed the nuclear threshold and already may possess one or two nuclear weapons.
To some extent, the current Bush administration is hamstrung in its military options because it is consumed with planning a possible war against Iraq. But the administration, in its rhetoric and its policy choices, has also subtly changed the context for dealing with North Korea, mainly by already anointing North Korea as a nuclear power. This has allowed the administration to keep the focus on Iraq, which it acknowledges has unrealized nuclear ambitions, while minimizing the immediate threat from North Korea.
The Clinton administration, in effect, operated on the presumption that it was unclear whether North Korea had nuclear weapons but that the regime was so unstable and irrational it had to be kept firmly within the international system of nuclear non- proliferation. So officials leaped at the chance to engage with the North Korean government and negotiate a deal to freeze its nuclear programme.
The Bush administration, by contrast, states flatly that North Korea has nuclear weapons and appears to play down the possibility that it may soon acquire more. Indeed, even though North Korea just admitted to secretly cheating on its agreement with the Clinton administration, Bush officials appear to believe North Korea will act calmly and rationally in the coming months, responding to international pressure to meet the terms demanded by the United States for a resumption of dialogue.
“Don’t be quite so breathless,” Secretary of State Colin Powell cautioned one interviewer who expressed alarm on Sunday. “Yes, they have a large army and, yes, they have had these couple of nuclear weapons for many years, and if they have a few more, they have a few more, and they could have them for many years.”
The administration’s hardline on negotiations with North Korea, which it views as a morally bankrupt regime on the verge of collapse, has protected it from criticism from the right over what some might regard as a cavalier dismissal of the nuclear threat. “If (President Bill) Clinton had said that, they would have had his head,” said L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs, a public policy organization in Washington.
But, despite administration claims, it is not so clear-cut that North Korea is already a nuclear weapons power. In early 1993, the CIA began circulating an analysis that North Korea may have obtained enough fissile material to produce one or two bombs. But, even today, that analysis is the subject of dispute, with some experts dismissing it as little more than a “back of the envelope” calculation. It is based largely on the amount of plutonium that would be needed for a nuclear weapon and how much North Korea is estimated to have diverted from its nuclear facilities.
“There are people who don’t agree with that,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a research group. He said the possibility was 50-50, but that he believes the odds that North Korea has developed its nuclear weapons capability has increased over time.
The Clinton administration officially acknowledged the CIA analysis in 1997. But James Steinberg, Clinton’s deputy national security adviser and now vice president at the Brookings Institution, said it has not been confirmed that North Korea took the plutonium and produced two weapons. Asserting that North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and so it is less alarming if they produce more, “is a pretty slippery-slope argument,” he said.
An administration official said that, given that the CIA has calculated that North Korea has enough nuclear material for two weapons, it made little sense to set a new strategic threshold that needed to be crossed. “What does the number have to become before you say we’ve crossed a new line?” he asked.
Robert Einhorn, a top nonproliferation expert in the Clinton administration, said one or two bombs give a nation only the ability to suggest it has a doomsday bomb that it could use in response to an attack.
In 1994, the foreign policy community operated on the assumption that North Korea did not have nuclear weapons. The crisis then was prompted by North Korea’s refusal to allow inspections of its facilities at Yongbyon, its threat to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and then its decision to withdraw spent fuel rods without detailed international inspections.
Brent Scowcroft and Arnold Kanter, the former Bush officials who advocated a military strike, said it was unclear whether North Korea had enough plutonium to make nuclear weapons, but that without action, in six months it would have had enough material to produce up to eight nuclear weapons. “We must not let that happen,” they wrote.
Preparations for military action, however, did not progress very far before former President Jimmy Carter negotiated a freeze in the North Korean programme.
Testifying before Congress in early 1995, Paul Wolfowitz, now Bush’s deputy defence secretary, assumed, as did the Clinton administration, that North Korea had not yet obtained nuclear weapons. But he said the agreement did nothing to change the North Korean policies that are the cause of tensions on the peninsula.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.