By Gwynne Dyer, ContributorAT A meeting between North Korean and US diplomats in Beijing last week, North Korean delegate, Ri Gun, told US Assistant Secretary of State, James Kelly, that Pyongyang already has nuclear weapons, and has almost finished reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods from its reactor at Yongbyon, which would give it enough fissile material for half a dozen more.
Not only does North Korea have nuclear weapons, but it is prepared to test them or pass them on to other countries, or maybe even to terrorists, if Washington does not end the crisis on Pyongyang's terms. "We can't dismantle them," Ri told Kelly. "It's up to you whether we do a physical demonstration or transfer them." President George W. Bush immediately accused North Korea of "blackmail" but what can he do about it?
IRAQ WAS EASY
Iraq was easy, because its army had never been rebuilt after the catastrophic defeat of 1991, because Kuwait was willing to let the US use its territory as a launching pad for the invasion, and above all because Iraq had no 'weapons of mass destruction'. The accusations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were needed to provide a legal pretext for the attack and persuade the US public that it was necessary, but Mr Bush must have known they probably didn't exist or at least, that was what his own intelligence services were telling him, particularly regarding any Iraqi nuclear capacity.
North Korea, by contrast, has the world's third-biggest army, and consists mostly of mountains, not flat desert. There are US bases in South Korea, but it is most unlikely that South Korean President, Roh Moo Hyun, would let the US launch a war from there that could devastate the whole Korean peninsula. And North Korea is now openly saying it has nuclear weapons, and what does the US plan to do about it?
What IS the United States going to do about it?
The first thing it must do is figure out what is going on under the bouffant hairdo of North Korea's diminutive 'Dear Leader', Kim Jong II. Why did he have his diplomats tell Kelly last October that North Korea had a nuclear weapons programme and now that it has actual nukes?
There is little doubt that Kim was
cheating on the 1994 'Agreed Framework' deal that ended the last crisis over North Korean nuclear weapons. He shut down the plutoni un-fuelled reactor at Yongbyon at that time in return for free shipments of oil and a promise by the US, South Korea and Japan to build two new pressurised-water reactors that do not produce much in the way of weapons-grade material. He even admitted inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to check that the Yongbyon reactor stayed shut. But he did simultaneously start up a secret uranium enrichment programme (which does not need a reactor to produce fissile material).
GROWING SUSPICIONS
By 1998 Washington's suspicions were growing, but President Clinton's administration did not panic because nobody thought the programme was anywhere near to success. The panic began fifteen months ago, when President Bush included North Korea in his 'axis of evil' hit-list and it was a panic in Pyongyang, not in Washington.
We know from ex-White House speech-writer David Frum's tell-all account that North Korea got included in the 'axis of evil' almost by accident: there were two Muslim countries, Iraq and Iran, on the list already, and they just needed a non-Muslim country for 'balance'. But in Pyongyang, it felt like a death sentence and when it became clear last autumn that the US was going to execute the sentence on Iraq, North Korea went into overdrive. It deliberately revealed its secret uranium-enrichment programme to Washington.
Since then, it has expelled the IAEA inspectors, withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, started up the Yongbyon reactor again, and now claims to have actual nuclear weapons. Should we believe it? Probably not.
So far as US intelligence knows, North Korea's attempts to import high-grade aluminum tubing have been thwarted, and without them the expensive and technically demanding uranium route is unlikely to have produced any actual nuclear weapons yet. Yongbyon has just been restarted, and satellite surveillance show no sign that North Korea has begun reprocessing those 8,000 fuel rods as Mr. Ri claims. The probability is high that the whole thing is a bluff driven by North Korea's fear that it faces a US attack.
So what should the US do? Nothing hasty. Both sides have played this very badly, but it remains a problem that can be sorted out by diplomacy.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
