Strategic Comments  – Volume 15, Issue 5 – June 2009

North Korea's dangerous game

Nuclear test and missile launches go beyond usual brinkmanship 

In May, the United States Secretary of Defense called it ‘a harbinger of a dark future’. North Korea’s apparent progress on nuclear weapons and long-range missiles did not pose a direct military threat to the US, Robert Gates said at the eighth IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. However, the rogue state’s recent actions in testing its second nuclear bomb and firing off a volley of missiles did ‘give urgency’ to efforts to persuade it to change its direction.

Since April, the international community’s alarm and condemnation of North Korea’s actions have grown. Having fired a missile 3,200km over the Sea of Japan and into the Pacific Ocean, conducted a second nuclear test explosion, quit the Six-Party Talks on its nuclear programme, restarted its plutonium- production programme, expelled UN nuclear inspectors and repudiated the 56-year-old truce that ended the Korean War (see timeline, overleaf), the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was talking menacingly in early June of its ‘nuclear deterrent’ being available for a ‘merciless offensive’.

American scholars visiting North Korea this spring heard a consistent message that North Korea was no longer interested in normalising US relations unless on the basis of recognition as a nuclear-armed state.

The North Koreans may have believed that the best way to gain this was demonstrating that their nuclear devices and long-range missiles really work (see boxes above and below). The great fear is that they could miniaturise nuclear warheads to mount on missiles and then deliver such a weapon, but it is unlikely that they can currently achieve this (see box, next page).

A need to show strength is driven by external and internal vulnerabilities. Since 2008, North Korea has faced a firmer foe in conservative South Korean President Lee Myung Bak. Lee ended the ‘sunshine policies’ of his two predecessors and reduced the aid pledged in their summits with the North. His insistence on reciprocity has apparently prompted Pyongyang to do the opposite, lest it appear weak. North Korea broke off most communications and trade with the South, and threatened to close the Kaesong joint  industrial complex, just north of the DMZ (demilitarised zone) between the Koreas, unless wage payments were quadrupled. On 30 March, North Korea arrested a South Korean manager at the plant, shortly after seizing two American journalists near the Chinese border.

Succession politics are also surely in play. After the stroke suffered by Kim Jong Il in August 2008, the regime

needed to demonstrate externally and

In provoking a forceful Chinese condemnation, a Japanese assessment of new defence measures, and a realpolitik reaction from the Obama administration, North Korea may have overplayed its hand. The US, South Korea and Japan all emphasised that they would not accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state. This does not signal an intention to take military action to compel the North to give up its nuclear arsenal. Rather, it represents an American show of solidarity with Asian allies who fear that the US will exclusively pursue a containment strategy to at least keep North Korea from exporting nuclear weapons or materials.

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