One year after the North Korea nuclear crisis erupted, analysts expecting an early end to north-east Asia’s latest geo-political nightmare are thin on the ground.
On the positive side, China — North Korea’s one close ally and champion — triggered hope by stepping up to its responsibilities as Asia’s regional power and brokering multiparty talks in Beijing in August.
On the negative account, the United States has yet to convince regional players that it wants to deal with the regime and North Korea has already boasted of breaking one undertaking made at the Beijing talks — not to escalate the crisis further.
North Korea’s latest claims this week that it was making atomic bombs after reprocessing 8 000 spent nuclear fuel rods were hard to verify and met with considerable scepticism.
Koh Yoo-Hwan of Seoul’s Dongguk University said the North Korean sabre-rattling was an attempt to win concessions ahead of negotiations.
”North Korea wants to influence the ongoing policy consultations among South Korea, the US and Japan on this issue and stir South Korea and Japan to press the US to soften its stance,” he said.
Washington has maintained a hard line since James Kelly, the US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, travelled to Pyongyang in October 2002.
Experts believed he was packing in his travel bag a new paradigm for better US-North Korean relations. President George Bush’s so-called ”bold” initiative would offer Pyongyang an end to decades of mutual hostility by removing economic and political sanctions in return for North Korea’s help in eliminating weapons of mass destruction and cutting back on its heavy deployment of conventional forces.
Pressed by European and Asian allies, Washington went ahead with Kelly’s visit despite disquieting intelligence indicating that North Korea had embarked on a nuclear weapons programme based on enriched uranium.
This would violate a nuclear freeze agreed between Washington and North Korea in 1994 that ended a previous North Korean attempt to build atomic bombs through a plutonium-producing plant at Yongbyon, 90km north of Pyongyang.
Even so, a mood of optimism accompanied Kelly as he flew to Pyongyang on October 3 2002. As instructed by the Bush administration, he duly confronted the North Koreans on the enriched uranium suspicions.
According to US officials, Kelly was stunned when North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok-Joo blurted out an ”aggressive” verbal admission.
North Korea has denied that admission was ever made, but has since boasted of a much more dangerous nuclear game.
Responding to the US decision to stop the supply of emergency fuel oil to the energy-starved regime in November, North Korea began a strategy of regularly raising the stakes in the crisis.
That culminated in North Korea’s announcement on the eve of the anniversary of Kelly’s visit that it had begun making bombs from weapons-grade plutonium obtained by reprocessing 8 000 spent fuel rods stored at Yongbyon since 1994 under monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Those rods can yield enough fuel for half a dozen atomic bombs within months, whereas the CIA reportedly says the uranium-based programme would take years to produce weapons-grade fuel.
In the absence of international inspectors, the world is blind to what really goes on at Yongbyon. Spy satellites and air surveillance flights yield an imperfect picture.
One senior South Korean official suggested recently that the whole nuclear crisis could be a brilliant North Korean bluff, the biggest hoax in the history of international diplomacy.
It is known that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il was highly praised in Pyongyang for skilled nuclear brinkmanship that won billions of dollars in aid from Washington in 1994 in return for promising to mothball the state’s previous nuclear weapons drive, a promise he nonetheless broke.
”Nobody knows precisely what North Korea has or doesn’t have,” said Professor Yu Suk-Ryul, a North Korean expert here.
The US believes North Korea has already produced one or two nuclear bombs from weapons-grade plutonium diverted prior to the 1994 nuclear freeze.
Many South Korean officials are convinced that North Korea, once it secures economic and political concessions, will agree to dismantle its nuclear threat. Some independent experts say North Korea has come to view nuclear weapons as its only guarantee of survival and will push for a big pay-out for an empty promise to scrap them.
They argue that if North Korea, as it claims, is producing atomic bombs from reprocessing spent fuel rods, it can add six more to the two it already may possess within months, then bargain away one or two, while still holding a sizeable and growing nuclear arsenal as an insurance policy.
North Korea says it believes in a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, but needs nuclear weapons to counter a plan by Washington to invade the Stalinist state under the new US military doctrine introduced a year ago permitting pre-emptive strikes on would-be weapons proliferators.
From the outset of the crisis, Pyongyang has held out for a non-aggression pact as a first step before responding to Washington’s demand for a complete and verifiable dismantling of its nuclear weapons drive.
Bush has vowed never to bow to nuclear blackmail, but again Washington is under pressure from regional allies and China and repeated attempts by the Stalinist state to ratchet up the crisis.
”Over the past year not a great deal has changed in those positions,” said Professor Yu. ”Few people expect an end to all this any time soon.” — Sapa-AFP