North Korea: Peace Treaty or Nuclear State?
Apr 18, 2003
stratfor.biz
Summary
Just days before entering talks with the United States in China, North Korean officials have said they are in the "final phase" of reprocessing more than 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods and warned that the lesson the country learned from the war in Iraq was that sovereignty could be protected only by having a "powerful physical deterrent." The statements are an early signal of Pyongyang's bargaining position in the talks with Washington: If North Korea cannot gain a formal peace accord or a nonaggression treaty with the United States, it will consider formal declaration of nuclear status.
Analysis
A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said April 18 that Pyongyang is "successfully reprocessing more than 8,000 spent fuel rods at the final phase … after resuming our nuclear activities from December last year." The statement, carried by the official (North) Korean Central News Agency, also touched on the Iraq war, saying the lesson learned was that to prevent war and preserve national sovereignty, "it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent force only."
The comments come days before North Korean and U.S. officials are set to meet in China to resume long-stalled talks on North Korea's nuclear program. Pyongyang's apparent warning is an early signal of its bargaining position during the talks. North Korea's leadership has laid out two paths that can guarantee its security: a formal peace treaty with the United States or the formal declaration of North Korea's nuclear status. The regime in Pyongyang hopes that the latter choice is so shocking -- not only to the United States but also to China, South Korea, Japan, Russia and others -- that Washington will have no choice but to accede to the former.
Pyongyang's top priority in next week's nuclear talks with the United States is to sign a formal peace treaty with Washington and to do away with the 1953 Armistice Agreement. North Korea's top leadership feels constrained by the armistice agreement as well as by the ever-present threat of U.S. military force, and believes it cannot both retain political power and expand its economic policies significantly without first removing the threat of war on the Korean peninsula. Barring a formal peace accord, Pyongyang would settle for a more temporal nonaggression treaty, but is unconvinced of the long-term stability of such a document.
North Korea itself carefully orchestrated the current nuclear crisis with Washington and is intent on maintaining control over the pace and scope of negotiations. Thus the meeting in Beijing is not a capitulation by Pyongyang out of fear of the United States following the Iraq war, but a carefully timed concession designed to engage Washington at a time when the U.S. military is not yet fully rested from the Iraq war and when Washington is less likely to seek a military confrontation in a different theater of battle.
Pyongyang is concerned by the U.S. military's swift capture of Baghdad and the apparent ease with which U.S. forces ultimately conquered Iraq. But the lesson learned by North Korea's leadership is not that Pyongyang should roll over and accede to whatever Washington wants. Rather, Pyongyang believes that a powerful deterrent -- nuclear weapons -- will serve to keep Washington from stepping over the DMZ.
According to sources familiar with the North Korean leadership, Pyongyang's assessment of the Iraq war battle plan -- sending in ground forces simultaneously with the air campaign -- signaled Washington's belief that Baghdad in fact possessed no deployable weapons of mass destruction. Otherwise, the U.S. military would have withheld troops until it was sure the air campaign had effectively removed the threat of chemical and biological weapons.
The conclusion in Pyongyang, the source notes, is that there are only two paths to peace and security in Korea. One is through negotiations to sign a formal peace treaty or at least a nonaggression treaty; the latter is less desirable because there is little assurance Washington will keep its word -- and the international community proved impotent in preventing the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The other alternative is the formal declaration of North Korea as a nuclear state.
Pyongyang is well aware of the ramifications of such a move. It could easily trigger the nuclearization of the Japanese and South Korean militaries and raise the ire of China and Russia. But North Korea's strategic planners see some benefits from a nuclear Japan and South Korea, as it renders moot the U.S. nuclear umbrella in the region. And since North Korea already is facing off against a nuclear United States, what difference does it make if South Korea and Japan have the bomb?
The fear of a nuclear domino effect in Northeast Asia -- even more than the fear of a nuclear-armed North Korea -- is precisely the bargaining chip Pyongyang plans to employ during talks with the United States. And as U.S. military and intelligence assessments already hold that North Korea has two or three nuclear devices, in addition to stocks of chemical and biological weapons, the United States will be unlikely to launch a pre-emptive strike against North Korea, and have little choice but to negotiate.
How Washington will react to such a threat from the North remains to be seen, but China's sudden burst of involvement in the nuclear standoff suggests Beijing is well aware of Pyongyang's negotiating tactic and is itself interested in pre-empting the nuclearization of the rest of Northeast Asia, since that would seriously undermine China's physical and economic security. |
