Walking Into Trouble
Spy flights prove North Korea is making plutonium. It may have four nukes already. But don’t panic ... yet
By Richard Wolffe and B. J. Lee
msnbc.com
July 28 issue — The phone rang at 5 a.m. in early July at the home of a North Korea expert in the Bush administration. The caller had serious news from the U.S. Air Force’s nuclear-detection team. For months the team had been sampling the air above the Yongbyon nuclear complex, looking for evidence that the facility was back in the arms business.
NOW THERE WAS no doubt: the team’s sensors had detected the radioactive gas Krypton-85—proof that the North was turning its stockpile of spent fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium, just as dictator Kim Jong Il had been threatening. And what was the reaction to the dawn alert? “I was back to sleep in 30 seconds,” the expert told NEWSWEEK.
If Bush’s advisers are at all worried by North Korea’s doomsday behavior, they’re doing a great job of hiding it. South Korea’s military analysts are predicting that military conflict could come before winter. The warning was echoed in a Washington Post interview last week by former Defense secretary William Perry. Yet U.S. officials seem utterly calm. Some Bush aides, diplomats especially, are sure everything will end peacefully with a bit of friendly (and self-serving) intervention from Beijing. “They don’t want a nuclear North Korea next door,” said one senior State Department official.
But the administration’s hard-liners are smiling for reasons that are radically different. They’re certain Pyongyang can’t win. The worse the North acts, they figure, the easier it will be to isolate and strangle the regime by shutting off its illicit sources of cash, like weapons, drugs and counterfeit goods. The noose is already tightening. Last month John Bolton, the State Department’s senior arms-control official and a close ally of Vice President Dick Cheney, toured the Middle East with a message for Egypt, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates: stop buying North Korean missiles; we view your purchases as a direct threat to U.S. security. The listeners are said to have responded positively.
The sense of calm may also have a more unsettling explanation: it’s too late to panic. Until recently, U.S. officials thought Kim had no more than one or two nuclear devices. But administration aides now tell NEWSWEEK that he likely has three or four—primitive, but dangerous nonetheless. The new estimate changes the geopolitical calculation. If the North already has a mini-arsenal, the latest threats—including the claim that it has already finished reprocessing 8,000 fuel rods—lose their power to shock. “The clear intention is to try and drive the process with blackmail,” says one senior U.S. official. “That is why we make clear we will not be intimidated.”
That may sound OK from Washington’s side of the globe, but South Koreans are scared. North and South Korean soldiers at the demilitarized zone exchanged shots last week for the first time in 20 months. Nobody was hurt, but it added to the jitters. And South Korea’s military experts predict that its neighbor’s next nuclear step will come soon. One expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses says the reprocessing will probably be finished in October, followed by a nuclear test. Paik Jin Hyun at Seoul National University is more pessimistic. He thinks Pyongyang could announce possession of nuclear weapons in time to celebrate the anniversary of the Workers’ Party on Sept. 9.
Neither side seems ready to blink. Still, the White House cannot ignore the risk that a cornered Kim might try to raise cash by selling the bomb to another rogue leader or to terrorists. Although the Bush administration insists it has no plans for military strikes on the North, one senior aide says the North could trigger war by exporting its nukes or fissile materials. Officials in Washington may still be sleeping tight. The worry is that they could be in for a very rough awakening. |
