Sounds like SK is looking hard for a way to pretend that nothing happened....
North Korean shells aim to shock
By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - The United States and South Korea now have to face what has become more than an abstract question: What is more troubling, the specter of North Korea as a growing nuclear power with a brand new uranium-enrichment facility almost ready to go into operation, or a nasty assault by "conventional" weapons on land?
The question jumped into harsh reality on Tuesday when North Korean gunners pumped dozens of rounds of artillery shells onto the tiny island of Yeonpyeong off the Korean west coast just south of the line in the Yellow Sea below which the South insists on banning North Korean vessels.
South Korean gunners fired about 80 rounds back at the North Koreans in the sharpest escalation of tensions since the sinking of the navy corvette the Cheonan in the same waters in March.
The great difference, though, is that the latest North Korean assault was not against a target at sea but against targets on land, and scores of houses on the island went up in flames. The North Koreans may well have been gunning for military targets, but collateral damage was inevitable in an attack in which one at least one South Korean marine was killed and a dozen others wounded.
It was not as if the North Koreans did not have their reasons. They had apparently sent a message earlier in the day inveighing against a South Korean military exercise underway in the area, and they had threatened weeks ago to fire on South Korean targets whenever they wished. The basic rhetoric was familiar, and the tendency was to dismiss it as just rhetoric.
The incident, like others, may go down in the long list of "isolated episodes" since the end of the Korean War in 1953, but the timing was particularly unnerving. It happened just as the US's nuclear envoy, Stephen Bosworth, was in Beijing after stopovers in Seoul and Tokyo, all of which were to "coordinate" policy on dealing with a North Korean threat of a very different kind - the uranium-enrichment plant at Yongbyon.
Bosworth talked in the usual diplomatic platitudes, saying the news of the uranium facility was "another in a series of provocations" but "this is not a crisis". He may be revising that estimate, though, as he beseeches Chinese officials to do what they have been most reluctant to consider, and that is to apply significant pressure on North Korea.
Kim Tae-woo, senior fellow at the Korea Institute of Defense Analyses, is pessimistic about getting China to persuade North Korea to back down from its nuclear activities in view of rising Chinese strength in the entire region.
"China is getting stronger and tougher," he says. "North Korea by increasing its capability is bringing all kinds of side effects to South Korea. They want to increase their leverage."
Like many experts here, he is pessimistic about getting the North to alter its policy. "North Korea is intimidating and threatening South Korea," he says. What can we do? Nothing."
That estimate, though, is largely but not entirely true. South Korean gunners can return fire when fired on, and South Korean fighter planes scrambling to the scene added a special touch of drama. South Korea's President Lee Myung-bak called an emergency cabinet meeting, and South Korean forces went on high alert all along both the sea and land borders between the two Koreas.
South Korea, though, is not at all likely to go on the offensive, to seek revenge, to stage a retaliatory attack any more than it was in the aftermath of the sinking of the Cheonan in which 46 sailors were killed.
Nonetheless, in a standoff in which one has to expect the unexpected, the air is filled with wild declarations and innuendos. Might the current state of play bring about the redeployment of nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula?
The immediate answer, before the artillery exchange on Tuesday afternoon, was, no, the United States is not going to plant nuclear weapons in South Korea, and South Korea is not going to ask the US to do so.
It's not that that there aren't people here, and doubtless in Washington too, who wouldn't think that's a great idea. Rather, it's just that South Korea's Defense Ministry had to pull back with embarrassing alacrity after Defense Minister Kim Tae-young mooted the idea before a committee of the South's National Assembly.
When a conservative member asked Minister Kim whether South Korea was considering that option, Kim responded, enigmatically, that his government would "review what you said". The whole topic would come up, he promised, in a meeting of a joint US-Korean committee formed just last month in talks with US Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
No way. We can all breathe a sign of relief that escalation does seem to have its limits. Not even construction of a brand new nuclear enrichment facility at North Korea's main nuclear complex is going to be enough to revert to the good old days before 1990 when the US had, in the best available estimation, scores of tactical nukes scattered around this place.
Kim left it to his deputy, Chang Kwang-il, to pick up the debris from the explosive impact of his remarks. "Uh", said Chang, redeployment of US nukes "would cross the line of the denuclearization policy on the Korean Peninsula."
The real point is that North Korea, by holding out the threat of two very different types of warfare, may think that's the way to get negotiations going again - on North Korea's terms.
It was clearly with that aim in mind that the North invited in a group of American experts, including the physicist Siegfried Hecker, for a look at their uranium-enrichment plant. Hecker has returned to Washington reporting what he saw was "stunning" - and that North Korea has about 2,000 centrifuges already in place in the plant.
He did not say if it was operational, and the North claims it's the light-water variety for producing electrical power, not warheads - but nobody's really buying that.
Enriching natural uranium to 3-5% produces fuel for light-water reactors. But enriching it to more than 90% yields the ingredients for a nuclear bomb.
"We have been undervaluing their progress in uranium-enrichment," said Ha Tae-keung, president of North Korea Open Radio, which gets information by cell phone from contacts in North Korea. "They are trying to prepare for the third nuclear experiment. They are hinting there's a third nuclear test coming up."
Ha said North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il believes, "If they just have a few nuclear devices, it will make them a good nuclear negotiator." Then, when they get to six-party talks, they will divert the discussion, he says, from abandoning nuclear warheads to "demilitarization".
As for putting American nukes into South Korea, The US during the presidency of George H W Bush is believed to have removed all its nuclear warheads from Korean soil before the signing of an agreement with North Korea in 1990 that purported to guarantee a "nuclear-free" Korean Peninsula.
While no one expects President Obama to entertain any suggestions for nukes, the question is what he's prepared to do about sending American forces to South Korea's aid. That may be a more immediate issue as North Korea shows a propensity for escalating tensions on land as well as sea.
Donald Kirk, a long-time journalist in Asia, is author of the newly published Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine.
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