North Korea - the plot

North Korea - the plot continually thickens.

I'm seeing two big possibilities here:

• Kim Jong-Il is taking advantage of our distraction to push for concessions.
• The long-time

The Guardian says:

The Stalinist regime could have triggered the crisis principally to force concessions from Washington. It certainly made no effort to disguise the lorries that pulled up to the nuclear storage area at Yongbyon and were spotted by US satellites. In that case, its nuclear brinksmanship has succeeded. The Bush administration broke off contacts with North Korea soon after coming to office and then in January 2002, the president famously labelled Pyongyang as part of the "axis of evil". This week it climbed down, and Mr Armitage confirmed that Washington was ready for direct talks.

However, some analysts, like David Albright, a physicist and the head of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, believe that the North Korean government is determined to build itself a significant arsenal of nuclear warheads. "The reason we see those trucks at the storage facility might be that they just don't care whether we see them doing it or not," Mr Albright said.

Nukes would certainly give Kim a type of strength that, even with his masses of obsolete conventional forces, he lacks.

Kim Jong-il may have come to the conclusion that his regime may be next on the Pentagon's to-do list, whatever he does. In that case, it may make sense from his point of view to accelerate his efforts to build up his nuclear deterrent at a time when Washington is fixated on Iraq.

Once he moves the fuel rods into Yongbyon's reprocessing plant, it immediately raises the risk involved, should the US try to carry out its long-standing contingency plan of bombing the plant. An airstrike would send a plume of highly radioactive dust into the atmostphere. The North Korean leader is almost certainly right in believing that the Bush administration's current conciliatory approach will not last. Mr Bush has expressed his personal loathing for Kim Jong-il, and North Korea is far more suitable as a target for the Bush doctrine than Iraq. It almost certainly already has nuclear weapons, and it is far more starved of cash, making it more likely to sell its warheads abroad.

The big difference being that North Korea is surrounded, either by US allies and bases, or by countries either friendly with us (Russia) or who may not be friends but who may hold Kim at arm's length, too (China). Iraq, on the other hand, is in missile range of half the world's economy - a Sarin bomb over Dahran, Saudi Arabia would send the western economy into freefall.

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, warned Pyongyang against assuming he had taken his eye off the Korean peninsula. "To the extent the world thinks the United States is focused on problems in Iraq, it's conceivable someone could make a mistake and believe that's an opportunity for them to take an action which they otherwise would have avoided," he said, confirming that he was putting the B-1 and B-52 bombers on alert for deployment to the Pacific.

But Mr Rumsfeld is well aware that the post-cold war US forces - already stretched by policing work in Afghanistan and the deployment for Iraq - are not necessarily capable of fighting and decisively winning two major conflicts at the same time. Instead, the US is likely to wait for the dust to settle in Iraq, before turning on North Korea, and Pyongyang is readying itself for that moment.

Here's my biggest worry.

In Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, World War III begins when the Soviet (at the time) leadership, facing a crushing internal economic crisis (caused by Moslem terrorism, ironically), lashes out at the West to prevent their own extinction, at the hands of their own people.

Not to transfer too much pulp literature to reality, but this seems all too plausible at the moment.

Posted by Mitch at February 7, 2003 12:53 PM