It was no surprise that five days of talks with North Korea ended with nothing decided — not even when the talking will resume. Pyongyang’s negotiators in Beijing showed themselves to be completely disinterested in the issue of their country’s nuclear disarmament. Their major concern was lifting US and Japanese financial sanctions, imposed after last October’s first nuclear test. The other parties around the negotiating table, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States have been made to appear totally powerless. Indeed, at one point the North Korean delegation announced that a further test of the country’s new nuclear weapon was more than likely.
North Korea may not have a particularly sophisticated nuclear bomb, but it does have the rocketry to deliver it. It also has the world’s fifth-largest army, a one-million-strong force that is thought to make up in discipline what it lacks in the way of advanced weaponry. It was this massive military that has always dissuaded the United States from direct intervention. Now Pyongyang has an even more destructive deterrent in its armory.
The harsh truth is that North Korea was won the race to nuclear armament and is now protected from outside military intervention. The way it has managed this, by an adroit mix of bluster, obfuscation, delaying tactics and determination, will no doubt be of considerable interest to all other powers that are themselves thinking of going nuclear. But North Korea now faces a different challenge. In as much as anything good has come out of the destructive power of the nuclear weaponry held by the established nuclear states, it has been purely in terms of deterrence. The terrible consequences of using these horrific weapons ensured that they were never used. Kim Jong Il’s new nuclear weapon can therefore protect his dictatorship, but is it going to be of any other use? With the single exception of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, no nuclear state has ever used the threat of nuclear attack to force an opponent to change policy.
Does Pyongyang imagine that it can now obtain its ends by threatening nuclear attack? Who would it threaten? Treaties with the United States protect Japan and South Korea. Threaten them and even though Washington is busy losing the international war against terror in Iraq, it will still seek to act, for better or worse, in their defense. Such a re-emergence of Washington’s strategic role in the Far East would be viewed with great displeasure in China. Maybe Kim has an idea that with missiles aimed at Beijing, the Chinese will be less inclined to carry out their threats to strangle his dictatorship by cutting off flows of food and power on which it relies. Were that ever a reality, some would say that the Chinese had only themselves to blame for supporting and protecting this regime.
The basic conundrum for Pyongyang is that it now has a new powerful loaded gun with which to threaten everyone but once it pulls the trigger, the regime and maybe hundreds of thousands of its citizens, are dead.
