IT was President George W. Bush who pushed the diplomatic button that yesterday triggered North Korea’s first nuclear weapon. He did it on March 20, 2003 when the first US cruise missiles smashed into Baghdad. He had prepared even earlier in January 2002 when in his State of the Union Address he called North Korea, Iran and Saddam’s Iraq the “The Axis of Evil”.
At the time, North Korea protested the Bush’s assertion was little short of a declaration of war. Pyongyang withdrew from tortuous negotiations to abandon its nuclear-weapons program in return for aid and restarted its Yongbyon reactor. It is now clear that from this date it raised a series of diplomatic smokescreens during on-off negotiations within the “Six Nation” forum with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. In January 2003, when it had become patently clear that Washington was poised to invade Iraq, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Since then it has tested missiles and announced that it had six nuclear devices. At each revelation, the rest of the world, with Washington in the lead, has huffed and puffed. China, Pyongyang’s only real ally and supplier of much of its energy and essential foodstuffs, has preferred to use gentle persuasion. In the event neither strategy has worked. The North Korean leadership has exploited international differences and Washington’s entrapment in the diplomatic and military mire of Iraq.
In its terse announcement of the successful test, the North Korean news agency asserted, “It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the area around it.” It is hard not to disagree with this. If the international community was unable to intervene decisively while Pyongyang’s scientists were hurrying to make their bomb, how much harder will intervention be now? It matters not that this explosion was equivalent to only 800 tons of TNT when one of the bombs the Americans dropped on Japan in 1945 represented the force of 15,000 tons of the explosive. North Korea has joined the nuclear club and the very unpredictability of its Stalinist regime makes its bomb that much more powerful.
The long-established Western nuclear powers, America, Britain and France always described their terrible atomic arsenals as “deterrents”. That is precisely what North Korea has now obtained, what Iran may still want to obtain, and what before he was driven back from Kuwait and had his WMD program dismantled by UN inspectors, Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain. A nuclear weapon, however primitive, will deter outside aggression and entrench inside despotism. It’s that simple. Bush unleashed US military might on Iraq because he knew (despite pretending otherwise) it had no nuclear weapons or the other WMDs — namely the chemical stockpiles that were supplied by the US during the Iran-Iraq War and were decommissioned after the First Gulf War.
North Korea has learned the lesson on how to deter such aggression. Thus once again Bush’s own weapon of choice has proved to be a boomerang.
