North Korea: Famine, rockets, and nukes

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "This year, (North Korea) has been frequently affected by warm and dry winds from the west," reported the Korean Central News Agency last week. "As a result, its precipitation is very small and most regions have been hit by droughts." In other words, the five-year famine in the world's last Stalinist state is going to get worse -- just as the crisis over its rockets and its suspected nuclear weapons program threatens to cut off help from outside.

The most dramatic blow to the 1994 Framework Agreement in which North Korea agreed to curb its nuclear program in return for foreign help was last August's missile test, when Pyongyang fired a two-stage Taepo Dong I ballistic missile right across Japan.

"The Taepo Dong came as almost as much of a shock (to Japan) as Commander Perry's black ships," said Shunji Taoka, defense analyst of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, referring to the American warships that forced Japan to open up to the world in the mid- 19th century. Japan doesn't even have the early-warning equipment to detect such missile launches on its own, and the thought that it was now only six minutes away from a surprise North Korean strike, perhaps with nuclear weapons, transformed the defense debate there.

Suddenly Tokyo began to show interest in the U.S. proposal for a Theater Missile Defense to protect South Korea, Japan and Taiwan from both Chinese and North Korean missiles. Understandably, Japan also stopped payment on its share of the US$4.6 billion promised to North Korea to dissuade it from building nuclear reactors capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. And the U.S. was already not paying its share.

The U.S. Congress, suspicious of the Framework Agreement, has been withholding funds for the half-million tones of oil a year that were supposed to keep North Korea power supplies going until substitute pressurized-water reactors, unable to produce fissile material, were completed (at the expense of the U.S., Japan, and South Korea) in 2003.

New intelligence last summer that North Korea was building a vast new underground site at Kumchang-ri, allegedly for nuclear weapons, strengthened Congressional opposition to the deal. The Clinton administration now faces a deadline of June 1 to certify to Congress that Pyongyang is living up to its commitment not to produce nuclear weapons, and that it has curtailed its ballistic missile program. It almost certainly cannot provide these guarantees.

So North Korea heads into the worst summer of its 5-year famine with no fuel for tractors to plough the fields. Aid agencies report that up to a third of the country's 24 million people will have to survive mainly on "alternative foods" (i.e. low-nutrition but stomach-filling things like seaweed, tree bark, and grasses) until the next harvest in September -- and even Supreme Commander Kim Jong-il's own government now admits that hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have starved to death in the past few years.

Others have offered estimates of up to two million dead, and there have even been reports of cannibalism in the poorest, north-eastern parts of the country. Even more conservative estimates of North Koreans' plight are appalling: around a quarter of the population, including all children under seven, are getting food aid from international agencies, but a random survey last year by the World Food Program and Unicef found that 62 percent of all children were stunted, indicating that they have been malnourished for years.

So why, in the midst of all this, has the North Korean regime chosen to test-fire missiles and to start huge excavations at the Kumchang-ri site, rousing renewed fears of its nuclear weapons ambitions and putting existing aid commitments at risk? There are two possible answers. The less frightening one is that Pyongyang has decided to shake the tree again, in the hope of bringing down fresh bounty.

"North Korea has the tendency of being tactically clever, but strategically stupid in its negotiations," said a U.S. embassy official in South Korea last year. What he meant was that Pyongyang's nuclear weapons threat had shaken loose a good deal of aid in the 1994 deal; maybe it thought that new nuclear and missile threats would shake some more loose.

Maybe that's not so stupid, either. "This administration hasn't a clue what to do concerning North Korea," as William Taylor, senior vice-president for International Security Affairs at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, remarked last year. If Clinton can persuade Congress to go along, it's quite possible that he will again bribe North Korea to be good.

On the other hand, Kim Junior may really think the regime's crisis is so acute that an all-or-nothing gamble on overrunning South Korea with the help of nuclear weapons, while deterring aid from U.S. bases in Japan by threatening to use the same weapons there, is at least as good a survival strategy as any other.

That is much the same calculation that his father, Kim Il- sung, made 50 years ago in March, 1949, when he first approached Stalin for military backing for an invasion of South Korea. Kim Senior's calculation was wrong, of course, but it took three years and three million lives (including those of about 50,000 American soldiers) to prove him wrong. And who believes that the U.S. would accept a cost of fifty thousand body-bags today?

It can't even bear the thought of fifty.