North Korean missile policy has three aspects

By Lakhvinder Singh

SEOUL: Now that U.S. President Bill Clinton has finally decided about his visit to North Korea and left the issues involved to be resolved by the new Bush administration, the time has come to look at the North Korean missile policy in its totality. Any policy to counter only one aspect of it -- as was being emphasized by the Clinton administration -- is bound to fail in future also.

North Korea's missile policy has three aspects. The first aspect is that its acute economic difficulties have led to its use of missile-capability as a bargaining chip to secure political, security and economic concessions. After all, this policy of using it as a bargaining chip delivered Pyongyang rich dividends in the past. The 1994 "Agreed Framework" with the United States gave North Korea everything it wanted, while still retaining its nuclear option.

That agreement was supposed to prevent North Korea from going nuclear. But Pyongyang has made it very clear that the real picture of whether it will retain the nuclear option or not will be known only after the agreement with the United States, Japan and South Korea is fully implemented to "its satisfaction" by the year 2005. But success is unlikely for the present policy of the United States of assuring North Korea that economic benefits await, provided the latter does not conduct further missile tests and stops exporting missiles to other countries.

The second aspect of North Korean missile policy is that it is designed to offset Pyongyang's vulnerabilities in the face of robust U.S.-South Korea and U.S.-Japan deterrence systems. This point is all the more important in the sense that North Korea's nuclear and missile policies predated its economic crisis.

Therefore, it was not simply devised as a bargaining ploy. Therefore, economic incentives alone will not resolve the problem. For the North Korean regime, its military prowess is a symbol of the country's nationhood and an important guarantee for the regime's survival.

The third aspect of the North Korean missile policy is the much-needed hard foreign currency it earns through missile exports and the international implications of this trade. North Korea is probably the world's most cynical proliferator, willing to sell missiles and secrets to anyone who pays.

It earns every year millions of dollars by selling missiles to countries like Egypt, Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates. These exports serve to increase tension in regions already characterized by political and military instability. Of course, this is being done with the connivance of China, but that is a different story.

It is not widely known that North Korea has been receiving payment for its missile exports partly in cash, partly in food grains and partly in fertilizers -- the three commodities that Pyongyang desperately needs. Though essentially a rice-eating nation, North Koreans have been receiving wheat from Pakistan since 1996 and importing wheat from the United States to make up the deficit for its internal consumption.

Indirectly, therefore, U.S. wheat-farmers have been unwittingly contributing to North Korean efforts to develop inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of hitting Japan, South Korea, Hawaii and Alaska. North Korea is diverting the money saved from the Pakistani supply of wheat to its missile development program. It has relieved pressure on the regime from hungry people and further enabled it, through its co-operation with Pakistan, to benefit from the sophisticated technologies clandestinely procured by Pakistan from the West.

For some time Israel has been concerned about what it believes is the Egyptian transfer of U.S. missile technology to North Korea. It fears that Western and U.S. technology obtained by Egyptian government-owned companies is being sent to Pyongyang and is adapted and returned as advanced missile components for Egypt's medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) program. If Cairo is, with North Korean help, developing an MRBM with chemical and biological warheads, this surely threatens Israel's security interests.

Similarly, North Korea's clandestine missile transactions with Pakistan threaten security interests of not only India but also the whole of South Asia. Against this background, any policy to confront North Korea's missile capability has to be broad-based and must go beyond the purview of the U.S.-South Korea-Japan axis.

Admittedly these three countries are most affected by the problem, but it is also true that the problem has international implications and therefore needs the involvement and coordination of all countries which are affected by this China-North Korea- Pakistan-Iran-Libya linkage. The United States should develop a broader policy, which includes and protects the interests of all affected parties from this linkage.

South Korea's defense links with the United States are extremely important, and if the United States permits Japan to improve its military capability, why then should it not do the same in the case of South Korea? The United States should ease its restrictions on South Korea and support it in developing its own self-defense systems.

Now that the difficult issues involving SOFA have been resolved, the South Korea-U.S. security experts will have more time and energy to discuss these defense issues more fully. At the same time South Korea also must take note of the international dimensions of North Korean missile policy and start coordinating its North Korean policies with concerned countries -- particularly India and Israel.

After all, one of the main elements of President Kim Dae- jung's "sunshine policy" is to gain international support for reconciliation with North Korea, while maintaining a robust defense posture.

The writer is a Korea Foundation fellow and presently affiliated with Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul.

-- The Korea Herald/Asia News Network