Island Hopping & Korean Affairs

I am off to Prince Edward Island for the weekend, golfing with a few friends and my main man Brian W. Walker, who is getting married to Angela MacNeil on July 22 here in Halifax. We're heading to Brudenell resort for one night (and golfing on the actual courses Brudenell and Dundarave), and Charlottetown for one night. Golf legends Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson visited Brudenell two weeks ago, and I haven't been to PEI since a grade 9 band trip, so this should be fun.

Before I go, a few of you have asked me whether or not North Korea's July 4/5 launches affect my thesis. Unless these launches lead to breakthroughs at the negotiating table, or World War III, my answer is an unequivocal 'no.'

For the curious, here are some points to think about:

• All of the North Korean missiles are some variation on the Soviet "scud" and are not nearly as advanced as the ICBMs you normally hear about from news agencies. If a BMD system could have a good hope of one day shooting something down, it would be a North Korean missile.

• The six Nodongs/Rodongs launched are old news. Korea has been testing them since 1993, and they've likely sold plenty of them to Libya and Syria, with plans going to Iran and Pakistan. They are nothing more than a retro-fitted, reverse-engineered SS-1c "Scud-B" type intermediate-range missiles, though North Korea could have hundreds of them, precluding the effectiveness of a BMD shield. Nodongs can easily strike South Korea and Japan.

• The Taepodong-2, which is a big brother of the Taepodong-1 tested in 1998 and is loosely built off of the Nodong design, carries more cause for alarm. Unfortunately for North Korea, the missile didn't last. This model, though very little is known about it, could potentially hit Alaska or, if improved somewhat, Hawaii.

• From its graphite-moderated nuclear facilities alone (Yongbyon), North Korea has extracted enough plutonium to build between 8 and 20 (approx) nuclear warheads. This saying nothing of the regime's alleged secret uranium enrichment programme, which was the cause for tensions in 2003, sealed the fate of the 1994 Geneva Agreed Framework (which did not cover a uranium programme) and put us into the current round of "six-party" negotiations.

• Despite all this, North Korea still has not tested a nuclear device or proved that it can mount a warhead as complicated as a nuclear warhead on any missile of any kind. My educated guess is that the right political "climate" for a nuclear test has not yet occurred — if North Korea tested tomorrow, it would do more harm than good and current allies of the regime might shift position. The same cannot be said for next week, however.

It is important to remember that, by most accounts, Kim Jong-Il the foreign leader is neither mad, nor crazy, nor suicidal. He may have colourful personal tendencies — driving luxury cars, watching thousands of Hollywood films, and kidnapping South Korean film directors are three of his favourite pastimes — but most signs point to his loyalty to Juche, the North Korean ideology of self-sufficiency, containment, and survival that has so far made North Korea the worst country in the world to live in. Invoking a nuclear or military attack on North Korean soil through threats or pre-emptive strike would be suicide for the Kim Family Regime. In other words, Kim is unlikely to nuke another nation unless he has been backed into a wall. This is because...

• The latest round of tests, rather than meaning to indicate doom and gloom to the world, are simply part of an ongoing challenge-bluff pattern that began in 1993 and in which North Korea threatens the world just enough so that it can extract maximum economic and political leverage from diplomatic negotiations, later reneging on deals and agreements, and then restarting the process with new threats. This allows Kim to consolidate domestic legitimacy, paint the U.S. as an evil "Other", and score points internationally. All of this is normally accompanied by a contradictory slew of improvements to North Korea's foreign relations with South Korea, China, Russia, and Japan, as well as other activities that challenge U.S. patience, including money laundering, illegal arms trafficking, and bucketloads of sabre-rattling.

• Negotiations have stalled not because of anything explicitly North Korean, but because the U.S. and Japan have not been able to reconcile their hard-line stick positions with the softer carrot approaches preferred by China, Russia and South Korea. The U.S. and Japan, drawing from the aformentioned 1994 GAF, on which both North Korea and the U.S. cheated, are calling for CVID — complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament — before they will offer North Korea any carrots. The others — and China, especially, since it dumps billions of dollars into North Korea and is its primary ally — see CVID as an unacceptable ultimatum for North Korea, which fears U.S. aggression and is unlikely to oblige.

• Despite the negotiations impasse, a military solution is dangerous. Even without a nuclear-equipped missile, North Korea could do significant damage to South Korea and Japan by simply launching Nodongs as conventional missiles equipped with conventional explosives, or as part of North Korea's myriad WMD/Chemical Weapon capabilities (think Saddam Hussein launching into Israel). Seoul, a city of 9 million people (and some 15-20 million in the greater metropolitan area -- slightly larger than New York City), is within striking distance of regular North Korean artillery. If we count Japan and South Korea alone, there are nearly 200 million people within striking distance of North Korea's simplest missiles. 50 million of them live in the metropolitan areas of Tokyo-Yokohama and Seoul.

• Ignoring North Korea isn't a walk in the nuclear park, either. While you've been reading, North Korea has continued to operate and extract plutonium from Yongbyon (5MWe), build two new graphite-moderated power plants (50 and 200MWe, respectively), develop its secret uranium enrichment programme, and continue to improve its missile technology. The threat of the Kim Family Regime/leadership of North Korea actually going crazy, dying off and leaving a power gap, or simply seeing no way out, is very real, and could kill millions of people. Otherwise, North Korea may attempt to make up losses from sanctions by doing what it normally does: selling its hardware to rogue states, like Pakistan and Iran, that are connected with terrorist groups.
  
  
• Thus, we are left with diplomacy...