Nuclear Security and Strategic Analyses Dr Marko Beljac

Slipping Towards War With North Korea

We seem to be slipping towards war with North Korea, a war nobody really wants. We all know that North Korea has again tested a nuclear weapon and seems to be making the initial moves to conduct an actual test of the Taepodong 2. In this post I would like to make a few points on the issue.

Was the Test a Fizzle?

The actual nature of the nuclear test continues to attract attention. Jeffrey Park, writing for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is calling a fizzle

...According to early reports, Monday's North Korea event certainly seems like a deliberate explosion in the right place. However, it was too small to be a successful Hiroshima-class crude explosive device, by a factor of three or four. The reported estimates of Richter magnitude spread from 4.5-5, and the standard conversions to explosive yield suggest a yield of 2-6 kiloton-equivalents of TNT. Most of the latest Richter magnitude estimates have come in the low half of the 4.5-5 range, so it seems likely that the yield was 4 kilotons or smaller...

Notice Park is calling a fizzle based on a yield of ~4 Kt. This is because

...That's a lot of energy, much larger than the 2006 North Korean test, but it still falls far short of an expected 12-20 kiloton yield of a crude Hiroshima-style device...

The editors got a bit sloppy here. That should have read the expected yield of a crude 20Kt Nagasaki type device.

Personally I am not inclined to accept Park's analysis. I have no quibble with his yield estimate. We are fairly sure that the North Koreans informed the Chinese about 20mins before that October 2006 that they were gunning for a yield of 4Kt, however.

They got 4Kt this time. So, assuming that they tried to replicate the 2006 test, we might state that this was successful. Even Park concedes a yield of about 4Kt.

Earlier in the year Selig Harrison reported a North Korean boast of "weaponisation." This likely means that now, post 2009 test, North Korea has a functioning Nodong nuclear warhead.

How we got here

According to most reports we should hang all of the shit on the North. Out of history is all the skulduggery engaged in by Team Bush. The North isn't clean, going back to the Agreed Framework, but the collective amnesia in the past couple of weeks must have all the propagandists in the North watching in awe.

The best analysis of the wider implication of this aspect has come from Leon Sigal and Bruce Cumings. Sigal points out what I have been saying to all and sundry

...Despite the promise of change, the Obama administration has started to address North Korea just as the Clinton and Bush administrations did--accusing it of wrongdoing and trying to punish it for its transgressions. As Pyongyang's recent nuclear test demonstrates, the crime-and-punishment approach has never worked in the past and it won't work now...

That's right. Sigal focuses on the reaction to the Unha-2 launch, which has really pissed off Pyongyang in a big way. However we could point out the early testimony of Brand Obama's intel Tsar Admiral Dennis Blair

...The IC continues to assess North Korea has pursued a uranium enrichment capability in the past. Some in the Intelligence Community have increasing concerns that North Korea has an ongoing covert uranium enrichment program...

That came right after hawks in Team Bush were using an extensive verification protocol demands to determine whether these concerns had any basis. All this in order to scuttle the de-nuclearisation process. Blair could have have skirted this. That he didn't would have signalled to Pyongyang not to take Obama's "change we can believe in" too seriously.

Sigal points out

...The current crisis truly began last June when North Korea handed China a written declaration of its plutonium program, as it was obliged to do under the October 3, 2007 Six-Party joint statement on second-phase actions. In a side agreement with Washington, Pyongyang committed to disclose its uranium enrichment and proliferation activities, including the help it had provided for Syria's nuclear reactor.

Many in Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul were quick to question whether the declaration was "complete and correct," prompting the Bush administration to demand arrangements to verify the declaration before completing disabling and moving on to permanent dismantlement of North Korea's plutonium facilities. However, the October 2007 accord had no provision for verification.

The day Pyongyang turned over its declaration, the White House announced its intention to relax sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act and to delist North Korea as a "state sponsor of terrorism"--but with an important proviso. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Heritage Foundation on June 18, "[B]efore those actions go into effect, we would continue to assess the level of North Korean cooperation in helping to verify the accuracy and completeness of its declaration. And if that cooperation is insufficient, we will respond accordingly." She acknowledged Washington was moving the goal posts: "What we've done, in a sense, is move up issues that were to be taken up in phase three, like verification, like access to the reactor, into phase two."

In bilateral talks with the United States, North Korea agreed to establish a Six-Party verification mechanism and allow visits to declared nuclear facilities, a review of documents, and interviews with technical personnel--commitments later codified in a July 12 Six-Party communiqué. Pyongyang also committed to cooperate on verification in the dismantlement phase.

But Tokyo and Seoul demanded more, and President George W. Bush tried to change the terms of the agreement again. The United States handed the North Koreans a draft verification protocol and on July 30 announced it had delayed delisting North Korea as a "state sponsor of terrorism" until they accepted it. Pyongyang retaliated by suspending the disabling at its plutonium facilities at Yongbyon on August 14. Not long after, North Korea began restoring equipment at its Yongbyon facilities.

With disabling in jeopardy, U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill went to Pyongyang on October 1 with a less intrusive draft protocol in hand. His North Korean interlocutor Kim Gae Gwan agreed to allow "sampling and other forensic measures" at the three declared sites at Yongbyon--the reactor, reprocessing plant, and fuel fabrication plant. The United States believed that might suffice to ascertain how much plutonium North Korea had produced. Kim also accepted "access, based on mutual consent, to undeclared sites," according to the State Department. The oral understanding led President Bush to reverse course again on October 11 and delist North Korea as a "state sponsor of terrorism."

This move angered the hard-line Aso government in Tokyo. Seconded by an internally divided government in Seoul, it insisted that energy aid promised under the October 2007 accord be suspended until Pyongyang accepted a written protocol with more intrusive verification, and President Bush changed his stance. On December 11, the United States, Japan, and South Korea announced the decision.

In response to the renege, North Korea stopped disabling. In early February it began preparations to test-launch the Taepodong-2 in the guise of putting a satellite into orbit...

Put in this context the Blair testimony meant "expect more of the same."

Disablement reversal bottom line

What does disablement reversal mean? The best analysis comes from Sigfried Hecker

...Taking all of these factors into account, the best North Korea could do is to separate approximately 8 kilograms of bomb-grade plutonium by October 2009 and produce at most another 6 kilograms of plutonium per year for the next two to four years with its existing stocks of fresh fuel. This fuel would have to be reprocessed to be turned into bomb fuel. In the mean time, it could refurbish the fuel fabrication facility completely and continue this cycle for many years to come. North Korea has the material and manpower to do so. The only way North Korea could increase this rate of plutonium production is to build bigger gas-graphite reactors. In their April 14 statement announcing the resumption of nuclear operations, Pyongyang stated that it will consider building a light-water reactor on its own; it did not threaten to resume construction on its bigger gas-graphite plutonium production reactors, a process that would take 5 years or more because North Korea has limited industrial capacity...

The main threat from here on is not (a) massive fissile material production due to reversal of disablement (b) even transfer of fissile materials to state or non-state actors as commonly supposed, but rather (c) a slippage towards war.

The potential road to war

The Proliferation Security Initiative forms the most likely catalyst to this. The new conservative government of South Korea has indicated that it will now buy into the PSI. Whatever we might think of the PSI and North Korean nuclear and missile technology trading, and that is bad no doubt, the PSI could provide the escalatory dynamics that could lead to war. Aggressive boarding of ships to and from the North could create an incident that might escalate up towards war.

According to Cumings

...The Obama administration, and especially Secretary of State Clinton, are running on the same tracks as George Bush did in ’07 and ’08. They’re even talking about the Proliferation Security Initiative, PSI, which is something that was handcrafted by John Bolton to put pressure on North Korea...

The South Korean membership of the PSI could have implications running from it (a) being largely symbolic to (b) to be used as a means to pressure the North economically with a proliferation cover.

If it is (b) and it is done in a non-discriminating and aggressive fashion war is a likely outcome.

So, what now?

What is the appropriate policy now that we have come to this pretty pass?

I believe it to be 2 party high level talks between the United States and North Korea with no pre-conditions. I am convinced now of the main reason why Washington opposes this. This is opposed because it is felt that agreeing to 2 party talks, the main North Korean demand, will dent US global "credibility."

It won't.

This aspect reminds me of an exchange between Kissinger and De Gaulle as retold by Kissinger in his memoirs. Kissinger is asked at a diplomatic reception by De Gaulle why the US won't withdraw from Vietnam. Kissinger explained that a withdrawal from Vietnam would dent US credibility in the Middle East.

De Gaulle is reported to have replied (to the effect); "how very odd. One would have thought that it is your opponents who have the credibility problem in the Middle East."

The credibility argument here also is "how very odd" and probably made with reference to US credibility in the Middle East.

However, this argument is sloppy. Daryl Press has written an important book called Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats." At page 1

...Every country strives to make its threats and promises credible, but how is this done? What causes credibility?...

To which he answers

...This book argues that the conventional wisdom about credibility is wrong. A country's credibility, at least during crises, is driven not by its past behavior but rather by power and interests...

Engaging in two party talks with North Korea would not diminish US credibility.

What is the bottom line here? Well, it was provided by Winston Churchill (I think)...

"To jaw, jaw is better than to war, war".