There are “reports”:http://gsn.nti.org/gsn/nw_20090617_5686.php that North Korea may be getting set for not one but two long-range missile tests. We may be in for some impressive fireworks.
Discussion of further nuclear tests in the near future still seems a bit speculative.
Wouldn’t you like to know?
The “answer is here”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2348/did-north-korea-test-a-nuke.
This one is somewhat off topic, but may be of interest to anyone who has tried to anticipate what Country x or Country y will do in relation to matters of armament and disarmament, war and peace. Or whatever.
A question that plagues discussions of deterrence, proliferation, alliance formation, and assorted other security policy issues — or enlivens them — is systems of government: how they work, who runs them, how they will behave under various circumstances. It’s notoriously hard to reduce any of this to a neat formula. Not that this stops anyone from trying, but you know how it is: governments are made of people, and people are quirky.
It Ain’t Beanbag
The never-ending debate about revolutionary states and their leaders — rash or rational? — is merely one frame for this picture. Not that I’d recommend it. Anyone who has ever been part of any organization ought to be quick to recognize the inadequacy of either label. Not that this stops anyone from using them.
There are basically three problems. First, “nobody knows anything”:http://books.google.com/books?id=m9bviPR-UvIC. It’s not like all this stuff is written down somewhere.
Second, even when you do think you know something, it’s complicated. The biggest concerns can be parsed out — structure, traditions, ideologies, personalities — but they are all mutually entangled and overlapping. The best analysts will have a feel for how it all fits together, not a mathematical model.
Third, all this stuff keeps changing. Like small children or pets when someone is trying to take a family portrait, nothing sits still for too long.
Everything Ancien Is New Again
Even so, one of the more interesting recurring aspects of even some of the most unpredictable regimes is how much they seem to resemble their forerunners. Every “matryoshka”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll that starts with Vladimir Putin seems to end with Tsar Nicholas.
Consider Mehdi Khalaji’s “op-ed in today’s Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR2009061401758.html, comparing this week’s “military coup” in Iran to the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. In a few quick strokes and without explicitly saying anything about it, Khalaji has clarified the interminable argument over the roles and powers of Iran’s Supreme Leader and President. The former looks awfully like a Shah, the latter like a Prime Minister. So who really holds the power? Well, it depends on who and when, and you can’t really say except in hindsight. For comparison, is the American office of the Vice Presidency a powerful position? Very few people thought so in 2002.
Or take North Korea… please. In how many Communist states does authority devolve according to the “dynastic principle”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2029/il-piccolo-principe, based on a claim to “divine or semi-divine origins”:http://articles.latimes.com/1992-06-02/news/wr-623_1_kim-il-sung? According to one “school of thought”:http://dissidentvoice.org/Oct06/Leupp16.htm, these features of the regime were borrowed more or less directly from its predecessor, Great Imperial Japan.
There is nothing inevitable about any of this; that’s just how it came out. If Kim Il Sung had made other choices, it might have worked out somewhat differently. Egypt, for example, is still noted for its highly centralized form of government, even if it no longer has “divine pharaohs”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pharaohs to speak of.
Or think about these United States we have over here. It’s a federal republic, not a constitutional monarchy. There is no established church. And we don’t have a parliamentary system. But somehow, it does happen that we have a powerful head of state, a bicameral legislature, and an independent judiciary. “Wherever could all this have come from”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom?
Maybe revolutionary apples don’t fall so far from the tree. Something for the Supreme Leader to think about as he weighs his next move.
He could also “listen to this musical bonus”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFipyKSC2U8.
ACA has a handy new “Chronology of U.S.-North Korean Nuclear and Missile Diplomacy”:http://armscontrol.org/factsheets/dprkchron now online. Can’t say that I’ve read it end to end, but it looks like a useful resource.
If you just can’t get enough NK chronology, NTI has more on “missiles”:http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/NK/Missile/chronology_2008.html and “nukes”:http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/NK/Nuclear/nk_nuclear_2008.html.
In “testimony to the SFRC”:http://foreign.senate.gov/hearings/2009/hrg090611p.html, Special Representative for North Korea Policy Steven Bosworth spells out the diplomatic situation:
bq.. Fourth and finally, we remain willing to engage North Korea to resolve our differences through diplomacy, including bilaterally, within the framework of the Six-Party process. A central tenet of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy approach to date has been a willingness to engage in dialogue with those with which we have had differences, sometimes very serious differences. From the beginning, this has been the approach we have pursued with North Korea. But North Korea greeted the open hand of the new Administration with preparations to launch a ballistic missile. When I was appointed by the President and Secretary Clinton, I proposed to the North Koreans a visit to Pyongyang, in the spirit of engagement, rather than threat. To this day, I have received no response.
On our trip, we made clear that the United States remains open to bilateral dialogue with North Korea in conjunction with the multilateral effort to achieve the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. As we have repeatedly stated, the United States has no hostile intent towards the people of North Korea, nor are we threatening to change the North Korean regime through force. We remain committed to the September 2005 Joint Statement from the Six-Party Talks, the core goal of which is the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula through peaceful means. We believe it benefits North Korea’s own best interests to return to serious negotiations to pursue this goal. The United States position remains unchanged: we will not accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state.
In conclusion, diplomatic outreach will remain possible if North Korea shows an interest in abiding by its international obligations and improving its relations with the outside world. If not, the United States will do what it must do to provide for our security and that of our allies. We will work with the international community to take defensive measures and to bring significant pressure to bear for North Korea to abandon its nuclear and missile programs. The choices for the future are North Korea’s.
p. Shorter version: The ball is in Pyongyang’s court.
_Update: Also of interest are “Bosworth’s remarks to the Korea Society”:http://www.state.gov/p/eap/rls/rm/2009/06/124567.htm in New York last week._
Victor Cha has a “measured take”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/12/AR2009061202685.html on what the North Korean regime is really after (an India-style deal), what we can realistically expect from them (not much), and what the real value of diplomacy with Pyongyang probably is: damage control.
“Check it out”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/12/AR2009061202685.html.
Can I start by saying that I hold no brief for the DPRK? That ought to be “reasonably”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2029/il-piccolo-principe “clear”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2028/what-kji-is-after by now, but I’d like to avoid any confusion on that point. They’ve earned the “disrespect”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1892/how-much-respect-does-a-nuclear-arsenal-get and then some.
It’s also not my intention to become one of those raging _Death-to-All-MSM!_ types, although the sentiment “certainly seems”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2285/oh-calm-down “warranted”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2027/the-disappointing-new-york-times “at times”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2018/art-of-the-blown-headline.
OK. End self-referential throat-clearing. Here’s the bad news about this morning’s newspaper.
What the North Koreans Said
Yesterday, the North Korean Foreign Ministry released another milestone “statement” via “KCNA”:http://www.kcna.co.jp/index-e.htm. This one comes in response to the “passage of UNSCR 1874”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/world/asia/13nations.html on Friday. As of this writing, the official English translation is not yet up on the site, but Reuters has “gotten ahold of the text”:http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSSEO5078.
Update: the “official text”:http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2009/200906/news13/20090613-10ee.html is now online.
(This is a media-criticism post. I’ll tackle the implications of the statement later, time permitting.)
The statement announces three North Korean “countermeasures” to the Security Council’s resolution, which can be summarized as follows:
* “Weaponizing” plutonium that North Korea now claims to have already reprocessed from its current bunch of spent fuel rods.
* Commencing uranium enrichment on an “experimental” basis, in connection with fueling a light-water reactor, as yet not built.
* A “decisive military response” and “all-out confrontation” against any “attempted blockade” of the DPRK by “the U.S. and its followers.”
Got it? For your reference, again, “the text is here”:http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSSEO5078. I’ll put it in the comments, too.
So why can’t the _Washington Post_ get the story straight?
Sorry, Guys, You Blew It
There’s already so much confusion and mythology out there about North Korea’s activities in the field of uranium enrichment (to say nothing of uranium conversion). Why does the _Post_ have to add to it with this “rhetorical flourish in the lede”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/13/AR2009061300636.html?
bq.. TOKYO, June 13 — North Korea adamantly denied for seven years that it had a program for making nuclear weapons from enriched uranium.
But on Saturday, a few hours after the U.N. Security Council slapped it with tough new sanctions for detonating a second nuclear device, the government of Kim Jong Il changed its tune, vowing that it would start enriching uranium to make more nuclear weapons.
p. Let’s compare this directly with the relevant section of the NK FM statement, “via Reuters”:http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSSEO5078:
bq. Second: The process of uranium enrichment will be commenced. Pursuant to the decision to build its own light-water reactor, enough success has been made in developing uranium enrichment technology to provide nuclear fuel to allow the experimental procedure.
Do you see any reference to making uranium-based nuclear weapons there? I sure don’t. At best, that’s an inference by the _Post._ Maybe it’s warranted. But the DPRK “vowed” no such thing. This is just plain bad reporting, based on careless reading.
The part of the NK FM statement about the uranium came right after the part about weaponizing plutonium, so it’s not hard to see where the confusion started. But the same _Post_ story discusses the history of the uranium issue at some length, and even quotes part of the relevant excerpt of the NK FM statement above. There’s just no excuse.
How the Others Did
It must have been an easy mistake to make, since the _Post_ was merely this morning’s worst offender. “AFP blew it”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25634212-12377,00.html, too. So did “this AP story by Carolyn Thompson”:http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iwlhL35A2ztIHM3SXt-k0qKVfuMgD98Q5VU00.
The _New York Times_ “did somewhat better”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/world/asia/14korea.html:
bq. In a statement on the North’s official Korean Central News Agency, an unidentified spokesman for the North Korean Foreign Ministry was quoted as saying that his nation would continue its nuclear program to defend itself against what he called a hostile United States policy. He was quoted as saying that his nation would “weaponize” its existing plutonium stockpiles and begin a program to enrich uranium, which can also be used to make atomic warheads.
Yes, this wraps up the plutonium and uranium issues together, and does not mention the LWR angle, which could be misleading. But it contains little that can be called inaccurate. (The statement said that that NK would “commence” enrichment, but also said that the development of technology has been underway for an unspecified time, so “begin a program” does not seem quite right.)
The NYT also noticed that this part of yesterday’s statement echoes “one from late April”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2021/what-to-expect-from-north-korea. That’s something else the WP -got wrong- _appears to have missed._
This other “AP story by Hyung-Jin Kim”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090614/ap_on_re_as/as_koreas_nuclear;_ylt=AqBRpW8iowxU7sCNOahYFAys0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTJqaDI1aDJvBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkwNjE0L2FzX2tvcmVhc19udWNsZWFyBGNwb3MDMwRwb3MDMTAEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yeQRzbGsDbmtvcmVhd2FybnNv got it right about the LWR angle, wrong about the novelty of the statement:
bq. In Saturday’s statement, North Korea said it has been enriching uranium to provide fuel for its light-water reactor. It was the first public acknowledgment the North is running a uranium enrichment program in addition to its known plutonium-based program. The two radioactive materials are key ingredients in making atomic bombs.
Sorry to drag on like this, but I’m really frustrated by the bad reporting. Can you tell?
On a Happier Note
The _Washington Times_ “got it pretty much straight”:http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/14/un-sanctions-prompt-threat-to-attack/?feat=home_headlines:
bq. The news agency quoted an unidentified Foreign Ministry official as saying that Pyongyang would start a program to enrich uranium for a light-water reactor.
As in the case of the NYT, one could quibble about the word “start.” Regardless, I’m awarding to Desikan Thirunarayanapuram of the _Washington Times_ the inaugural _TW Prize for Largely Accurate Reporting About North Korea._ Congratulations, Desikan.
“Antoine de Saint Exupéry”:http://books.google.com/books?id=CQYg20lTHtMC, meet “Niccolò Machiavelli”:http://books.google.com/books?id=bJUBAAAAQAAJ.
Word has been leaking out of South Korea for awhile now that KJI’s presumed successor is his third son, Kim Jong Un, aged 26. The Swiss magazine _L’Hebdo_ carries an account (en français) of the “apprentice dictator’s” “schooling in Berne”:http://www.hebdo.ch/Exclusif_Coree_Nord_dictateur_Suisse_1461_.html. The _Washington Post_ hits “some of the high points”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/01/AR2009060103750.html:
p{float: right; margin-left:2px}. !/images/101.jpg!
bq. Kim attended the school under the false name of Pak Chol, the weekly said, and school officials and his classmates “thought they were dealing with the son of the driver of the embassy.” Friends and staff at the school remembered a shy boy who enjoyed skiing, loved the National Basketball Association and spoke highly of action-movie actor Jean-Claude Van Damme. He reportedly left the school at age 15 to return to North Korea, and little about his life there is known to the outside world.
Bill Powell of _Time_ has a “profile with details from his Pyongyang days”:http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1901758,00.html:
p{float: right; margin-left:2px;}. !/images/102.jpg!
bq.. In his memoir recounting the days he spent as Kim Jong Il’s personal chef in Pyongyang, Kenji Fujimoto calls Kim Jong Un, the third son of the North Korea dictator, the “Prince.” “When Jong Un shook hands with me,” Fujimoto writes, “he stared at me with a vicious look. I cannot forget the look in the Prince’s eyes: it’s as if he was thinking, ‘This guy is a despicable Japanese.'” Jong Un, Fujimoto also writes, is “a chip off the old block, a spitting image of his father in terms of face, body shape and personality.”
[snip]
Jong Un, Fujimoto writes, is different. He and his brother Jong Chul enjoyed playing basketball — but after the games, Jong Chul would just say goodbye to their friends and leave. Jong Un would then gather up his teammates and, like a coach, analyze the game they just played: “You should have passed the ball to this guy, you should have shot it then.” According to various, usually unsourced South Korean press reports since Fujimoto’s book came out, Jong Un is said to be “ambitious” and a “take-no-prisoners” type — again, in contrast to his older brothers.
p. Notice what connects these accounts: basketball. Soon, perhaps, KCNA will start accusing the brigandish puppet flunkeys of conducting a madcap full-court press.
Meanwhile, it appears that North Korea is “preparing a long-range missile”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-north-korea-missile2-2009jun02,0,4799191.story at its new launch facility at Dongchang-ni.
Not the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, to judge by “this item”:http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2009/200905/news30/20090530-07ee.html:
bq.. Pyongyang, May 30 (KCNA) — Meetings took place in the capitals of South Phyongan, Jagang, South Hwanghae, North Hwanghae and Kangwon Provinces to hail the second successful nuclear test.
[snip]
Speakers at the meetings said that the above-said success marked a historic event which demonstrated the dignity and might of Songun [military-first] Korea to the world once again.
[snip]
The speakers underscored the need to adorn every day of the 150-day campaign with miracles and feats, highly proud and honored with the status of the country as a nuclear weapons state and open the gate to a thriving nation in 2012, the centenary of birth of President Kim Il Sung.
p. This is a mite ironic at a couple levels. The part about a “thriving nation,” for example. Also, Kim Il Sung’s dying wish was said to have been the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
According to Elaine Grossman’s “Pentagon source”:http://gsn.nti.org/gsn/nw_20090529_3404.php, North Korea’s plutonium is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma:
“We don’t know how much (fissile) material that they have,” the Pentagon official, who asked not to be identified, said in a Wednesday interview. “We don’t know how much of what they have they want to expend on tests.”
However, multiple nuclear tests are “quite possible,” the official told Global Security Newswire.
As the title of this post suggests, I can see at least a couple of ways of looking at this matter. As per usual, they are based on no special information of any kind — no rumors, gossip, or leaks — just my own speculations and educated guesses. Let’s call them “More is More” and “Less is More.”
More is More
According to the Theory of More is More, North Korea is a plutonium miser who carefully husbands its stockpile. Nothing followed the 2006 test for so long because every last little bit was needed to deter invasion, command respect, or whatever it is exactly that one supposes North Korea’s plutonium is for. Because Test #1 was a fizzle, further testing was in demand, but it would have to wait for further reprocessing of plutonium.
That’s basically what Sig Hecker was telling Mark Landler of the NYT “back in mid-April”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1996/north-koreas-reprocessing-option:
But Dr. Hecker said the North Koreans could begin reprocessing plutonium from an existing cache in a couple of weeks. That would allow them to make at least one additional bomb, he said, which might embolden them to conduct another test and refine their bomb-making expertise.
“With Yongbyon disabled, it meant no more bombs and no better bombs,” Dr. Hecker said.
In sum: Fewer tests, more plutonium, more value.
Less is More
According to the Theory of Less is More, because Test #1 was a fizzle, North Korea basically had nothing of value at all. So the more testing done, the closer the DPRK gets to its Holy Grail, the weaponized device. (In inimitable NK lingo, this would be called “bolstering the war deterrent.”) Nothing followed the 2006 test for so long either to avoid disrupting the 6PT process, because a suitable provocation had yet to be found, or because that’s how long it took the scientists and engineers to be ready for another go-round.
In sum: More tests, less plutonium, more value.
(Somewhere out there, there’s also got to be a Theory of It Doesn’t Matter, in which the timing of nuclear tests plays a crucial political function, and the rest is an afterthought. But I’m not ready to go there.)
…Drum Roll…
Now, since North Korea _has_ tested before reprocessing the spent fuel on hand, More is More is looking a little shaky. Sig Hecker has lately written a “valuable essay”:http://experts.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/26/from_pyongyang_to_tehran on this and related topics. It’s interesting to see how he handles the problem:
Although Yongbyon will not be able to complete reprocessing for four to six months, the anticipated increase in plutonium is what has allowed it to conduct this week’s nuclear test. …This test will enhance Pyongyang’s confidence in its arsenal and may be an important step toward miniaturizing warheads to fit on its missiles. Still, the size of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal will remain restricted by its limited plutonium inventory. Fully capable nuclear-tipped missiles will require further tests, so the sequence of this week’s provocative steps foreshadows more of the same.
Here one detects some wavering in the direction of Less is More from a carefully modified More is More, in which the _anticipation_ of reprocessing enabled Test #2. I’m probably not doing justice to the essay, so read “the whole thing”:http://experts.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/26/from_pyongyang_to_tehran for yourself. But basically, one no longer sees the strongly held judgment of April 2009.
An aside: for reasons not worth regurgitating here, no one outside the DPRK itself knows more about North Korea’s plutonium than Hecker. His views are carefully attended to in the norkological community and beyond, making him an opinion leader of some heft. It is safe to take what he says as indicative of much more than one person’s judgment. At least, “that’s what I do”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2023/surprise-intel-failure.
The Envelope, Please
So, “what should we expect”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/2021/what-to-expect-from-north-korea?
At this point, we seem to be looking at a rolling pattern of military activity that will continue for some time, as the DPRK takes “additional self-defensive measures in order to defend its supreme interests” and “reacts to additional perceived provocations”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2319/lick-the-carrot. Who knows? Perhaps the _Sturm und Drang_ will drag on through the end of the “150-Day Battle”:http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk01500&num=4876, on October 10. We’ve seen a nuclear test and several short-range missile tests. Now there are “indications of an upcoming ICBM test”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/30/AR2009053000478.html.
And how many more nuclear tests, if any, should we expect? To answer that question, it would be helpful to know how many test shafts have been spotted up at “P’unggye-yok”:http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/dprk/kilju-punggye-yok.htm. Sean O’Connor has “spotted two possibles”:http://geimint.blogspot.com/2009/05/nuclear-korea.html in 2005 imagery. Maybe someone could task a commercial imagery satellite to see what it can see?
The short answer is, I guess we’ll find out.
Here are some resources for anyone getting up to speed on NK Pu. ISIS published a “detailed report”:http://www.isis-online.org/publications/dprk/DPRKplutoniumFEB.pdf in 2007. The Washington Post provided some insight into the thinking of the U.S. intelligence community back in “May 2008”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/13/AR2008051303205.html. A key point in the article was “clarified at ACW”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1886/a-lot-of-nork-pu#comment. There were also several other articles on North Korea’s formal declaration of its stockpile, “linked and discussed at ACW”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1907/north-korean-reprocessing-campaigns.