The threat from North Korea

by John Thompson

09/15/03

There is an army expression — "when the balloon goes up." It refers to what should, might, or must happen when a particular war begins. The balloon has been threatening to go up again in North Korea for several years.

Kim Jong Il, the weird leader of a weird nation, has been blustering and sabre rattling in a bid to capture the World’s attention for almost a decade now. We can guess why, but he is walking on a treacherous path.

North Korea is one of the world’s last overtly Marxist nations, but is also a xenophobic state with a strong personality cult around Kim Jong Il (aka "Dear Leader") and his late father, Kim Il Sung (the "Great Leader"). In 1950, much to Stalin and Mao’s surprise, Kim senior launched a surprise attack on South Korea, then a tentative democracy under US supervision. This was a bid to unite the Koreas under his own rule.

The resulting war took three years and over two million lives. The USSR and People’s Republic of China had sent North Korea men, supplies and equipment; while the US and dozens of UN members were defending the South. As the full prosecution of the war by the UN might have risked the start of another World War, the UN sought a truce rather than battlefield victory. As North Korea refused, then and now, to recognize the existence of South Korea, in a technical sense the North is still at war with the South.

The difference between the Koreas (and the different political systems that governed them) can easily be seen 50 years later. The South is a fully industrialized democracy, prosperous, and easily twice the population of the North. North Korea has managed to kill about a million of its own citizens — at least — with the gulag and terror machinery of a Stalin-style state, and millions more are starving in the dark as a result of a series of cascading economic failures.

One of the reasons why North Korea’s economy is failing is the incredible concentration of resources it places into its military. While South Korea poured concrete into office towers and factories, the North poured it into fortifications — producing hundreds of artillery bunkers and underground tank hangers to give it a secure footing for a new war on the south. For fifty years, South Korea sent salesmen out into the world to develop markets for its goods. North Korea preferred to send infiltrators and commandos into the south, and still occasionally does so.

North Korea has probably developed chemical weapons — they have enough of an economic infrastructure to do so, and do export cheap arms into the developing world. While South Korea built up an automobile and electronics industry, North Korea started churning out ballistic missiles. Exporting extended range Scud rockets and the know-how to make them appears to be their most prosperous industry.

The Dear Leader has also spent his nation’s slender resources to developing nuclear weapons. Korea reneged last year on a 1994 agreement with President Clinton to abandon a nuclear reactor program that was enriching uranium in return for the construction of two light reactors (that do not produce weapons grade material as a by-product) and for the delivery of a 100,000 tons of diesel fuel every year. Part of the deal was that the spent fuel rods from the old reactor would be kept under supervision, instead of being processed to separate out fissionable uranium of an atomic bomb.

It was thought by some analysts in 1994 that the North Koreans had already diverted enough material to build one to two weapons. However, with their current refusal to abide by the 1994 agreement, they have started enriching uranium from the spent fuel rods again, and have probably assembled some nuclear weapons already.

In the meantime, North Korea is squalling like a spoiled infant, threatening war one day and demanding respect the next. Seeing as their massive artillery park (and, perhaps, thousands of tons of chemical shells) is within range of Seoul; that their ballistic missiles can reach all of Japan; and that they probably can export atom bombs to, ahem, "private" buyers quite soon; they have the World’s attention. However, such behavior cannot be rewarded under any circumstances.

As the pampered son of an all-powerful dictator who stepped into his father’s jackboots, it is unlikely that Kim Jong Il has heard of the "law of unintended consequences", but threatening and blustering can backfire, and many leaders have painted themselves into corners before. The risk of a renewed Korean War remains high.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca