There is a pervasive desire in the United States and throughout East
Asia to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear-armed power, for
the prospect of Kim Jong-il's bizarre and unpredictable regime having
such a capability is profoundly disturbing. Two factions have emerged
in the United States about how to deal with the crisis, and they
embrace sharply different strategies. Yet they share an important
underlying assumption: that North Korea is using its nuclear program
merely as a negotiating ploy, and that Pyongyang can eventually be
induced to give up that program.

One group thinks that Washington's top policy objective should be to
entice Pyongyang to return to the 1994 Agreed Framework, under which
the North Koreans agreed to freeze their nuclear program in exchange
for fuel oil shipments and Western assistance in constructing
proliferation resistant light-water reactors for power generation.
These advocates of dialogue think the United States should meet North
Korea's demand for a non-aggression pact and provide other
concessions to resolve the nuclear crisis. Individuals as politically
diverse as former President Jimmy Carter, Sen. Joseph Lieberman
(D-CT), former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and Rep.
Curt Weldon (R-PA) have issued impassioned calls for a strategy of
dialogue and concessions. Those who advocate that strategy ignore an
important point, however: The United States has negotiated with North
Korea before, but each understanding or formal agreement seems merely
to pave the way for a new round of cheating and a new crisis.

The Bush Administration and most conservatives form the competing
faction, which is decidedly more skeptical about the efficacy of
offering concessions to Pyongyang. Moreover, it is apparent that the
administration has no interest in merely restoring the Agreed
Framework. Washington's goal is an agreement that would include
comprehensive "on demand" inspections of all possible nuclear weapons
sites. Indeed, it was that demand that contributed to an impasse in
the six-party talks (involving Japan, South Korea, China, Russia, the
United States and North Korea) in August.

The administration's approach combines a willingness to engage in
multilateral talks with a determination to tighten the screws
economically. One manifestation of the latter component is the
Proliferation Security Initiative, which enlists the support of
allies to interdict North Korea's trade in ballistic missiles,
nuclear technology, illegal drugs and other contraband. The core of
Washington's strategy is to forge a united diplomatic and economic
front with the nations of East Asia to pressure North Korea to give
up its nuclear weapons program.

But if the advocates of negotiations and concessions are naive,
proponents of diplomatic pressure and economic coercion may not be
much more realistic. It is not at all clear that even comprehensive
economic sanctions would produce the desired policy changes. UNICEF
has concluded that, because North Korea is already so desperately
poor, economic sanctions would have a slight impact. Trying to
further isolate one of the world's most economically isolated
countries is a little like threatening to deprive a monk of worldly
pleasures. Tightening economic sanctions may cause additional
suffering among North Korea's destitute masses, but such an approach
is unlikely to alter the regime's behavior on the nuclear issue.

Ultimately, the competing strategies of dialogue and
economic/diplomatic pressure are based on the same assumption: that
the right policy mix will cause the North to give up its nuclear
ambitions. But what if that assumption is wrong? CIA director George
Tenet concedes that North Korea may believe there is no contradiction
between continuing to pursue a nuclear weapons program and seeking a
"normal relationship" with the United States--a relationship that
would entail substantial concessions from Washington. "Kim Jong-il's
attempts to parlay the North's nuclear program into political
leverage suggest he is trying to negotiate a fundamentally different
relationship with Washington, one that implicitly tolerates the
North's nuclear weapons program", Tenet concludes. Robert Madsen, a
fellow at Stanford University's Asia/Pacific Research Center is even
more skeptical of the conventional wisdom that North Korea is using
the nuclear program solely as a bargaining chip. As he argued in the
Financial Times,

The problem with this analysis is that Pyongyang probably does not
intend to trade its nuclear weapons for foreign concessions. To the
contrary, an examination of North Korea's national interests suggests
the acquisition of a sizeable nuclear arsenal is a perfectly rational
objective.

Given the way the United States has treated non-nuclear adversaries
such as Serbia and Iraq, such a conclusion by North Korean leaders
would not be all that surprising.

Pyongyang's long-standing pattern of making agreements to remain
non-nuclear and then systematically violating those agreements also
casts doubt on the bargaining chip thesis. In addition to violating
the 1994 Agreed Framework, the North violated its obligations under
the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (which Pyongyang joined in 1985)
and the 1991 joint declaration with South Korea to keep the peninsula
non-nuclear. Such repeated cheating raises a very disturbing
possibility: Perhaps North Korea is determined to become a nuclear
power and has engaged in diplomatic obfuscation to confuse or lull
its adversaries. If that is the case, the United States and the
countries of East Asia may have to deal with the reality of a
nuclear-armed North Korea.

Pre-emption vs. Containment

The policy options available to forestall this dangerous development
are all rather unpleasant, but one is decidedly worse and
significantly more frightening than the others: the possibility that
the United States might use military force to prevent North Korea
from building its nuclear arsenal. Hawks in the American foreign
policy community are already broaching that possibility. Citing
Israel's raid on Iraq's Osirak reactor, Richard Perle, the
influential former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board,
warns that no one can "exclude the kind of surgical strike we saw in
1981." Moreover, in what should sound alarm bells in Tokyo and Seoul,
he makes it clear that America's allies should not expect to exercise
a veto over that decision.

Many advocates of pre-emptive military action are confident that such
a course would not trigger a major war in East Asia. Those who
embrace that optimistic scenario fail to explain why the North Korean
elite would assume that a passive response to an American pre-emptive
strike would enhance the prospects for regime survival. Given the way
the United States treated Iraq, the North Koreans would more likely
conclude that an attack on the country's nuclear installations would
be merely a prelude to a larger military offensive to achieve regime
change. The fact that some political allies of the Bush
Administration openly talk about pushing regime change certainly does
not reassure Pyongyang on that score.

Using military force to eradicate North Korea's nuclear program would
be a high-risk venture that could easily engulf the Korean Peninsula
in a major war. Indeed, it could be a war with nuclear implications.
North Korea boasts that it already possesses some nuclear weapons,
and U.S. intelligence sources have long believed that Pyongyang
already may have built one or two weapons by the time it agreed to
freeze its program in 1994. An assessment by China's intelligence
agency is even more alarming. Beijing reportedly believes the North
may have four or five such weapons. Worse still, press reports
contend that U.S. officials have told their Japanese counterparts
that North Korea is working to develop "several" nuclear warheads
that can be loaded onto ballistic missiles. North Korea itself has
announced that it has completed reprocessing the spent fuel rods in
the Yongbyon reactor and is now building more nuclear weapons. If
true, Pyongyang will soon have a deployable arsenal, not merely one
or two crude nuclear devices.

A pre-emptive strike is not the answer. The nuclear variable in the
pre-emption equation is too uncertain to warrant the risk for at
least this simple reason: It is not at all certain that the United
States has identified all of the installations, much less that it
could successfully eradicate them. North Korea has had years to build
installations deep underground and to disperse any weapons it has
built.

It is unlikely that North Korea would passively accept the blow
against its sovereignty that even a surgical strike against the
Yongbyon reactor complex or other targets would entail. At the very
least, Washington would have to expect terrorist retaliation by North
Korean operatives against U.S. targets overseas and, possibly, in the
homeland itself. North Korea might even retaliate by launching
full-scale military operations against South Korea--a development
that would put U.S. forces stationed in that country in immediate
danger. Indeed, in a worst-case scenario, mushroom clouds could
blossom above Seoul and Tokyo--or above U.S. bases in South Korea or
Okinawa.

It is conceivable, of course, that Kim Jong-il's regime would
fulminate about an Osirak-like strike but not escalate the crisis to
full-scale war. Or perhaps North Korea's military would unravel under
stress and not be able to mount a coherent offensive. But that is not
the way to bet. Even a U.S. military buildup in the region designed
to intimidate Pyongyang could trigger a catastrophe. "Bold
Sentinel"--a war game organized by the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in May 2003, featuring a mock National Security
Council comprised of individuals who held senior policy positions in
previous administrations--reached the conclusion that North Korea
would likely launch a pre-emptive strike in response to such a
buildup. This assessment is shared by a senior North Korean defector,
Cho Myung-chul, who estimates the chances of general war to be 80
percent in response to even a limited strike on Yongbyon.

Aside from its possible nuclear (and chemical and biological)
weapons, Pyongyang possesses other impressive capabilities. In
addition to its army of more than a million soldiers, North Korea
deploys up to 600 Scud missiles and additional longer-range Nodong
missiles. The Seoul-Inchon metropolitan area (which hosts roughly
half of South Korea's population) is less than forty miles from the
DMZ. Pyongyang is thought to be capable of firing between 300,000 and
500,000 artillery shells an hour into Seoul in the event of war. Even
if the North were ultimately defeated, which would be almost
inevitable, the destruction to South Korea would be horrific.
Estimates of the number of likely casualties from a full-scale North
Korean attack range from 100,000 to more than one million. That fact
alone should take the military option off the table, yet the Bush
Administration has publicly--and, what is worse, privately--declined
to do so.

Instead of placing faith in the efficacy of negotiations with a
country that has violated every agreement it has ever signed on the
nuclear issue or considering the dangerous option of pre-emptive war,
the United States needs a strategy to deal with the prospect of North
Korea's emergence as a nuclear power. Washington should pursue a
two-pronged strategy, since there are two serious problems that must
be addressed. One problem is the possibility that Pyongyang might be
aiming to become a regional nuclear power with a significant arsenal
that could pose a threat to its neighbors and, ultimately, to the
American homeland. The latter is not an immediate danger, but a North
Korean capability to do so over the longer-term is a problem
Washington must anticipate.

Countering the threat of a "bolt out of the blue" attack on the
United States is relatively straightforward. America retains the
largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal in the world, as well
as a decisive edge in all conventional military capabilities. The
North Korean regime surely knows (although it might behoove the
administration to make the point explicitly) that any attack on
American soil would mean the obliteration of the regime. The United
States successfully deterred a succession of aggressive and odious
Soviet leaders from using nuclear weapons, and it did the same thing
with a nuclear-armed China under Mao Zedong. It is therefore highly
probable that Kim Jong-il's North Korea, which would possess a much
smaller nuclear arsenal than either the Soviet Union and China, can
be deterred as well. As an insurance policy to protect the American
population in the highly unlikely event that deterrence fails, and
for other reasons besides, Washington should continue developing a
shield against ballistic missiles.

To counter North Korea's possible threat to East Asia, Washington
should convey the message that Pyongyang would be making a serious
miscalculation by assuming it will possess a nuclear monopoly in
northeast Asia. North Korea's rulers are counting on the United
States to prevent Japan and South Korea from even considering the
option of going nuclear. American officials should inform Pyongyang
that, if the North insists on joining the global nuclear weapons
club, Washington will urge Tokyo and Seoul to re-evaluate their
earlier decisions to decline to acquire strategic nuclear deterrents.
Even the possibility that South Korea and Japan might do so would
come as an extremely unpleasant wakeup call to North Korea.

The United States does not need to press Tokyo and Seoul to go
nuclear. It is sufficient if Washington informs those governments
that the United States would not object to them developing nuclear
weapons. That by itself would be a major change in U.S. policy. In
addition, Washington needs to let Seoul and Tokyo know that the
United States intends to withdraw its forces from South Korea and
Japan. In an environment with a nuclear-armed North Korea, those
forward-deployed forces are not military assets; they are nuclear
hostages.

Faced with a dangerous neighbor possessing nuclear capabilities and a
more limited U.S. military commitment to the region, Japan or South
Korea (or perhaps both countries) might well decide to build a
nuclear deterrent. The prospect of additional nuclear proliferation
in northeast Asia is obviously not an ideal outcome. But offsetting
the North's illicit advantage may be the best of a set of bad
options. Simply trying to renegotiate the 1994 Agreed Framework is
unlikely to induce North Korea to return to non-nuclear status.
Diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions are not likely to achieve
that goal either. And pre-emptive military strikes are too dangerous.

The one chance to get the North to abandon its current course is for
Washington and its allies to make clear to Pyongyang that it may have
to deal with nuclear neighbors (translation: the North would no
longer be able to intimidate them in the same strategically
advantageous way). Indeed, Pyongyang could face the prospect of
confronting more prosperous adversaries possessing a greater capacity
to build larger and more sophisticated nuclear arsenals than North
Korea could hope to do. The North may conclude that ending its
cheating strategy and keeping the region non-nuclear would be a more
productive approach. Even if Pyongyang does not do so, a nuclear
balance of power--a mad for northeast Asia--would likely emerge
instead of a North Korean nuclear monopoly.

Additionally, the prospect of a nuclear-armed Japan is the one factor
that could galvanize Beijing to put serious diplomatic and economic
pressure on Pyongyang to relinquish its nuclear ambitions. Charles
Krauthammer has expressed this thesis starkly in the Washington Post:

We should go to the Chinese and tell them plainly that if they do not
join us in squeezing North Korea and thus stopping its march to go
nuclear, we will endorse any Japanese attempt to create a nuclear
deterrent of its own. Even better, we would sympathetically regard
any request by Japan to acquire American nuclear missiles as an
immediate and interim deterrent. If our nightmare is a nuclear North
Korea, China's is a nuclear Japan. It's time to share the nightmares.

Even if one does not embrace Krauthammer's approach, the reality is
that, if the United States blocks the emergence of a northeast Asian
nuclear balance, it may well be stuck with the responsibility of
shielding non-nuclear allies from a volatile, nuclear-armed North
Korea. More proliferation may be a troubling outcome, but it beats
that nightmare scenario.

But some of the most hawkish members of the U.S. foreign policy
community are terrified at the prospect of America's democratic
allies in East Asia building nuclear deterrents. Neoconservative
activists Robert Kagan and William Kristol, writing in the Weekly
Standard, expressed horror about the possibility of such
proliferation: "The possibility that Japan, and perhaps even Taiwan,
might respond to North Korea's actions by producing their own nuclear
weapons, thus spurring an East Asian nuclear arms race . . . is
something that should send chills up the spine of any sensible
American strategist." This attitude misconstrues the problem. The
real threat to East Asia is if an aggressive and erratic North Korean
regime gets nukes. Nuclear arsenals in the hands of stable,
democratic, status quo powers such as Japan and South Korea do not
threaten the peace of the region. Kagan and Kristol, and other
likeminded Americans, embrace a moral equivalency between a potential
aggressor and its potential victims.

The other component of the North Korean nuclear problem is even more
troubling. The United States and North Korea's neighbors can probably
learn to live with Pyongyang's possession of a small nuclear arsenal.
What the United States cannot tolerate is North Korea's becoming the
global distributor of nuclear technology, potentially selling a
nuclear weapon or fissile material to Al-Qaeda or other anti-American
terrorist organizations. Pyongyang has shown a willingness to sell
anything that will raise revenue for the financially hard-pressed
regime. North Korea earned $560 million in 2001 alone in missile
sales--including sales to some of the most virulently anti-American
regimes3--while, in the spring of 2003, evidence emerged of extensive
North Korean involvement in the heroin trade. As Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage remarked before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in early-February 2003, "the arms race in North Korea pales
next to the possibility . . . that she would pass on fissile material
and other nuclear technology to either transnational actors or to
rogue states."

Preventing that development, which is clearly the goal of the
Proliferation Security Initiative, will certainly not be easy.
Successful interdiction as a general policy is a long shot at best.
The utter failure to halt the trafficking in illegal drugs using that
method does not bode well for intercepting nuclear contraband. It
would be difficult to seal off North Korea in the face of a concerted
smuggling campaign. Indeed, it is especially daunting when one
realizes that the amount of plutonium needed to build a nuclear
weapon could be smuggled in a container the size of a bread box.

Since interdiction is unlikely to prove successful except on
fortuitous occasions, the United States needs to adopt another
approach. First, Washington should communicate to North Korea, both
in private and publicly, that selling nuclear material--much less an
assembled nuclear weapon--to terrorist organizations or hostile
governments will be regarded as a threat to America's vital security
interests. Indeed, the United States should treat such a transaction
as the equivalent of a threatened attack on America by North Korea.
Such a threat would warrant military action to remove the North
Korean regime. Pyongyang must be told in no uncertain terms that
trafficking in nuclear materials is a bright red line that it dare
not cross if the regime wishes to survive.

That warning should be the large stick in Washington's policy mix.
The carrot should consist of a willingness to extend diplomatic
recognition to, and lift all economic sanctions on, North Korea.
Making that country's economy more prosperous is the most realistic
prospect for ensuring that North Korea can derive sufficient income
from legitimate sources and thus will not be tempted to engage in
nuclear proliferation. That, of course, will require extensive
economic reforms by North Korea along the lines adopted by the
People's Republic of China over the past quarter-century.

Lifting economic sanctions is certainly no guarantee that North
Korean leaders will have the prudence to adopt the required reforms,
but Pyongyang has shown some signs in recent years of modifying its
ideology of Juche (self-sufficiency) and opening itself to the
outside world economically. In the spring of 2003, the North Korean
regime started building market halls around the country to encourage
the activity of private merchants, and it loosened rules about who
may do business and what may be sold. Surprisingly, even foreigners
will be allowed to sell their products in the new markets. "Before,
they were tolerating private business. Now, they are encouraging it",
concluded Cho Myong Choi, a North Korean defector who once taught
economics at Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang. True, these are
initial--and somewhat hesitant--steps on a long path, and Washington
cannot do much to advance North Korea's economic reforms. The North
Koreans will have to do the bulk of the work. At the very least,
though, the United States should not put obstacles in the path of
reform.

A policy mix of such carrots and sticks would hardly produce a
perfect outcome. The strategy would, however, trump the alternative
of vainly trying to bribe or pressure Pyongyang to relinquish its
nuclear ambitions, even as evidence mounts to the contrary. And it
certainly beats the reckless option of launching a pre-emptive war.
As is often the case, the best a policy can ultimately accomplish is
less than ideal. What matters instead is that it works.

Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies
at the Cato Institute. He is the co-author of Korean Conundrum: America's
Troubled Relations with North and South Korea, which is forthcoming from
Palgrave/MacMillan.

Essay Types: Essay