Sanctions, North Korea, and Ugly Alternatives

North Korea considers sanctions to be an act of war and would likely take out its frustrations on Seoul. Well, knowing the UN, that means that we'll get some weak worded resolution that will not impose anything nearly as strong to deter North Korea's nuclear ambitions. China seems to be okay with this, though one has to wonder why.

Mark Levin among others has called for the US to provide South Korea, Taiwan and Japan with the means to deploy not only missile defense systems, but nuclear weapons to not only deter North Korea, but force China into rethinking its position on North Korea.

Here's one thing that should be considered well before we get to that point. Demand that US and international inspectors have unfettered access to the site of the claimed nuclear detonation so that they can determine what exactly the North Koreans did. If the North fails to permit such access, then go ahead with the sanctions.

Right now, North Korea is dictating the terms of negotiating and they want to cleave the US from the other members of the Six Party Talks, thinking that they can get a better deal that way.

Also, if the UN does impose Article VII sanctions on North Korea, why shouldn't the North Koreans consider that to be an act of war and restart hostilities immediately? Let's keep in mind that the Korean War did not end with an armistice but a cease fire agreement. Sanctions would be casus belli for a renewal of hostilities just as much as those North Korean missile launches fired towards Hawaii and Japan over the summer were.

We're witnessing brinksmanship with a totalitarian dictator with potential or actual nuclear weapons who doesn't have a firm grasp of reality, which is the most dangerous kind of situation one can image.

Japan isn't waiting on the UN, and is imposing strict sanctions on North Korea. Good for them. They're in the line of fire, and they're stepping up to the plate. South Korea, however, is lagging, though that is a function of the simple fact that their capital city, Seoul, is in direct missile and gun range of the North Koreans just on the other side of the DMZ ~20 miles away.

Meanwhile, one needs to remember that North Korea has had as many as 1-2 nuclear weapons as of 2000, and perhaps a dozen or more in 2006. NBC News slipped that part into a news report last nite. So, far from blaming Bush for the sudden realization that North Korea has nuclear weapons, this has been building for years. They clearly had the materials, though whether they had assembled nuclear devices is an open question.

A State Department report notes the following:

In August 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated in Moscow that “North Korea possessed enough plutonium to produce two to three, maybe even four to five nuclear warheads.” This was largest official U.S. estimate of the possible number of North Korean nuclear weapons. U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies and experts have concluded a high range of likelihood that North Korea has acquired enough plutonium and has developed
significant technology to produce a small number of nuclear weapons. North Korea’s
approximately 70 day shutdown of the five megawatt reactor in 1989 gave it the opportunity to remove nuclear fuel rods, from which plutonium is reprocessed. State Department officials estimated that North Korea may have acquired six to eight kilograms of plutonium from the five megawatt reactor at Yongbyon, enough, they say, for possibly one bomb. However, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency reportedly estimated in late 1993 that North Korea extracted enough fuel rods for about 12 kilograms of plutonium — sufficient for one or two atomic bombs. The CIA and DIA apparently based their estimate on the 1989 shutdown of the five megawatt reactor. David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security produced in 1994 a detailed study of the 1989 reactor
shutdown and concluded that if North Korea removed all of the fuel rods from the reactor during the shutdown, the rods would have contained 14 kilograms of plutonium.

This report goes on to suggest that the South Korean and Japanese intel services had even higher estimates. It is key to focus on the timeframe here. We're talking August 2001, which is 8 months after taking office, and the nuclear materials were gathered in the course of the prior decade and didn't necessarily take into account other covert means to obtain nuclear materials.

Ed Morrissey has a Brookings Institute report on the situation and how the Clinton Administration handled matters. It isn't particularly flattering.

Technorati: north korea, nuclear, kim jong il, six party talks, bush, DPRK.