When the partying has to stop



Feb 10th 2005
From The Economist print edition

North Korea has announced that it is suspending its participation in talks on ending its nuclear stand-off with America. The Bush administration says this will only deepen Kim Jong Il’s isolation. The mercurial dictator clearly begs to differ

THE boss’s birthday is an obligatory big event in North Korea. Whether or not the reclusive Kim Jong Il shows up in person for his national shindig on February 16th, the fireworks have begun. North Korea’s announcement, not just that it has built nuclear weapons (it has said that before), but that it is suspending indefinitely its participation in six-party talks that America, China and others had been hoping would end its shady nuclear dealings, is an attempt to put the blame on the Bush administration for the nuclear impasse. But it is also a poser for China, which had been expecting to cajole, bribe and drag North Korea into more talks within weeks.

Pulling out of the talks will only deepen North Korea’s isolation, said Condoleezza Rice, America’s secretary of state. Mr Kim clearly calculates differently. Pressure had been building for him to sit down again, along with South Korea, Japan and Russia, and this time negotiate seriously. North Korea had yet to respond to an American proposal last June that would offer economic assistance and security guarantees, as North Korea has demanded, but only if Mr Kim agrees to the verifiable dismantling of both his nuclear programmes: the plutonium programme that had been frozen until two years ago under a 1994 deal with America, and the uranium-enrichment activity that America accuses him of carrying on in secret, and that led to the latest stand-off.

Instead of slapping down a counter-proposal of his own, Mr Kim has used a string of excuses—America’s presidential election (in which he rooted for George Bush’s opponent), waiting to see whether Mr Bush sounded “hostile” in his State of the Union address earlier this month (he didn’t). He blames his latest huff on Ms Rice, who recently lumped North Korea among the “outposts of tyranny”.

Until now, China, South Korea and Japan have all been happy to prop up Mr Kim with dollops of aid, so long as he refrained from doing rash things: testing a bomb, for example, or another of his far-flying missiles. South Korea has forged ahead with economic co-operation, including links across the otherwise heavily fortified border. But letting Mr Kim off the nuclear hook so easily had already started to look dangerous.

Tests by America’s Department of Energy have convinced American officials that North Korea may well have supplied the uranium hexafluoride gas—partly-processed uranium which can be spun in centrifuge machines to make enriched uranium for either civilian or military uses—that Libya turned over to inspectors a year ago when it abandoned its once secret nuclear-weapons programme. The evidence is not irrefutable, but the conclusion is also based on traces of plutonium found on the canisters concerned, as well as a third piece of evidence not so far made public. Earlier this month, America put its case to China, South Korea and Japan—possibly the real reason for Mr Kim’s latest tantrum. If the analysis is correct, it puts North Korea just one step away from one of the Bush administration’s red lines: the export of weapons-useable material itself.

Until recently, Chinese officials in particular had expressed scepticism that North Korea even had a uranium-enrichment programme. They and others have wanted America to focus on North Korea’s known plutonium-making. America accepts that North Korea has probably finished extracting the plutonium (enough for half a dozen bombs) from spent fuel-rods previously stored under the 1994 deal near its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon; it will soon be able to unload more rods from the reactor for reprocessing.

But the idea that America should set aside its uranium concerns is given a bipartisan rebuttal in the current issue of Foreign Affairs by Robert Gallucci, who negotiated the 1994 plutonium deal with North Korea under the Clinton administration, and Mitchell Reiss, the just departed head of policy planning in the Bush administration’s State Department. Turning a blind eye to evidence of North Korea’s enrichment work would, they argue, leave Mr Kim with a covert supply of fissile material, whether for bomb making or for export, including to terrorist groups.

So far, despite its tough line, says Gary Samore, of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, America has in effect acquiesced in North Korea’s becoming a covert nuclear power. South Korea recently admitted for the first time that it suspects the North of possessing nuclear weapons too.

But that is only part of the story. Its exports of missiles and imports of illicit nuclear goods are being disrupted on land, at sea and in the air under the American-led proliferation security initiative, which Russia has formally joined and which even China has said a few kind words about. Its collaborators, including Iran and Syria, are coming under increasing scrutiny. Its narcotics and counterfeiting activities are being squeezed too. Meanwhile, there have been reports of political intrigues and even some limited anti-regime protests. Mr Kim may soon pick one of his sons as the next dynast-designate, in part to quell rumours that he is losing his grip.

Lashing out under pressure is a Kim trademark. So is demanding hefty bribes, from China and others, for better behaviour. Mr Kim may yet change his mind again about the nuclear talks. But expect him to take his time about it.



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