Thirteen days ago, North Korea admitted to a visiting U.S. delegation that it has been developing a program in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 1994 agreement it made with the United States to refrain from producing weapons-grade material. The North Koreans made this startling admission because they were confronted with American intelligence that suggested they had a secret project underway.
Under the secret program, the North Koreans have produced weapons-grade material from highly enriched uranium without using a nuclear reactor. In addition, the Hermit Kingdom now says that despite a stipulation in the 1994 agreement, it will not dismantle the reprocessing plant that can convert spent nuclear fuel into weapons-grade plutonium.
While there is no concrete evidence that the North Koreans have turned this weapons-grade material into nuclear weapons, the fact is that they certainly can in a relatively short period of time. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld believes that the North Koreans may already have one or two nuclear bombs; some members of the Bush administration believe that within 12 months, North Korea could be producing six bombs a year. Moreover, as the North Koreans demonstrated in a successful test they conducted in August 1998, they have the capability to fire a missile that can reach Alaska.
Given these developments, the reaction of the Bush administration has been remarkably restrained in two ways. First, neither the president nor his advisors went public with the intelligence information. Rather, President Bush dispatched James Kelly, an assistant secretary of State, to Pyongyang to confront the North Koreans. Second, when the North Koreans admitted they had violated the 1994 agreement, the administration decided to handle the crisis quietly through diplomatic channels. Its strongest public reaction was to announce that it was calling off the talks to discuss economic cooperation with North Korea.
Compare this reaction to the way in which the administration has handled Iraq, another state it identified as part of an axis of evil. For the past year, the administration has been proclaiming loudly and often that preemptive military action is required to bring about an immediate regime change in Iraq–unilaterally if necessary. Why? According to Bush, it’s because Saddam Hussein may be able to obtain fissile material on the black market and that he would then be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year. But if Saddam must rely on his own resources, it will take a minimum of three years and probably as long as seven years for the Iraqi leader to produce a nuclear weapon. Moreover, none of Iraq’s missiles have ranges in excess of 600 miles. So even if he produces a nuclear weapon, he still cannot threaten the United States directly.
The Bush administration also claims that Saddam should be removed quickly because he has chemical and biological weapons and because he commits egregious violations of the human rights of his own people. But the North Koreans told their American visitors that they too had other “powerful things”–that is, chemical and biological weapons. And the late Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il, the current leader of North Korea, take a back seat to no one when it comes to starving and abusing their own citizens or those of other countries. Let us not forget the recent disclosure that North Korea abducted dozens of Japanese citizens two decades ago and assassinated most of the South Korean cabinet in 1990.
Still, the administration’s approach to the North Korea situation is the correct one. Taking preemptive military action against Pyongyang can lead to a second large war on the Korean Peninsula. Although the United States and its South Korean allies would be victorious in such a conflict, Seoul would probably be destroyed and hundreds of thousands of civilians on both sides of the demilitarized zone would be killed. Moreover, there is no reason that North Korea cannot be deterred from using its nuclear weapons in the same way that it has been deterred from sending its million-man army across the 38th parallel these past 50 years. But if North Korea is a greater and more immediate threat to U.S. security than Iraq, and if the administration is willing to rely on deterrence and diplomacy to deal with Pyongyang, then why is it not willing to use the same tactics with Iraq?
This is a question that our military leaders and our allies have been asking for months. And it is a question that the Arab and Muslim world will surely be asking if the United States takes preemptive military action against Iraq and not North Korea. Similarly, why did the Bush administration wait to reveal the North Korea program until after Congress had voted to authorize military action against Iraq? Because that country is trying to get fissile material when North Korea already has it? And why is the Bush administration willing to risk an Armageddon in the Middle East by taking preemptive military action against Iraq when it is not willing to do the same in Northeast Asia? The answer to all these questions is that our policy toward Iraq is emotional, not logical.
