Robert Marquand has the story in The Christian Science Monitor. North Koreans are taught to believe that Kim Jong Il is a god.
In fact, in a time of famine and poverty, government spending on Kim-family deification - now nearly 40 percent of the visible budget - is the only category in the North's budget to increase, according to a new white paper by the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy in Seoul. It is rising even as defense, welfare, and bureaucracy spending have decreased. The increase pays for ideology schools, some 30,000 Kim monuments, gymnastic festivals, films and books, billboards and murals, 40,000 "research institutes," historical sites, rock carvings, circus theaters, training programs, and other worship events.
In 1990, ideology was 19 percent of North Korea's budget; by 2004 it doubled to at least 38.5 percent of state spending, according to the white paper. This extra financing may come from recent budget offsets caused by the shutting down of older state funding categories, says Alexander Mansourov of the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
It has long been axiomatic that the main danger to the Kim regime is internal unrest. That is, Koreans will discover the freedoms, glitter, and diversity of the modern outside world, and stop believing the story of idolatry they are awash in. "It isn't quite realized [in the West] how much a threat the penetration of ideas means. They [Kim's regime] see it as a social problem that could bring down the state," says Brian Myers, a North Korean expert at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea.
The whole article is very interesting. The regime is constantly updating their methods and messages for propagandizing their population. As Marquand makes clear, their propaganda efforts make Stalinist era propaganda in Russia look tame by comparison.
One way we could destabilize the North Korean regime is to pay for smuggling radios, pre-paid cellular phones, CDs, DVDs, and other electronic information tools into North Korea. Make it easier for the North Koreans to find out about the outside world. Beam more radio broadcasts at North Korea. Spend big to help corrupt the border guards and make North Korea's border with China even more permeable. The regime needs isolation in order to survive. Well, de-isolate it.
The regime is unlikely to abandon nuclear weapons in talks because it has used its nuclear weapons program as a big propaganda tool to convince their populace of the power and glory of the regime and of the superiority and strength of their society.
Mass simultaneous Kim and Korea worship events such as flag wavings are pitched to build racial and ethnic solidarity.
Perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of the Korean cult project is its recent veering toward race and ethnic solidarity, say Kim watchers. His main appeal to his people today, a push that rarely gets attention outside the North, is to the racial superiority of a people whose isolation and stubborn xenophobia supposedly makes their bloodlines purer. Mr. Myers notes that festivals of 100,000 flag wavers is not a Stalinist exercise, but a celebration of "ethnic homogeneity." Since the 1990s Kim has more fervently claimed lineage to the first ancient rulers of Korea, a move intended to place him in a position of historical, if not divine, destiny as leader of the peninsula.
We ought to try to use electronic gadgets as a cheap way to overthrow the North Korean regime. North Korea has 23 million people. How much would it cost to get pre-paid cellphones with thousands of minutes into the hands of millions of them? How much would it cost to smuggle in millions of radios and MP3 players preloaded with lectures about life in other countries and the ability of MP3 players to swap lectures?
We are spending about $3 billion a week in Iraq (plus much larger longer term costs from deaths, maiming, post traumatic stress disorder, and the like) which does not do anything to improve US security. For a week's cost of the Iraq debacle we could probably give a few million North Koreans contact with the rest of the world and information about how much their government lies to them.
New York Times reporter Norimitsu Onishi interviewed 20 North Koreans in Bangkok along with Christian missionaries, government officials, and others with knowledge about North Korea in both Thailand and North Korea. He finds that away from Pyongyang the grip of the central government is weakening and cash has become a more powerful force than ideology. (great article worth reading in full)
The increasing ease with which people are able to buy their way out of North Korea suggests that, beneath the images of goose-stepping soldiers in Pyongyang, the capital, the government’s still considerable ability to control its citizens is diminishing, according to North Korean defectors, brokers, South Korean Christian missionaries and other experts on the subject. Defectors with relatives outside the country are tapping into a sophisticated, underground network of human smugglers operating inside North and South Korea, China and Southeast Asia.
North Koreans who have gotten out pay smugglers to get relatives out. You can imagine how this cycle could feed on itself as more people escape and earn the money to buy the way for still more to leave. A US government program to loan the North Koreans in South Korea money to finance the flight of relatives could speed up this process.
We should think about this. Fully featured smuggling services get a North Korean out of North Korea, provide passport and other documents and a flight to South Korea within a few days for $10,400. A smuggling trip out of North Korea to Mongolia or Southeast Asia costs about $3000.
In a country whose borders were sealed until a decade ago, defectors once risked not only their own lives but those of the family members they left behind, who were often thrown into harsh prison camps as retribution. Today, state security is no longer the main obstacle to fleeing, according to defectors, North Korean brokers, South Korean Christian missionaries and other experts. Now, it is cash.
“Money now trumps ideology for an increasing number of North Koreans, and that has allowed this underground railroad to flourish,” said Peter M. Beck, the Northeast Asia project director in Seoul, South Korea, of the International Crisis Group, which has extensively researched the subject in several Asian countries and is publishing a report. “The biggest barrier to leaving North Korea is just money. If you have enough money, you can get out quite easily. It speaks to the marketization of North Korea, especially since economic reforms were implemented in 2002. Anything can be bought in the North now.”
“The state’s control is weakening at the periphery,” Mr. Beck said, explaining that most refugees came out of the North’s rural areas but few from around Pyongyang, where the state’s grip remained strong.
The United States could probably afford to collapse the North Korean regime just by paying to smuggle out a large number of people. In particular, the US could offer to smuggle out those people most essential to the regime. Electric power plant operators for example. Or, hey, get a lead on all the people working on the North Korean nuclear program and offer them a fast trip out and large cash prizes once they get to South Korea. We are spending $2 billion a week on Iraq. Suppose the US withdrew from Iraq. Imagine what that money could money buy by removal of valuable workers vital to the survival of the Pyongyang regime.
At Audacious Epigone crush41 has an interesting post arguing for a withdrawal of US troops in South Korea.
South Korea was on the road to nuclear weapons in the seventies, but the US applied pressure and it stopped. The North's only way to best the South is through the use of the nuclear weapons it has that the South does not. Let's speed up the removal of an American presence (slated to decrease by 5,000 by 2008) and allow South Korea (as well as Japan, which has an acrimonious relationship with Korea, especially the North) to go nuclear. Currently our personnel is little more than potential WMD fodder. The ruling liberals want us out anyway. Why not oblige them?
Sure, I say. Pull out. Let the South Koreans defend themselves. North Korea is a basket case. We do not need to subsidize South Korea's defense.
But reading that paragraph a thought struck me: If the United States really did stop South Korea from going nuclear back in the 1970s the United States could always flirt with reversing position on that issue. We should tell Kim Jong Il, fairly disgusting ruler of the poor, hungry, and stunted people of North Korea, that if he explodes a nuclear bomb in testing then we'll help South Korea build some highly excellent nuclear weapons. I figure that ought to get his attention. Go nuclear? Then your cousins south of the border go very nuclear with far better hardware. We could say we'll extend that offer to Japan as well. That ought to get the attention of Beijing and Pyongyang.
In a way the United States tries too hard in foreign policy. We station troops all over and build huge amounts of hardware and engage in expensive (in lives, money, and influence) fights in places where fighting hurts our interests. We have lots of supposed experts and supposed learned commentators debating and advocating all sorts of new misadventures (e.g. bomb Iran). This heavy handed approach isn't working for us. Why not take a far more minimalistic approach where we play cards (or threaten to play cards) that require orders of magnitude less effort?
We could yank Kim Jong Il's chain rather cheaply. How about spending some money to send lots of free cell phones into North Korea? Or tell him we'll offer a $500 million reward for his death if he doesn't stop counterfeiting US currency? We wouldn't even have to offer the reward to rattle him. We'd just have to tell him we're ready to do it. We ought to use more bribery and rewards to accomplish whatever we want done and do less with military hardware and less with our troops.
North Korea has agreed to nuclear disarmament.
BEIJING, Sept. 19 - North Korea agreed to end its nuclear weapons program this morning in return for security, economic and energy benefits, potentially easing tensions with the United States after a three-year standoff over the country's efforts to build atomic bombs.
North Korea claims they will allow verification of the disassembly of their nuclear weapons.
The key passage confirmed Pyongyang's commitment to disassemble its nuclear weapons program—and the weapons themselves—in a "verifiable" way. It also expressed North Korea's willingness to return to the international agreements it pulled out of in 2002 when it acknowledged its nuclear program, specifically the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and safeguards outlined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In exchange, The United States offered energy aid and the possibility of diplomatic relations, confirmed that it does not intend to invade North Korea, and agreed to a step-by-step approach to disarmament. Previously, the U.S. had insisted that Pyongyang surrender it's nukes completely before the country received any aid.
China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, and the United States are all parties to this agreeement. After failure to reach agreement in the previous three rounds of the six party talks I find the agreement reached in the fourth round as quite surprising. However, a looming famine in North Korea might have helped clinch the deal.
The deal comes in wake of a statement by the World Food Program, which has said North Korea is headed toward the worst humanitarian food crisis since the mid-1990s when an estimated 1 million North Koreans died. WFP now predicts 6.5 million North Koreans desperately need food aid.
While there was cause for some celebration when the six-party statement was made public, observers say the follow-up talks in November could prove difficult. Details have always been a stumbling block when it comes to negotiations with North Korea. Kim Jong-il has a tendency to up the ante, depending on the situation, though North Korea's desire to get out of the world's doghouse in light of its impending food shortage should be incentive for the isolated state to build the joint statement into a more concrete pact.
Will the North Koreans backslide on the agreement once they have lots of food and fuel courtesy of the other parties to the agreement? Or will the deal assure a big enough on-going bribe to keep the Kim Jong Il satisfied?
The effect on possible nuclear proliferation in other countries is important to consider.
South Korea reaffirms it will not deploy nuclear weapons and that it has no such arms.
Think about that. If North Korea doesn't continue to possess nuclear weapons then the incentive for South Korea or Japan to go nuclear becomes much less. That helps the position of China. It also weakens the position of Taiwan. In my view Taiwan's best hope for maintaining independence is to develop a nuclear weapons capability. As China's total economy surpasses the US economy and as China's military becomes much stronger Taiwan's security position will become impossible for Taiwan to defend. China will have too many economic strings to pull and clear military superiority.
Taiwan would have a much easier time going nuclear if East Asia went into a general regional nuclear arms race. If Japan went nuclear then China would have much more reason to hesitate over whether to attack Taiwan or whether to seize islands that both Japan and China claim. If Japan went nuclear and North Korea continued to build up a nuclear capability then other countries would be far less likely to economically retaliate against Taiwan for going nuclear. So this deal, if it sticks, is bad news for Taiwan.
South Korea cites their electricity bribe offer as a key element in making the deal happen.
South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young cited his nation’s offer of two million kilowatts of electric power to the North, first made in July, along with Washington’s pledge to normalize relations with Pyongyang as key to the outcome.
Washington’s flexibility in moving “to normalize North Korea-U.S. relations can be viewed as an achievement of the Bush administration,” Chung said in Seoul, according to the state Yonhap news agency.
Well bless their bribing and appeasing hearts.
"They have said, in principle, that they will abandon their weapons programs. And what we have said is, 'Great. That's a wonderful step forward. But now we've got to verify whether or not that happens'," Bush said to reporters after a Cabinet meeting.
"The question is, over time, will all parties adhere to the agreement?"
That's the most important question. Can bribery and appeasement buy off the Hermit Kingdom? A modest proposal for the South Koreans: Offer Kim Jong Il a supply of very attractive hookers if he will adhere to the deal.
Update: The need for the hookers offer quickly becomes apparent. North Korea is already demanding a light water reactor before it will disarm.
``We will return to the NPT and sign the safeguards agreement with the IAEA and comply with it immediately upon the U.S. provision of LWRs, a basis of confidence-building to us,'' the North's Foreign Ministry said in the statement, carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency.
``The U.S. should not even dream of the issue of (North Korea's) dismantlement of its nuclear deterrent before providing LWRs,'' the North said.
The South Koreans are passing this off as a typical North Korean negotiating tactic.
South Korea, which has been lobbying hard on North Korea's behalf, sought to downplay the North's latest demand. Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lee Kyu-hyung, portrayed it as an attempt by Pyongyang to enhance its bargaining leverage when the talks resume in November.
"We assume that North Korea tries to demand at the maximum level," he said. " We believe the issue shall be discussed specifically at the forthcoming round of six-party talks."
But Mr. Lee also says Seoul's willingness to support peaceful nuclear energy use by North Korea depends on Pyongyang first rejoining the Non-Proliferation Treaty and bringing U.N. inspectors back.
Any bets on whether this agreement will fall through?
The film, "Those People, That Time," opened this month amid a firestorm of conservative criticism for its fictionalized portrayal of the 1979 assassination of dictator Park Chung Hee.
A major conservative party in South Korea supported efforts to get the film banned by a court ruling. A court ordered editorial changes in the film.
The conservative Grand National Party supports the campaign against the film, in part because Park's daughter is its leader. A court ruled against a ban of the film, but ordered the deletion of newsreel footage that gives a veneer of historical accuracy.
Park Jin, a conservative party leader in the National Assembly, says he still believes that many who see the film "could easily be confused." And, he says, he could not "exclude the possibility that the message of the film was political."
Leave aside the debate by South Koreans over their own history. What is noteworthy here is that a South Korean court could order newsreel footage taken out of a movie. Imagine a US court ordering the removal of news clips from, say, Fahrenheit 9/11 because the court judge(s) decided the news clips lent too much authority or credence to the political message of the film. It would correctly be seen as a clear violation of speech rights. Yet in South Korea this is obvioulsy acceptable. The judge or judges who made this ruling will not be removed from the bench because they have stepped over the line.
Democracy is oversold (notably by neocon liberals but also by conventional liberals) as the panacea that can solve all the political problems of the world. But democracy does not automatically and reliably produce freedom. Lots of democracies amount to dictatorships by the elite leaders of the majority. Democracy does not always produce political harmony or peace. Some nations have had elections and then immediately plunged into civil war (the United States in 1860 and Algeria in 1992 to cite just two examples). Democracy and a free press do not always produce governments and news media that are friendly to the United States as events in Islamic Turkey are demonstrating. The neoconservative strategy of forced democratization is based on false assumptions about human nature and politics.
North Korea's government says the place has nukes and isn't going to be pushed around by America.
"We have manufactured nukes for self-defence to cope with the Bush administration's ever more undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the [north]," the North Korean foreign ministry said in a statement carried on the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
The United States is in no position to push around North Korea anyhow. The US won't attack. The North Koreans do not need US aid.
South Korea is upset with North Korea.
South Korea echoed Koizumi's comments, saying the decision to quit the talks was "regrettable" and a matter of deep concern.
South Korean government officials said a nuclear North Korea would not be tolerated.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard said he thought Pyongyang's statement contained an "element of bluff".
The North Koreans are bluffing? Maybe. But I think it more likely that the South Koreans are bluffing. South Korea isn't going to tolerate a nuclear North Korea? Really? What is the South going to do in response? Cut off aid? Cut trade? Invade? I doubt it.
Dong-A Ilbo says the U.N. Security Council must take action. North Korea "must not forget that there is no single neighboring country, including China that will tolerate its nuclear armament."
Chosun Ilbo says, "North Korea must awaken from the self-induced trance where it believes it can gain something only when it takes on the international community head-on. ...[A]n attachment to the strategies of the past could mean that the situation spirals out of control with Pyongyang itself the ultimate victim."
I have news for the Chosun Ilbo: It was you guys and China and the United States that helped North Korea get into that trance. North was rewarded for its behavior. South Korea and China continue to reward North Korea for its behavior. So why should the Dear Leader stop?
North Korea joins a prestigious club of nuclear powers.
North Korea is now the eighth country with currently declared nuclear weapons. The others are the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia, all signatories of the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, and India and Pakistan, which have not signed the treaty. Israel is considered by analysts to have nuclear weapons, but has not acknowledged possessing them. South Africa built a bomb in the 1970s but later renounced its nuclear program.
My guess is that Iran will be the next member of the club. Eventually so many will join that membership will just plain lose its allure. Living in big cities and other likely targets of terrorist nukes will lose its allure for related reasons...
The White House played down the significance of the North Korean statement. "It's rhetoric we've heard before," press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters traveling with President Bush in North Carolina. "We remain committed to the six-party talks. We remain committed to a peaceful diplomatic resolution to the nuclear issue with regards to North Korea."
What more can the Bushies say? It is not like they are going to do anything about it regardless of what press release comes out of the Pyongyang regime in North Korea.
What is new about the latest NK statement is that it shows a greater willingness on the part of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il and company to defy China and South Korea.
The South Korean press is trying to make sense of the latest news from Pyongyang.
The conservative Chosun Ilbo said in an editorial the North may be trying to raise the stakes to increase the concessions it will receive to head back to the bargaining table.
"We shall have to watch closely whether that is a real admission or simply typical of the Stalinist country's brinkmanship in attempting to ratchet up the tension with the United States," it said.
Ratchet up tensions with the United States? The US is too overextended in the Middle East to ratchet up tensions in Northeast Asia. Not going to happen. America is going to remain flaccid no matter how provocative a pose the Dear Leader assumes.
Writing for the Washington Post Glenn Kessler and Anthony Faiola think the Dear Leader and his regime are asking for acceptance of North Korea's status as a nuclear power.
By heightening the stakes in a two-year standoff, North Korea has signaled it has little interest in giving up its nuclear programs for relatively minor upfront concessions from the Bush administration -- and appears to be gambling that the United States and its allies will ultimately accept the idea of a nuclear North Korea.
At each step of the way in the crisis, the government in Pyongyang has carefully crossed once-unthinkable thresholds, with little apparent consequence. North Korea's announcement yesterday that it has nuclear weapons and is withdrawing from negotiations on its nuclear programs has once again upped the ante. But it appears unlikely it will jar the United States and its allies to take any dramatic actions, analysts and officials said.
I am guessing that Kim has a pretty good chance of gaining that acceptance. But if that happens then at some point down the line Japan may go nuclear in response. Then China may have no choice but to accept a nuclear Japan. Of course, once that happens the Taiwanese may decide to follow. In Taiwan's case nuclear power status would be the best protection from mainland Chinese ambitions to conquer the island.
Is there a bottom line in all of this? I think so: The United States by itself can not stop North Korea's nuclear program - at least not for any cost that the American public could possibly be convinced to pay. South Korea and China are helping to keep the North Korean regime viable through aid and trade. That has been true for years and it continues to be the case. North Korea's statements matter more for their effect on thinking in China and South Korea than they do for their impact on Bush Administration thinking. Regardless of Kim Jong Il's motive he is making it harder for South Korea and China to ignore his nuclear weapons development efforts. How will South Korea and China will react? Is Kim pushing to to a point where they will cut aid to North Korea in order to yank on the Dear Leader's chain? Or is there nothing short of a mushroom cloud that will change their collective minds?
This latest twist in the North Korean nuclear weapons saga reminds me of a post by Noah Millman where he argues that asking China to invade North Korea would bolster Chinese influence and prestige.
Finally, just one small point. We've adopted a "unilateralist" policy of regime change because supposedly the world can't come to agreement on who needs to be offed, at least not in a timely fashion. We, America, and "coalitions of the willing" composed of (mostly) democratic allies with similar interests will do a better job of policing the world. But here comes a proposal to have *another* nation - not an ally, not a democracy, not someone with whom we have clear common interests - unilaterally act to overthrow an odious regime on the grounds of its odiousness. Why on earth would we want to set such a precedent? And why should we prefer it to an attempt to get action authorized by some international body - fine, the UN, for all its own odiousness - that might bless the action with some legitimacy internationally, and act as a restraint on future unilateral action of this sort by other states? Particularly given that one objection to diplomacy on North Korea is that China would have to approve of any UN-authorized action against them, and China is the power we're outsourcing our "regime change" efforts to in this scenario!
It's depressing to think that anyone is seriously suggesting that the only way we can deal with North Korea is to ask the Chinese to invade and install a new regime. Depressing on so many levels, I don't know how to count them.
Asking for Chinese help on North Korea is - regardless of whether that help comes in the form of something as extreme as invasion or less extreme measures like an aid cut-off to North Korea - is going to make rather undemocratic China have more prestige and power. But, hey, there is no alternative way to stop North Korea's nuclear weapons program and China is a rapidly rising power that is likely to eventually surpass the United States as a military power at some point in the 21st century anyhow.
"If possible, Kim wants mobile phones to disappear in North Korea," says Nishioka Tsutomu, a professor of modern Korean studies at Tokyo Christian University. "But North Korean people do not have enough food. To trade on the black market in China, it is essential to have a mobile phone."
Despite the ban, North Koreans have been using cellphones more than ever, according to visitors to the region. Whether crossing the border legally on official business or illegally to procure food and other vital supplies, they routinely rent or purchase phones on the Chinese side, then turn them off and hide them from border guards as they return.
Cellphones by now are in common use in Sinuiju, the North Korean city across the Yalu River from Dandong, the major Chinese center through which China does much of its trade with the North. They're also widely used along the Tumen River border in the east, and advances in technology now mean callers can occasionally reach contacts as far south as the capital, Pyongyang.
After initially creating an internal cellular network and allowing the more affluent North Koreans to pay for cellphones the regime has shifted toward a far more restrictive set of rules for use of cellphones and all those cellphones being brought in from China are clearly banned.
Chinese people-smuggling entrepreneurs are promoting the use of cellphones in North Korea.
Chinese brokers who arrange for people to leave North Korea for the Yanbian region are responsible for the North-South communication. The brokers give prepaid cellphones to collaborators in North Korea. When someone needs to make a call to a family member, the collaborators go to their home and escort the caller to a border town within reach of cellphone frequencies.
Fees for covert calls are much higher than the standard amount. The 30-year-old woman mentioned who spoke to her sister paid brokers 1 million won, or about 100,000 yen.
Chinese entrepreneurs, just in pursuit of a profit, are more effectively undermining the North Korean regime than anything the United States government is doing. The US could weaken the regime by paying for prepaid cell phones to be shipped into North Korea. Also, the construction of more cellphone towards along the DMZ in South Korea would help. Though the South Korean government may oppose this move due to their own foolish calculations.
The money involved in the latest US effort to undermine the North Korean regime amounts to chump change. The Bush Administration talks a big game but it is very ineffectual.
Barry Briggs of North Korea zone has a reference to a new US government effort to smuggle radios into North Korea.
For the next four years, Washington will spend up to $2 million annually to boost radio broadcasts toward North Korea and send mini-radios across its borders. How to smuggle the radios in remains to be worked out.
Also Saturday, North Korea's state-run daily Minju Joson accused Washington of trying to topple the North Korean regime by smuggling tiny radios into the isolated country, where all state-issued radios are preset to receive only government signals.
...
The American plan to smuggle small radios into North Korea is outlined in the North Korean Human Rights Act, which President Bush signed into law Oct. 18. The sweeping act provides money to private humanitarian groups to assist defectors, extends refugee status to fleeing North Koreans and sets in motion a plan to boost broadcasts to North Korea and get receivers into the country.
That two million dollars per year is a meager effort. The US burn rate in Iraq is $5.8 bil per month. So 12*5.8/52 is the amount per week and divided by 168 is the amount per hour which is 8 million per hour. So this plan to smuggle radios into North Korea has a yearly cost of 15 minutes worth of the Iraq burn rate.
The United States has greatly reduced food aid to North Korea in recent years but the United States still gave North Korea over $35 million in food aid in 2003 or about 17 times the amount that the US wil spend on radios to undermine the North Korean regime.
If one listens to the rhetoric coming out of Washington then nuclear proliferation is an important priority for the Bush Administration. But a count of the Benjamins is hard to reconcile with the official rhetoric. I do not think that Bush Administration policy toward North Korea and Iran will prevent either country from building up nuclear arsenals. The United States and its allies lost an excellent opportunity in the late 1990s to push the regime into collapse by cutting off aid to North Korea when its economic crisis was most severe. At this point the regime's survival seems more assured than it did in the 1990s. I find it increasingly difficult to take the Bushies seriously on foreign policy.
Thanks to Vinod for the heads-up on this.
US Army Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins from North Carolina, age 64, deserted his unit in South Korea and crossed over into North Korea in 1965. He eventually married a Japanese woman there when the government chose her for him and they had two children. He has finally left North Korea after his wife was let go as part of a deal between North Korea and Japan. In a trial that sentenced him to 30 days in a US military jail in Japan Jenkins and his wife described life in North Korea.
The Americans, he said, were forced for 10 hours a day to study and memorize the writings of North Korea's founder, Kim Il Sung, writings that he called "class struggle from the perspective of a crazy man."
Six months ago, while he was still in North Korea, such a statement could have earned Sergeant Jenkins execution. He said here on Wednesday that if he had once criticized Mr. Kim or his son and successor, Kim Jong Il, there would have been no forgiveness. "Go dig your own hole, because you are gone,'' he testified. "I have seen that done."
With no heat or electricity in their Pyongyang house during most of the winter, she said that to sleep in the cold "we would wear everything we owned in terms of clothing when we went to bed." Warm water never flowed from faucets. Warm baths were rare luxuries.
Reading at night was by candlelight. When the candle wick had burned, she said, her husband "would collect the melted wax in a can and use it for a homemade candle." With the food rationing system breaking down, she said, they grew vegetables and raised chickens in their yard, but the family often went to bed hungry.
The family was forbidden to leave the house without their political supervisor. Coils of barbed wire surrounded their house, she told the court.
North Korea is a cold place in winter to not have heat. My guess is their clothing was poor as well.
One can not refuse anything the government in North Korea tells you to do.
Jenkins’s day in court was charged with emotion as he tearfully described his reasons for deserting, the drunken night on which it happened, and his life in Pyongyang, the capital. He was found guilty on the count of aiding the enemy by teaching North Koreans English. “You don’t say no to North Korea. You say one thing bad about Kim Il Sung and you dig your own hole, because you’re gone,” he said.
Jenkins said he realized his mistake within one day of being in North Korea.
"Desertion is a very serious crime, especially in wartime. ... Jenkins ought to be in jail for the rest of his life," said Darrell E Best, now a retired lieutenant colonel.
Others argued that Jenkins had suffered enough by spending most of his life in one of the world's most impoverished and oppressive countries.
"He has done his tour in hell already," said Brendon Carr, a former military intelligence official. "His daily punishment the last 40 years must have been waking up and realising what a fool he had been to defect to North Korea."
...
From 1965 to 1972, Jenkins was put in a one-room house in North Korea with three other former American soldiers.
The men slept on the floor, bathed once a month and more in summer, and were forced to study the teachings of leader Kim Il Sung.
"Each day for the first 15 years I wished I would just die."
I think 40 years in North Korea is such severe punishment that the man has suffered enough for desertion.
Chinese men are buying North Korean women as wives.
But it's easy for Chinese, including smugglers and human traffickers, to cross illegally into North Korea, they say, and this props up a thriving black-market border trade that helps keep the barren North Korean economy afloat.
Dandong natives such as laid-off factory worker Lao Zhou, whose picturesque home town draws tourists eager to spy on North Korea with telescopes, shake their heads when they talk about refugees.
"North Korean women make good wives. They are beautiful and hard-working," he said, echoing an oft-repeated view. "It doesn't cost much to buy a North Korean girl for a wife and just a few thousand kwai (hundreds of dollars) to get them a residency permit."
There is also a slave trade in prostitutes. The demand for prostitutes will likely rise right along with the demand for wives.
Consider the larger context for this report about wife buying and female sex trade. On my FuturePundit blog I've reported on the sex ratio imbalance in China caused by the selective abortion of females.
Li said the normal newborn sex proportion is 100:104-107, and if China's disproportionate figure is allowed to continue unchecked, there would be 30 to 40 million marriage-age men who would be single all their lives by 2020.
"Such serious gender disproportion poses a major threat to the healthy, harmonious and sustainable growth of the nation's population and would trigger such crimes and social problems as mercenary marriage, abduction of women and prostitution," Li said.
Some believe this sex ratio imbalance will make China militarily aggressive and they may be right.
In a new book, Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population (MIT Press), Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer warn that the spread of sex selection is giving rise to a generation of restless young men who will not find mates. History, biology, and sociology all suggest that these "surplus males" will generate high levels of crime and social disorder, the authors say. Even worse, they continue, is the possibility that the governments of India and China will build up huge armies in order to provide a safety valve for the young men's aggressive energies.
But consider a different possibility: Chinese men may buy so many North Korean wives that North Korea will either become militarily aggressive or collapse from within. This is not implausible. Those 30 to 40 million single men in China in the year 2020 mean there wil be 3 to 4 times more single men in China than there are women in North Korea. The Chinese will be more affluent than the North Koreans unless radical changes happen to North Korea's economy. North Korea is the place where Chinese men will have the best competitive advantage in angling for wives. The other East Asian countries are not nearly as poor as North Korea and North Korea shares a long 1,416 km land border with China.
China's economy is growing rapidly. Buying power of Chinese men is rising. Even poor Chinese farmers can afford to buy North Korean women.
Lee, the former clerk, said she was fooled into believing she would have a good life in China. "One day, a man from my home town came to see me. He was looking for good-looking women from North Korea to go to China. The prettier the better. I decided on the spot to go.
"Of course, he fooled me. He said he would introduce me to a good man, a university graduate, who was looking for a wife. Then I realized North Korean women were being sold at a cheap price to rural farmers in China."
The fact that even a rural farmer in China can afford to buy a North Korean wife means that there are far more people in China with the buying power to acquire a North Korean wife than there are North Korean women.
Expect the hostility of North Korean men toward China to increase.
Ryu remembers a woman six months pregnant arriving at the camp. The baby's father was Chinese. Four guards grabbed the woman's limbs and threw her toward the ceiling over and over until the woman aborted the fetus. Ryu helped clean up the blood afterwards. "The guards said they hated Chinese babies," says Ryu. "The North Koreans hate the Chinese now, because they are rich and betrayed socialism."
China has been cracking down on North Koreans trying to cross the border into China. But official corruption in China is sufficiently widespread that black market forces will probably prevail over official policy as a consequence of the rising buying power of single men desperate for wives.
Ms Kim was picked up a year after getting married and giving birth to a daughter. Her new family pleaded for her release, arguing that the baby needed her mother because she was still breastfeeding. Ms Kim says they paid a 10,000RMB bribe for her freedom. Three years later she is well established and has a residence permit.
Chinese men will pressure the Chinese government to allow North Korean women to pass into China. The Chinese government will see these women as a source of women to reduce the frustrations of single men who can not find Chinese wives. Chinese leaders are going to have to weigh the foreign policy and domestic policy consequences of their border policy with North Korea. If they continue to clamp down this may just encourage more corruption.
Chinese money is also going to flow to North Korean border guards and officials and corrupt them as well. This is already happening. So the North Korean guards are not all immune to the enticements of cash in exchange for looking the other way. As living standards rise in China and the female shortage worsens the amount of money available for smuggling women out of North Korea will rise.
The shortage of women in China may end up posing an existential threat to the Pyongyang regime more powerful than anything US policy makers are likely to do. North Korean leaders might react to this threat by engaging in market liberalization reforms aimed at raising North Korean living standards enough to reduce the level of desperation of North Korean women.
The regime in North Korea faces a more general economic threat from China because of rising wages in China. The higher the wages go the greater the incentive for Northeast China factory managers and other businesses to turn to the black market to supply cheap North Korean labor. This will pull both men and women out of North Korea. Will that destabilize the regime more or less than the selective removal of women from North Korea?
As the Marmot has previously reported and as Barbara Demick describes in greater detail the North Koreans are about 8 inches shorter than South Koreans (same article here) due to the sustained food shortages and famine in North Korea.
South Korean anthropologists who measured North Korean refugees here in Yanji, a city 15 miles from the North Korean border, found that most of the teenage boys stood less than 5 feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds. In contrast, the average 17-year-old South Korean boy is 5-feet-8, slightly shorter than an American boy of the same age.
North Koreans are shocked when they find out that South Koreans are so much taller. Imagine what the impact would be North Koreans if they all knew just much much shorter they are than the South Koreans.
To the extent that they ever get to meet South Koreans, the North Koreans are likewise shocked. When two diminutive North Korean soldiers, ages 19 and 23, accidentally drifted into South Korea on a boat, one reportedly was overheard saying they would never be able to marry South Korean women because they were "too big for us," according to an account in the book "The Two Koreas," by Don Oberdorfer.
The United States government ought to be making a very large effort to break through the information monopoly the North Korean government has over the North Korean people by smuggling in radios, books, and other material. The chief goal of such an operation should be to cause the North Koreans to learn just how much worse off they are than South Korea, Japan, and the United States. A secular ideology is disprovable by empirical evidence. North Korea's regime is far more vulnerable to undermining by outside influences than is a regime based on a widely believed religion. Religions based on beliefs about the supernatural are as easily disproven or discredited in the eyes of their believers and so theocratic regimes in religious nations are harder to undermine.
South Koreans fear reunification with the North in part because they fear the Northerners suffer from lower IQs due to sustained hunger and malnutrition.
The issue of IQ is sufficiently sensitive that the South Korean anthropologists studying refugee children in China have almost entirely avoided mentioning it in their published work. But they say it is a major unspoken worry for South Koreans, who fear that they could inherit the burden of a seriously impaired generation if Korea is reunified.
"This is our nightmare," anthropologist Chung said. "We don't want to get into racial stereotyping or stigmatize North Koreans in any way. But we also worry about what happens if we are living together and we have this generation that was not well-fed and well-educated."
About 500 North Korean children have come to South Korea, either alone or with their parents, and they are known to have difficulty keeping up in the school system, say people who work with defectors.
The food problem in North Korea shows no signs of getting better.
BEIJING, Feb. 13 -- A severe food shortage has crippled the U.N. feeding program that sustains North Korea's most vulnerable and undernourished people, according to Masood Hyder, the U.N. humanitarian aid coordinator and World Food Program representative in Pyongyang.
He said his organization can now feed fewer than 100,000 of the 6.5 million people it normally does, many of them kindergarten-age children and pregnant women who cannot get what they need to stay healthy from the country's distribution system.
Undermining the North Korean regime ought to be a major US foreign policy goal. That the Bush Administration is not trying very hard to reach the people of North Korea is a major continuing US foreign policy mistake.
You might expect that a highly doctrinaire communist hellish dictatorship would not call a potential future leader by the title "King". But if so then you do not reckon with one Koh Young-hee (also spelled Ko Yong-Hi and Ko Yong-hui), Japanese born Korean lover and likely past and perhaps current wife of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Koh is referred to in the North Korean media as the "beloved mother" and also has been calling herself "Mother of Pyongyang". Well, Koh had two sons by Dear Leader Kim and she is promoting the title "Morning Star King" for her the younger son Kim Jong Woon (also spelled Kim Jong-un) who may now be the favorite to eventually succeed Kim Jong-il as leader of North Korea.
The scepter in the Hermit Kingdom passed from the Great Leader to the Dear Leader - and will he in turn pass it on to his youngest son, already extolled by some as the Morning Star King?
The previous Asia Times article by Yoel Sano is an excellent tour thru the innards of the North Korean ruling elite and explains the extent to which inter-family ties within the elite and intergenerational loyalty within ruling families ensures stability for the regime. North Korea's regime looks remarkably stable at this point and unless the United States can cut off more external sources of aid and trade the regime looks likely to remain in power and continue its nuclear weapons development program for years to come.
Kim Jong Chol
Possibly the favourite to succeed Kim Jong Il, this 22-year-old is Kim's son with the former dancing girl Ko Yong-Hi. He was educated in Geneva. His younger brother Kim Jong Woon was recently renamed "Morning Star King" by his mother, according to some defectors' reports, suggesting he may be her choice.
Back on September 13, 2003 the South Korean newspaper The Chosun Ilbo was predicting that "Morning Star King" Kim Jeong-woon (Kim Jong Woon or Kim Jong-un) would be annointed Kim Jong Il's successor.
Pyongyang is undergoing preparations to designate the third son of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as Kim's eventual successor. The announcement would be made next Feb. 16, the leader’s 62nd birthday.
That birthday has now come and gone. The precedent of Kim Jong-il's ascension suggests that the annointing of the next ruler of North Korea will not happen suddenly with a single big announcement but instead will unroll gradually as a favored son is appointed to more higher positions that indicate he is the chosen one.
A US intelligence satellite has picked up signs that the North Koreans may be doing work at the Yongbyon nuclear reactor.
Seoul's JoongAng Ilbo, citing US and South Korean sources, said that a US intelligence satellite had detected "signs of vapor and fumes" from a coal-fired boiler linked to a nuclear laboratory at the plant for four days this month.
It said a truck was also spotted in the area where the nuclear research center's five-megawatt nuclear reactor is located.
The North Korean regime's nuclear weapons program is difficult to analyse from outside. Any visible activity is difficult to interpret. It could be that the North Koreans are working busily on making nukes or it could be that the regime thinks this sort of activity helps it somehow in negotiations.
The details were reported in the South Korea news paper JoongAng Ilbo.
JoongAng Ilbo quoted Seoul officials as saying the fumes were detected on December 2, 3, 4 and 7, and that a truck was spotted traveling in and out of the premises of Yongbyon's five-megawatt nuclear reactor on December 3.
It is winter and presumably quite cold at Yongbyon. So heat from a coal-fired reactor would be easier to detect, coal burning would create fumes, and water vapor would likely be visible.
StrategyPage.com has a post up about cheap wind-up radios that US forces are distributing in Afghanistan.
The 200,000 radios the U.S. is buying will probably cost less than four million dollars. But it appears to be a good investment, as the Taliban and warlords in Afghanistan have gained power, and stayed in power, by taking advantage of the relative ignorance of most Afghans. The radios will provide a lot of information (and music, soap operas, religious programming and much more), and will definitely change the information landscape.
Trent Telenko comments "Now if they would only do this with North Korea.". No kidding Trent. To make enough wind-up radios for the approximately 22.5 million people in North Korea would cost about $45 million dollars. Delivering them might cost more than making them. Some could be put into floatation containers and delivered out of US attack submarines all along the North Korean coastline. Others could be attached to helium or hydrogen balloons (the hydrogen could be generated cheaply from electricity and water) and launched upwind from whereever the winds were blowing into North Korea. This could be done from South Korea (unless our enemies the South Koreans prevented us from doing so) or off the North Korean coastline outside of territorial waters. Still others could be placed in obscure locations in North Korean ships docked in foreign ports.
The Bush Administration's strategy for North Korea is inadequate to deal with the threat North Korea poses. South Korea and China are playing enablers propping up the regime while North Korea's nuclear and missile programs continue under development. The US needs to use more tactics against the North Korean regime. One way the US could weaken the North Korean regime is by breaking the information monopoly that the regime holds over its own people. Many of the radios floated on the water or the air toward North Korea would not make it into the hands of regular North Korean people. But given the low cost associated with making and delivering the radios for the cost of what that the US spends in Iraq in a single week the US could easily afford to send ten times as many radios into North Korea as there are North Koreans to hear them.
While Democrats carp at Bush for pursuing a unilateral policy toward North Korea (see again the Marmot's critique of Josh Marshall complaints of Bush Administration unilateralism in North Korea policy for a great example of this) Bill Gertz's report on a press conference with Donald Rumsfeld and Shigeru Ishiba is a useful reminder that the Japanese fear US weakness toward North Korea more than unilateral US belligerence.
Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing at a news conference with Japan Defense Agency Director Shigeru Ishiba, also said that any U.S. security guarantees provided to Pyongyang would not be made at Tokyo's expense.
Check out the text of the press conference of Shigeru Ishiba and Donald Rumsfeld.
Q: Yes sir, Bill Gertz with the Washington Times. My question is for both of you. First, it’s about the nuclear issue. It's been reported that North Korea is prepared to accept some U.S. security guarantees. Mr. Ishiba, are you concerned that any agreement with North Korea could lead to a weakening of Japan’s security, and Mr. Rumsfeld, since North Korea has violated the ’94 agreement, can North Korea be trusted with any future nuclear agreement?
ISHIBA: For the U.S. to assure in what way the security and safety for North Korea -- I understand that study is ongoing within the United States. Now, this is just, on a hypothetical question and with the guarantee of security to be given to the North Korea and the U.S. has a guarantee of implementing the obligations of the defense for Japan. These two are separate questions. One thing is being given does not mean that other will be undermined. That is not the relationship between the two. With the assurance or guarantee given to the North Korea, and if there is an unjust attack made on Japan, U.S., I am sure, will have no change in its intention to work together with Japan to defend our nation. I believe we are in total agreement between myself and Mr. Secretary.
RUMSFELD: We are indeed in total agreement and the – it is a hypothetical question because the United States government has not gotten to that point. I can say this. The United States government is not going to make any arrangements with any other country, that one or others, that would in any way undermine our security agreement with Japan. Second, with respect to trust, I have always kind of agreed with former President Reagan --trust but verify.
Ishiba appears to stumble here and yet still manages to get in the point that the US has obligated itself to defend Japan in a sentence about a deal with North Korea. The Japanese are afraid the US will be too wimpish in dealing with North Korea and the Japanese do not want to see the United States cut a bilateral deal with North Korea that is not verifiable. Think about that. While the Bush Administration gets criticised for unilateral hawkishness by the Left in the United States and Europe over in East Asia Donald Rumsfeld offers assurances that the United States will not be unilaterally wimpish with the very country that many Bush Administration critics claim the Bushies are being too belligerent toward. While the Chinese and South Koreans try to paint the US as the responsible party for dealing with North Korea to resolve a dispute that is mainly between the US and North Korea over in Japan the emphasis is on the idea that the US has an obligation to defend Japan and had better not make a deal that results in Japan becoming less secure.
Robert "The Marmot" Koehler, an American citizen living deep inside enemy territory, Kwangju South Korea, takes on Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall's partisan foolish analysis of the Clinton and Bush Administration policies toward North Korea.
The defining encounter came in March 2001 when then-President Kim Dae Jung visited the White House only to be told by the president that we were withdrawing support for his policy. As Jessica Matthews, head of the Carnegie Endowment put it, President Bush took "the architect of the North-South reconciliation and ... publicly humiliate[d] him."
The Marmot takes Marshall to Task.
Look, President Bush simply voiced his skepticism concerning North Korea, skepticism that turned out to be well-founded. Allies do not have to agree on everything, and both Kim and current President and Sunshine fan Noh Mu-hyeon made it a point to say that they reserve the right to disagree with Washington, and that right is surely reciprocal. If Kim Dae-jung was "humiliated" because Bush (who did publically back North-South reapproachment, BTW) refused to publically declare the Sunshine Policy the greatest thing since sliced bread, then Kim should have had thicker skin. And to be frank, it would have been a mistake for Bush to back a policy which, as readers of this blog no doubt have gathered, is based on some rather imaginative premises. It should also be noted that much of the "humilation" that Kim suffered was the result of poor translation work on the part of the Korean press, but that's a whole other story...
Would Josh Marshall have preferred that Bush embrace Kim Dae-jung's foolish policy of bribery of the North Koreans just so that Bush could avoid disagreeing with ("humiliating" in Marshall's parlance) the president of South Korea?
The Clinton Administration did not view the 1994 Framework Accord as a permanent solution because they expected the Pyongyang regiume to collapse. The seemingly craziest part of the deal, Bill Clinton's agreement to make the US one of the funders of the construction of two "peaceful" nuclear reactors for North Korea, only seemed to make sense because the Clinton Administration figured the North would collapse by the time the construction was finished. Construction of those reactors was recently halted by a KEDO members vote because construction was getting too far along and the regime has not passed into the dustbin of history.
There is an obvious conclusion that can be drawn from the reactor construction deal: the Clinton Administration was not pursuing a sustainable policy of containment of North Korean nuclear ambitions. The Bush Administration had to abandon the policy because the North Korean regime has lasted longer than the Clinton Administration policy could have reasonably been expected to work.Of course, the Clinton Administration policy was already failing while Clinton was still in office with the North Koreans continuing to pursue the acquisition and development of technology for making nuclear weapons through missile-nuclear trade with Pakistan, covert purchase of technology in other countries, and work by their own scientists and engineers.
In response to Marshall's claims that the Bushies are acting all aggressive toward North Korea the Marmot points out some of the rather aggressive moves that the Clinton Administration made toward North Korea including the leak in 1998 of a plan to attack North Korea as a way to send a message to Kim Jong-il and his partners in brutality. The Marmot goes down the timeline and points out how the history of US policy toward North Korea is at odds with Marshall's memory.
While Bush Administration policy changes were a necessary corrective for failing Clinton Administration policies my own view is that Bush policy changes have not been enough to yield a policy that will ultimately be successful.
The real tragedy of the 1994 Framework Accord (a.k.a. Geneva Agreed Framework) that Clinton and Carter are responsible for is that it sent South Korea's internal politics hurdling down a degenerate path. The net result is that the 1994 Accord has turned South Korea into North Korea's bitch.
South Korea's desire to play intermediary between North Korea and the US has manifest into that of an advocate, rather than arbiter. When the North announced in October last year that it had secretly, and in direct contravention of its 1994 agreements, developed a highly enriched uranium program and was planning to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (it was the initial threat of the same by Pyongyang in 1992 that led to the Geneva agreement), South Korea quickly declared that the US must have misunderstood. When North Korea announced in September that it had finished reprocessing plutonium for the manufacture of additional nuclear weapons, it was South Korea that declared that this was false. Contrary to North Korean declarations that it has working nuclear devices and is busily making more, the South proclaimed again, not true.
The South Korean administration maintains the principle of a non-nuclear peninsula, but polls continue to show that few fear the Northern nuclear threat, with many taking quiet pride that the North is a nuclear power. The South, after much persuasion by the US, abandoned its nuclear weapons program in the mid-1970s. An oft-heard phrase in South Korea these days is Korean pride: loosely translated as an embrace of Korean nationalism and independence. A "Korean bomb" would be a boon to many in the South who believe the peninsula has been under the yoke of foreign powers for far too long.
The US no longer has an ally on the Korean Peninsula. South Korea serves North Korea. That is a big loss for US national interests and that loss began as a result of Clinton Administration policy. Kim Dae-jung came to power in 1997 in significant part as a result of the 1994 deal and he pursued policies that were made possible by that deal.
David Scofield, also author of the previous piece and writing from Seoul South Korea, argues the current regime in North Korea can not be expected to adhere to any agreement that might be negotiated.
The success of any agreement rests on all parties involved believing that they will be better served by following the terms - compliance offering something that cheating does not - or conversely, the costs of cheating being higher than the potential reward. Unfortunately, neither is true in the case of North Korea.
The present leadership cannot adhere to its promises, and we should not expect it to. It cannot accept change and retain control at the same time, its power and position being predicated on its ability to extort concessions and yield nothing; cheating is a necessity, not a choice. We should accept this reality and devote all available resources to the principle of leadership change, finding new people to negotiate with, people in whose best interests it is to abide by the principles of a new regional agreement.
Scofield comes to the same conclusion as regular readers of this blog have heard here: regime change is the only way to create a government in North Korea that will be willing to adhere to an arms control agreement. The most disappointing aspect of Bush Administration policy toward North Korea is that, at leaste as far as can be ascertained from public sources, the Bushies are not trying all that hard to make regime change happen. They are working to reduce some forms of revenue flowing to the North. But the South is upping trade and aid and it is not clear that the North is suffering a net decrease in support. The Bushies at the very least ought to be trying to break the North Korean regime's information monopoly over the people in the North. A lot could be done. A billion or two a year could be spent to get radios and books into North Korea, to broadcast more into North Korea, to smuggle North Korean refugees out of China, and to otherwise pursue policies that would have the effects of weakening the North Korean regime. Plus, the Bushies ought to make it clear to Beijing and to the South Koreans that the US views their support for North Korea as acts that threaten US national security and that the US places a higher priority on protecting US national security than on maintaining amicable relations with either Beijing or Seoul.
The Marmot's post and both of Scofield's Asia Times articles are excellent reads and I recommend reading them in full.
The CIA says North Korea has working nukes. The CIA presented this assessment as a response to questions raised at a hearing of Congress on 2003 February 11. The assessment is part of a document entitled "Questions for the Record from the Worldwide Threat Hearing" and was provided in an unclassified response in August 2003 to the US Senate Intelligence Committee. The relevant section is in a document now on the Federation of American Scientists website and is found on page 19 of this PDF file.
We assess that North Korea has produced one or two simple fission-type nuclear weapons and has validated the designs without conducting yield-producing nuclear tests. Press reports indicate North Korea has been conducting nuclear-weapons related high explosive tests since the 1980s in order to validate its weapons design(s). With such tests, we assess North Korea would not require nuclear tests to validate simple fission weapons.
There is no information to suggest that North Korea has conducted a successful nuclear test to date.
The North's admission to US officials last year that it is pursuing an uranium enrichment program and public statements asserting the right to have nuclear weapons suggest the Kim Chong-il regime is prepared to further escalate tensions and heighten regional fears in a bid to press Washington to negotiate with Pyongyang on its terms. If North Korea decided to escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula, conducting a nuclear test would be one option. A test would demonstrate to the world the North's status as a nuclear-capable state and signal Kim's perception that building a nuclear stockpile will strengthen his regime's international standing and security posture.
...
A North Korean decision to conduct a nuclear test would entail risks for Pyongyang of precipitating an international backlash and further isolation. Pyongyang at this point appears to view ambiguity regarding its nuclear capabilities as providing a tactical advantage.
The FAS provides some background on where this assessment comes from.
That CIA assessment, which slightly amplifies past public statements, appears in a new set of intelligence agency replies to "questions for the record" (QFRs) submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee following this year's annual hearing on the "worldwide threat."
Such QFRs are often overlooked because they are provided to Congress months after the hearing that prompted them, and they are made public months after that. But given the relative sparsity of unclassified intelligence threat assessments, they are usually worth reading.
North Korea may have the ability to deliver these nuclear weapons.
David Albright, a physicist who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said the CIA statement suggested a belief the North had already "weaponized" a nuclear device that could be dropped from a plane or delivered by missile.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and CIA do not expect North Korea to collapse from within.
In their political analyses, the American intelligence agencies said the government of Kim Jong Il appears unlikely to crumble from within, although they differed on who would succeed Kim if he died.
Well, given that South Korea and China are propping it up and the United States is not trying all that hard to reach the North Korean people with information about the outside world this seems a reasonable assessment. Why the Bush Administration doesn't try much harder to reach the North Koreans with information about the outside world is beyond me. Also, I would be very curious to know by what political calculations the Bushies have reached the conclusion that it is not worth trying to lean on the South Koreans and Chinese to cut off aid to North Korea.
The United States does not now have a strategy for dealing with the developing threat from North Korea that has a good chance of succeeding. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is rapidly becoming a dead letter. China and South Korea are protecting the North Korean regime.
South Korea seems intent upon continuing with its appeasement strategy come what may. The biggest unknown in how the events with North Korea will play out is the thinking of China's top leaders. Are the Chinese changing their minds about their support for North Korea?
Writing for Japan Today Devon Rowcliffe sees North Korean-Chinese ties as being in jeopardy.
In January of this year, when Pyongyang withdrew from the non-proliferation treaty, Beijing sent a senior official to the North to scorn the country, and briefly stopped oil shipments in February. Energy shipments were again suspended in March in an effort to push North Korea into multilateral talks with the U.S.
By contrast, writing for Asian Times Jaewoo Choo sees North Korea-China ties as firm.
However, what we should not overlook is the true purpose of Wu's visit to North Korea. There were many other agendas at the meeting. This can be inferred from the composition of Wu's delegation, and from the statement he made at the conclusion of his meeting with Kim. The delegation comprised no fewer than seven vice-ministerial officials ranging from political and foreign affairs to economic and defense ministers.
My guess is that it is wishful thinking to believe that China will firmly intervene to either take away North Korea's nuclear weapons or to bring down the regime. If the Chinese leaders do decide based on their own internal deliberations to intervene then it is possible they will eliminate the threat posed by North Korea. But it seems unreasonable to expect this and US policy can not count on it.
Since North-South trade on the Korean peninsula is rapidly rising the economic pressure on North Korea may be getting no more intense and may actually be lifting. If the US was to organize a complete embargo on trade and aid to North Korea from all countries other than China and South Korea then the US might be able to apply enough pressure to bring down the Pyongyang regime. But as South Korea trade with the North increases the potential impact of an embargo by other countries will gradually decline. Bush Administration policy makers will find the policy tools at their disposal will become weaker with time. The Bushies look set to fail in their policy toward North Korea and may already have passed beyond the point where success is possible. North Korea seems likely to continue to be a source of nuclear weapons technology for Middle Eastern governments and could potentially become a source nuclear weapons materials and perhaps even complete working bombs.
Update: For a good latest collection of links to recent goings-on related to North Korea see Robert "Marmot" Koehler's Winds of Change Eyes On Korea post. Robert also has his own blog Marmot's Hole which he writes from deep within enemy territory of Kwangju South Korea.
Lots of financial analysts think the collapse of the Norht Korean regime is inevitable.
John Chambers, managing director of sovereign ratings at Standard & Poor's, said the inevitable economic collapse could cost South Korea up to 300 percent of its annual gross domestic product.
...
Chambers told CNN Tuesday the North's collapse was "ineluctable". On timing, he said it could be soon or in the medium time. Either way, it would cost the South "dearly".
The question is whether enough aid and trade to prop up the regime is still getting thru.
"The North is still on the receiving end of donated food from China, Japan, the USA and South Korea," said Mr Morris.
"A sharp reduction in the assistance it is getting either from the West or from China... could push them over the edge," Mr Chambers predicted.
Standard & Poor's director for South Korea agrees with his boss.
"North Korea's economy cannot be sustained in its current state and we think it is highly likely to collapse," said Choi Jung-Tai, the agency's director for South Korea, adding: "When is uncertain."
In a sign of how the money men are looking at Korea they have even moved on from talking about the inevitability of the Pyongyang regime's collapse to bickering about the financially important question of how expensive the aftermath will turn out to be for South Korea. Barclays Capital says the Standard & Poor's cost estimate for reunification is too high.
``The 300 percent of South Korea�s GDP needed for reunification claimed by S&P would represent 75 times the North�s GDP. There is no example in the history of economic development of a country absorbing the equivalent of several hundred times of its GDP in external aid,� Barclays said in a report.
This depends on how one defines "cost". When South Korean corporations invest in factories in the post-collapse north will that be considered a cost or an investment? Also, the size of the cost depends on how the South Koreans handle it. They could rapidly build gold-plated infrastructure for North Korea or they could take a more parsimonious approach and let the growth of the post-collapse North Korean economy to provide a lot of the revenue for upgrading housing, medical faciltiies, roads, bridges, and so on.
So is the collapse of the North Korean regime inevitable? Kim Jong Il has two rays of hope. The first is that South Korea and China continue to send him aid and engage in trade. If Kevin of Incestuous Amplification is correct then the second ray of hope may turn out to be that the Bush Administration may wuss out and make a deal with North Korea for a pretty much unverifiable arms control agreement.
So here's the sequence. US presents evidence of a uranium-enrichment program to North Korea. North Korea admits having such a program. US stops oil shipments based on that program's existence breaking the terms of the 94 Agreed Framework. North Korea declares the Framework dead, kicks out inspectors, breaks the seals on their plutonium, and begins processing some or all of that plutonium. US government tries for a year to put economic pressure on North Korea, repeatedly citing the danger of their out-in-the-open plutonium program and their hidden uranium program as the basis for stopping this growing threat.
Now, via the State Department and intelligence official quoted in the USA today article, we're hearing that the CIA is not certain that a uranium enrichment plant even exists, and that North Korean ineptitude has slowed the overall program to a point of it not being as dangerous as the intel previously pointed to.
Click thru and read all the evidence that Kevin points to as signs of a climb-down on the part of the Bush Administration. He thinks the Bushies are preparing to sign a lame deal with Kim Jong Il. This would give the regime more years of life because such a deal would likely come with big piles of cash to help prop up Kim Jong Il's evil regime.
The uncertainty expressed by the CIA about the state of the North Korean nuclear weapons program has to be considered in light of previous inaccurate assessments. The advanced state of Saddam's nuclear program in the aftermath of Gulf War I was quite a surprise to US intelligence agencies. At the same time, Saddam acted like his weapons programs were further along in advance of Gulf War II than any evidence so far has shown to be the case. Also, the rate of advance of Pakistan's nuclear program surprised at least some analysts when Pakistan demonstrated the ability to explode a nuclear bomb in 1998. Since Gulf War II's aftermath is the less-than-expected amount of evidence for Iraqi weapons programs and the resulting criticism of US intelligence agencies performance causing the CIA to now act in a mode of being more afraid to overestimate than to underestimate the state of a secretive nuclear weapons development program? Also, just how much data do they have to base any estimate upon?
Keep in mind the nature of the North Korean regime.
Pregnant North Korean refugees repatriated after being rounded up in China have their babies forcibly aborted or killed after birth, according to a report that adds more horror to what is known of the Stalinist state's gulags.
An unverifiable US deal with North Korea would leave the regime firmly in control of its suffering people with the United States and other countries serving basically as enablers of that suffering. As it stands now both South Korea and China are firmly in the category of countries willing to serve as enablers of a horrible totalitarian regime. Will the United States join them?
Still, there are hopeful signs that a lame deal won't be signed any time soon. The organization tasked with building a $4.6 billion dollar nuclear reactor project for North Korea as part of the 1994 Frameworld Accord, the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), has decided to suspend work on the project.
- The United States won support from key allies Wednesday to halt construction of two nuclear power plants in North Korea for at least a year because of the communist state's atomic weapons program.
North Korea threatened yesterday to seize the property of an international consortium that has been developing two light-water nuclear reactors on the country's east coast in reaction to an announcement that the project would be suspended for one year.
North Korea is even threatening to retaliate by refusing to participate in 6 party talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons program and other issues in dispute. Well, we can surely hope they will show the determination to follow thru on all these threats.
To be fair to Mr. Bush, the biggest problem the United States faces is that, as Kevin points out, South Korea and China keep propping up North Korea. The rapidly rising trade between South Korea and North Korea is especially infuriating. The United States ought to pull its troops out of South Korea and stop pretending that South Korea is an ally. If we fail to stop North Korea it will be because of South Korea and China. But we at least should not join those countries in propping up a regime that is both a threat and that is so terrible to its own people.
Henry Rowen has written an absolutely great article in Policy Review on North Korea and US policy toward North Korea and neighboring countries. The title of the article states his conclusion: Kim Jong Il Must Go.
If conditions get bad enough, might someone who understands the need for basic economic change seize power in a way analogous to Park Chung Hee’s takeover in South Korea or Deng Xiaoping’s succession to the Gang of Four in China? Both were dictators who, by opening their countries, produced rapid growth and, as a consequence, increased personal freedoms for their peoples — and for South Korea, democracy. As Deng told George Shultz in July 1988 when asked his opinion of Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union, “He’s got it backwards. He opened up the political system without a clue about the economy. The result is chaos. I did it the other way around, starting in agriculture and small businesses, where opening up worked, so now I have a demand for more of what succeeds.” What about political opening? “That will come later and will start small, just as in the economy. You have to be patient but you have to get the sequence right.”
While Deng's comments are very intriguing there is no sign as of yet that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is willing to embark on Deng-style economic reforms.
Rowen was able to talk with former Reagan Administration Secretary of State George Schultz in preparation for writing the article and hence he is able to quote the rather insightful comments the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping made to Schultz.
Perceived and real interests of the US and South Korea have diverged very substantially.
Until circa 1990, one could fairly say that American and South Korean interests were congruent: Both were about the security of the South and its consolidation of democracy. The robustness of Korean democracy is no longer in doubt. The problem is security. Of course both want to avert war, but Americans (and Japanese and apparently Chinese) perceive greater dangers from the North’s missile and nuclear weapons than do South Koreans. Southerners (rightly or wrongly) do not expect the North’s missiles or nuclear weapons to land on them, nor do they see themselves as the target of nuclear-armed terrorists. Americans see themselves as threatened both ways.
The US can not expect any help from South Korea in dealing with the North Korean regime. In fact, the US can expect South Korean policies that help prop up and protect the North Korean regime. South Korea is effectively no longer a US ally even though the US helps to defend the place.
The bottom line for Rowen is very basic: nuclear weapons inspection can not work in a closed society. Therefore Kim Jong-il has to go.
The nuclear inspection task would be formidable, especially for fabricated weapons. The only way to have confidence that they are not present in a country known to have had them (e.g., South Africa) is for the country to be sufficiently open that insiders with knowledge can safely reveal cheating. That condition will not exist in Kim Jong Il’s North Korea. The American effort to round up international support for inspecting and seizing exports of missiles and drugs at least puts pressure on the North in the maneuvering for an agreement. An economic blockade (excepting perhaps some food) might bring Kim down, and might be supported in the Security Council if proposed by the U.S. and China, but that brings us back to how far China is willing to go.
If something like an Agreed Framework Mark II is reached, there will be celebrations over having averted a great danger. One should not be too ready to carp at whatever emerges; this is a problem from hell. But elation would be premature. The inspection requirements for confidence that the fissile material production programs — and any fabricated bombs — are gone are so stringent as to be unlikely to be met, and as Pyongyang demonstrated recently, the inspectors could be thrown out at any time. It is axiomatic that any government headed by Kim Jong Il will have nuclear weapons, despite any agreement signed by his government (unless the Chinese take decisive action).
The Chinese, while claiming to have little influence over the Pyongyang regime, in fact could bring down the regime simply by cutting off food and fuel aid. Also, as Rowen points out, if China was to stop deporting North Korean refugees that would spark a rush for the border by millions of North Koreans. So China's willingness to prop up the regime is the most important external factor keeping Kim Jong Il in power.
Rowen's analysis is weakest in terms of constructive suggestions about how to go about trying to bring a regime change in North Korea. One option Rowen doesn't mention is to make a very large scale effort to get information into North Korea about the outside world. Break the information monopoly that the regime holds over the North Korean people. Large quantities of radios and books could be smuggled in via a number of methods and radio broadcasts into North Korea could be greatly increased. Also, all North Koreans who are outside of North Korea could be reached with reading materials as well.
Max Boot lays out some options for putting pressure on the North Korean regime.
The goals of such a campaign are easy to articulate but hard to accomplish: Cut off food aid to North Korea from various nations. Halt fuel supplies from China and investment from South Korean firms. Do more to intercept North Korean ships carrying illegal goods. Convince neighboring countries to open their doors to North Korean refugees. Finally, try to break Pyongyang's information monopoly. North Koreans' constant diet of outlandish propaganda, reported New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch, includes the claim that the Korean War was caused by capitalist aggression. The truth can set people free.
The Bush Administration and allies are already intensifying law enforcement investigations and intelligence work to reduce North Korean drug smuggling and other sources of revenue for the regime. Another step short of an embargo would be to reduce allowed legitmate trade that North Korea conducts with Japan and other countries.
Jim Hoagland argues that since the North Korean regime survives by use of extortion it will always have an incentive to cheat on any nuclear deal in order to better position itself for future extortion.
Tactics and strategy form a seamless web of survival for Kim, who runs no risk of mistaking one for the other. He is not buying time to experiment with reform communism or gradually open to the global economy. He is buying time "through the methodical export of strategic insecurity," in the words of scholar Nicholas Eberstadt, in a bid to escape change and outside influence.
The decision by the Pyongyang regime against embarking on serious internal reform of the sort Deng implemented in China effectively puts North Korea in a position where it has to find ways to become a security threat in order to be able to extort needed aid.
North Korea does not honor agreements to refrain from nuclear weapons development.
North Korea probably began cheating on the 1994 deal before the ink was dry. Scores of high-explosive tests done in the late 1990s suggest ongoing work to perfect a nuclear detonator. A female scientist who claims to have been in Yongbyon in the 1990s describes schemes concocted to hide covert weapons research. In a transcript allegedly made after she fled into China last year (and obtained by NEWSWEEK through a humanitarian group that arranged her exile in South Korea), she describes deception at the No. 304 Research Institute where she worked, a facility “involved with making both nuclear and chemical weapons.” To dodge IAEA inspections, she says, “we moved all materials and equipment into underground caves.” Eventually, a new plant called the August Facility was constructed. “The place is hidden inside a forest and connected with a new railroad from other facilities,” she added. “It processed uranium for use in other institutes.”