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Plutonium PokerIs Bush's new North Korean policy shrewd or just plain stupid?

By Fred Kaplan
Updated Monday, May 5, 2003, at 5:03 PM ET

The Bush administration is becoming either outrageously dimwitted or audaciously clever in its policy toward North Korea's nuclear ambitions. According to today's New York Times and Wall Street Journal, the White House has decided to shift gears on the subject. No longer will it try to deter Pyongyang's dictator, Kim Jong-il, from reprocessing plutonium or building A-bombs. Rather, it will focus on preventing him from exporting the stuff to other rogue nations or terrorists.

The case against this policy is straightforward. First, North Korea is about as rogue as nations get. Had there been evidence that, say, Saddam Hussein was plotting to sell North Korea plutonium, it would have made a persuasive case for going to war with Iraq. Why, then, is Bush so insouciant about North Korea's seeking to manufacture bomb-grade material on its own?

Second, if Bush declares that it's OK for a member of the "axis of evil" to possess a few nukes (as long as it doesn't share them with others), then surely other, less evil regimes will be tempted—or feel permitted—to go nuclear.

Third, North Korea's mere possession of a nuclear arsenal will make Japan think about building its own nuclear deterrent, which could compel China to increase its stockpile, which could trigger a response from India, which could force Pakistan to follow suit, and on the chain reaction goes.

Fourth, North Korea has a long, porous border with China, as well as four active seaports and a few airports. Difficult as it would be to negotiate a nuclear-disarmament treaty with Pyongyang, it will be much harder to detect and block nuclear trade.

But there may be something to the alternative theory—that Bush is trying to pull off a brilliant negotiating coup. Let's say that Bush has accepted the argument—made by several State Department officials, intelligence analysts, and regional specialists—that North Korea's nuclear threats over the past six months have been part of a wild-eyed diplomatic strategy. According to this view, Kim Jong-il's steps toward going nuclear—kicking international inspectors out of his nuclear reactor, unsealing the spent fuel rods, transporting them to a reprocessing plant, abrogating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—are a bargaining chip. At talks last month in Beijing, North Korea's deputy foreign minister told Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly that Kim would get rid of his nuclear program if the United States resumed economic aid, normalized political relations, and signed a nonaggression treaty. (In this sense, Kim's ploys and gambits with Bush, starting last October, amount to a replay of what his father, Kim Il-Sung, did to get a similar deal with President Clinton in 1994.)

Let us further say that the White House figures Kim Jong-il wants what nuclear weapons can buy—the aid, the nonaggression treaty, and so forth—more than he wants nuclear weapons themselves. One lesson that comes through in Scott Snyder's excellent book on North Korea's negotiating style is that the Kims never take "Yes" for an answer: As soon as you accept one of their conditions, they demand another, then another; the meetings are endless, exhausting, exasperating; it took 50 sessions for diplomats to hammer out the '94 accord. Maybe Bush has decided to play Pyongyang's game: If the other side offers a deal, reject it out of hand and make him give up more; never surrender the initiative or the upper hand.

The Times quotes a U.S. official who sums up Bush's thinking as follows: The North Koreans, Bush told him, "are looking to get us excited, to make us issue declarations." Bush's response to this pressure, the official said, is, "You're hungry, and you can't eat plutonium."

The North Koreans have been able to bargain with their nuclear program over the past decade for two reasons. First, it's the only asset that their miserably impoverished country possesses. Second, they know that nuclear weapons, especially nukes in the hands of a kook, are what the United States fears most. (For this reason, Kim Jong-il has made no effort to play down his eccentricities.)

Now, though, Bush is telling Kim: You want to build nukes? Fine. As long as you don't sell them, we don't care, we're not scared. It's as if a gunman takes a hostage and the cop responds by shooting the hostage; the gunman is suddenly vulnerable. Kim's the gunman, his nuclear program is the hostage, Bush is the cop.

If Bush's move is a tactic, a counter to North Korea's endless succession of ploys, then it might work. But if it's a firm position—if Bush really doesn't care about Pyongyang's nuclear program, or doesn't take the nukes seriously, or thinks they can be contained down the road—then it is, at the very least, shortsighted. Whatever it is, the White House is taking a big gamble in a very high-stakes game. How many hostages will Kim take, and Bush shoot, before one of them caves?

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. He can be reached at .
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Remarks from the Fray:


Let's say Bush agrees to everything Kim asks - will it be enough?…They've said they wouldn't develop nuclear weapons before, signed a treaty and then did it anyhow. What's changed that will convince any unbiased observer of Kim's honesty? I guess the US could take military action, but if you think we're gonna be able to go in there and just bomb whatever we think is right and then not catch hell for it then you haven't been paying attention. Not only is it likely that S. Korea will pay for this type of action in blood, but it's also very likely that Japan will catch it too. And who's to say we'll even bomb the right place?…After all, we obviously don't have much HUMINT on the ground and satellite images and third-party intelligence is shaky at best. I have about as much faith in the US being able to head off illegal arms shipments as I do our capability to find WMD's in Iraq. We just don't have the good inside people network needed to keep a handle on things. But what else can we do? Kim is not trustworthy, he has limited resources and I find it hard to believe that he is just going to negotiate away his Ace-in-the-Hole so fuel shipments and food will start rolling in. A non-aggression pact may give him some comfort, but he has to know that, given the right circumstances, the United States will roll over that piece of paper and render it as useless as a UN Security Council Resolution. It just doesn't add up. What are we left with? Not much, sadly. But there is hope if Kim hasn't the capabilities in nuclear wholesale/retail we think he has and this administration can outlast him until someone in N. Korea says enough is enough and takes him out. Frankly though, I suspect Mr. Kim will be negotiating his next wishlist with the successor regime in Washington. Tyrants have a way of hanging on for a very long time.

--Loran

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kaplan constructs an analogy where korean nukes are somehow a hostage, and bush is a cop who must rescue the hostage . . . and can succeed only by pretending he doesn't care about the life of the hostage. got that? me neither. the initial part of what kaplan is saying seems to align with what myself and several other fray posters have urged over the past several months: "no oil for more broken nuke treaties with north korea." but then kaplan undermines the simple beauty of this proposition by asserting that bush will eventually HAVE to cave in and grant kim the financial aid he craves, or risk 'losing the hostage' (the nukes). this ignores the central truth that there is no amount of aid, no deal so rich, that it will ultimately result in north korea disarming. with pyongyang treaties have always been a ploy, and always will be. kaplan worries that if the US doesn't reprovision pyongyang, that north korea's 'long, porous' border with china will be a way for kim jong il to supply terrorists with nukes. that ignores the fact that china is already a nuclear power itself, and needn't go to the trouble of aiding and abetting kim to achieve a foreign policy result which china itself deplores. (there are more than a few groups which harbor strong resentments toward beijing - think tibet, islamic fundamentalists, etc.) the US should hold firm: no fuel & food to maintain kim's regime, and keep the north koreans oppressed under the misery of his rule. and if pyongyang is considering an attempt to transfer its WMD to 3rd parties, the US should use the current talks to ensure there is no ambiguity about the speed and severity of the consequence. for years american foreign policy was shortsighed, resulting in support for dictators of every political stripe. kaplan would have us repeat this error yet again with kim jong il. but i'm optimistic that we can learn from our mistakes, and be a more responsible superpower.

--baltimore-aureole

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"North Korea is about as rogue as nations get." From the current evidence, true enough, but they don't seem to be as much a threat to the U.S. as they are to there much closer neighbors. Shouldn't we let North Korea's neighbors rein them in? Attacking Iraq when, where and how we did, was a mistake. While we 'won' the battle, the problem is likely to drag on or come back to haunt us. We shouldn't be determining how we deal with North Korea based on the 'logic' used to attack Iraq. America cannot afford to nor does it have the mandate to play policeman to the world. While we certainly must protect ourselves, the people in China, South Korea, Eastern Russia, Taiwan, and Japan should be more concerned and more active in correcting the problems when it comes to North Korea. If North Korea stepped forward and claimed that they intended to support world wide anti-American terrorists it would be much more our problem to face. While I'm not advocating an isolationist viewpoint, we need to encourage people to keep their own neighborhoods safe, not run around protecting the world. The U.S. track record is poor enough that we look rather like hypocrites at the very least, when we try to play policeman and tell others how they should behave.

--Analytical

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In his dealings with Korea and elsewhere, Bush has given priority, however, to the flashy Big Move, encapsulated with his Top Gun landing, and there's no doubt about it: He's seduced a LOT of Americans with that flash and big-gun go-for-the-gusto kind of manifestation of Power and Determination. But how much of the seduction with that is also the vicarious power drive of an addicted society, craving symbols of vindication and conquest, masking a deep-seated and dysfunctional ennuie with the everyday reality of a world wherein if you insist that the name of the game is Power, you are modeling a game with an enormous price tag in both blood and treasure. One that in its way mirrors the isolated cowboy in the room with the one-armed bandit and his endless pile of silver dollars to feed it but with stakes that risk dragging the whole casino down with it.

--zinya

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Plutonium isn't the only thing North Korea can sell: its biggest seller, in fact, is its missile technology. It appears to have bartered with the Pakistanis, giving them missile technology as a trade for nuclear technology. So, one would think, if the Bush folks are as clever as Mr. Kaplan suggests, that Bush would want to try to keep North Korea from exporting dangerous missile technology. But what do they do when the North Koreans are caught trying to smuggle missiles to Yemen? Let them get away with it, of course.

--JoeUser

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Fred Kaplan misses one important possibility. It isn't that Bush doesn't care if North Korea has nukes, it is that he knows we can't stop them from having nukes. North Korea has proven that they will not be bound by agreements. The only way to be really sure they do not go forward with a nuclear weapons program is war and that is not an option. Even without nukes the North possesses the conventional ability to wipe out Seoul and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in South Korea, something we cannot let happen. The unhappy truth of the matter is that we have no control over the situation and cannot stop the North from developing more nukes.

--TJA

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