MEANWHILE, BACK IN NORTH KOREA: DEFECTOR’S WARNINGS A REMINDER THAT NUCLEAR CRISIS IS INTENSIFYING

(Washington, D.C.) Ominous revelations
by a well-connected North Korean defector
in Seoul yesterday could hardly be worse
news for the Clinton Administration.
After all, ever since former President
Jimmy Carter mortified Mr. Clinton and
his Carterite foreign policy team by
derailing U.S. efforts (such as they
were) to thwart North Korea’s nuclear
program, the Administration has hoped to
keep public attention away from its
failure.

More problematic still was what the
defector, Kang Myong Do — believed to be
the son-in-law of the North Korean prime
minister, Kang Sun San — had to say
about the current status of Pyongyang’s
nuclear program. According to Kang, North
Korea already has five nuclear
weapons and it has no intention of giving
them up in exchange for American
economic, political or other concessions:
“Some say North Korea is only using
the nuclear issue as a card. I don’t
think so. There is a firm belief that the
only way to sustain the Kim Jong Il
system is to have nuclear
capabilities.”

Bad News for ‘Bubba’

This puts the Clinton Administration
on the spot. It has made much of the U.S.
intelligence community’s reported
assessment that North Korea has only
illegally produced one or two
nuclear weapons in violation of its
obligations under the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty. By crediting
Pyongyang with such low levels of
weaponry, the Administration apparently
hoped that it could get away with
President Carter’s scheme of
concentrating on “freezing” the
North Korea nuclear program, rather
than having to account for its past
production. Conventional wisdom also
had it that, if the North only had one or
two nuclear weapons, it would be unlikely
to transfer them to anyone else — a
distinct possibility otherwise, given the
regime’s well-documented propensity to
sell any and all military technologies to
other dangerous parties.

If correct, Mr. Kang’s assessment
would oblige Washington and its friends
in the region to go back to square one.
It is entirely possible that the North
Koreans were more efficient in extracting
plutonium from their reactor at Yongbyon
than the CIA has previously assumed.⁽¹⁾
Alternatively, there have been published
reports that North Korea may have
obtained some amount of weapons grade
plutonium from other sources. Either way,
it is certainly clear that just
stopping Pyongyang’s future nuclear
weapons activities is no longer enough.
Its apparently larger inventory of
nuclear weapons could mean that the North
is already actively marketing these
devices to Iran, Syria, Libya or other
rogue nation clients.

An equally grave problem arises from
the fact that North Korea could, even
now, be covertly removing fuel rods that
it defiantly downloaded two months ago
from the graphite reactor at Yongbyon and
placed in cooling ponds over the
objections of the International Atomic
Energy Agency and United Nations. Should
it be doing so, the only
“freeze” on the North Korean
nuclear issue is that evident in
Washington’s policy paralysis.

See No Evil

For these reasons, it is not
surprising that the United States has
reacted to Mr. Kang’s revelations with
horror. As is generally the case
with arms control or peace
“processes” like that the
Clinton Administration is trying to
foster with North Korea, such revelations
are regarded not as valuable warnings but
as a threat to delicate diplomatic
maneuvering.

Consequently, the reaction is
generally to try to deny or otherwise
dispute the information, frequently by
discrediting the source. Hence, according
to the Washington Times,
“Secretary of Defense William Perry
[is] saying that the Administration still
stands by its intelligence assessments
that North Korea has built no more than
two bombs.” State Department press
spokesman Michael McCurry put it even
more pointedly:

“…The information provided
by this defector falls well beyond
and well outside [the exact
parameters of the North Korean
nuclear program being debated within
the U.S. intelligence community]. So
the reliability of the information is
something that, frankly, we’re not
certain we can assess at this
point.”

According to the New York Times,
when asked whether United States
officials would like to talk to the
defector, McCurry responded: “It
depends on whether there’s any reason to
believe his information is
credible.”

In fact, there is abundant reason to
want to debrief Mr. Kang, whether his
specific information on the size of the
North Korean nuclear program is accurate
or not. By dint of his relationship with
a senior member of the ruling regime, he
unquestionably can provide insights into
its personalities, policies and
intentions that are essentially
unavailable elsewhere.

What is more, the United
States can ill afford to allow cognitive
dissonance — the practice of not seeing
what one does not want to see — to
contaminate its intelligence assessments
of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities.
It is entirely possible that North Korea
has extracted more plutonium — or
weaponized it more efficiently than the
CIA had assumed. Alternatively, Pyongyang
could have obtained additional quantities
of weapons grade special nuclear
materials elsewhere.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy
believes that Kang Myong Do’s revelations
should be taken very seriously.
Particularly, his assessment of
Pyongyang’s determination to continue to
build nuclear weapons and the missiles
with which they might be delivered
obliges the United States to return this
crisis to where it belongs — at
the forefront of the national security
agenda and public debate.
Washington simply cannot afford to allow
wishful thinking or cognitive dissonance
about a “peace process” in East
Asia to corrupt its intelligence, reduce
its attention to ominous indicators and
warnings and divert its policy focus from
the burgeoning threat posed by North
Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

In particular, the Center believes
that Mr. Kang’s warnings about the
North’s determination to pursue ballistic
missile programs capable of delivering
its nuclear weapons — presumably, in due
course, to include long distance attacks
against the United States — are grounds
for opening, at long last, a
serious debate about defending against
such attacks. In this regard, it
welcomes — and endorses — powerful
remarks by a distinguished member of its
Board of Advisors, Ambassador
Jeane Kirkpatrick, at a
Washington forum yesterday:

“I believe that it is
impossible for any President to
fulfill his pledge to provide for the
defense of the United States without
developing sufficient missile
defenses….The
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty [which
effectively precludes such a defense]
is an artifact of a past era and
existed between the United States and
a country that no longer exists….The
successor state to the Soviet Union
had early [on] expressed interest in
the cooperative development of
space-based missile defenses that
would result in a U.S. capacity to
defend ourselves and our allies. The
Treaty exists today only in the minds
of a few members of the Clinton
Administration. It has no legal or
moral standing.”

– 30 –

1. Secretary of
Defense William Perry acknowledged as
much yesterday, telling a news
conference: “If [the North Koreans]
had a very advanced technology, they
could make five bombs out of the amount
of plutonium we estimate they have.”
It is not entirely clear what Secretary
Perry is referring to here since the
United States has long understood that
there are design approaches — some of
which are not particularly sophisticated
— which could permit the amount of
plutonium believed to be in North Korean
hands to be translated into perhaps as
many as twenty nuclear devices.