North Korea’s Coming Bomb: It’s Clinton’s crisis, and he’s not ready to lead

BY: Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post, November 5, 1993

This first year of the Clinton administration has featured a foreign policy of sideshows. The
monopoly that Bosnia, then Somalia, now Haiti have exercised over American attention testify to
the power of television and the weakness of this administration in defining American national
interests.

Well, there is a real crisis brewing in a place the cameras don’t go. The single most dangerous
problem in the world, the impending nuclearization of North Korea, is not yet on the national
radar screen. Peter Rodman calls it “the crisis that ought to be happening but isn’t.” It will be. By
next summer every political talk show in the country will have special editions devoted to the
sudden emergence of the Korean emergency.

Nothing sudden about it. As early as March 1992, then CIA Director Robert Gates testified that
the North Koreans were “close, perhaps very close” to developing a nuclear weapon. Since then,
nothing has been done to slow them down.

What is this to us? North Korea lies in one the most strategically important areas of the world,
nestled at the junction of Russia, Japan, China and South Korea. None will sleep well with nukes
in the hands of the most belligerent and paranoid regime on Earth, a regime that once tried, for
example, to blow up nearly the entire South Korean leadership with a terror bombing in Rangoon,
Burma.

The North Korean nuclear bomb would be controlled by either Kim Il Sung, the old and dying
Great Leader, or his son and successor, Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. It is a sign of the dangerousness
of this situation that the old man — the man who started the Korean War with a brazen invasion of
the South — is probably the moderate. His son, unpredictable, possibly psychotic, would be the
closest thing to Dr. Strangelove the nuclear age has seen.

Which makes time of the essence. North Korea has already tested a missile with enough range to
hit Japan. A nuclear North Korea would set off a deadly arms race in the North Pacific. Japan
would go nuclear very quickly. South Korea would follow. This would not sit well with China and
Russia. Tensions set off by such a regional arms spiral would make the outcome unpredictable and
extremely dangerous.

More immediate, North Korean possession of a nuclear deterrent might tempt it to launch a
conventional invasion of the South. The North Koreans have a million-man army with no other
purpose. They might calculate that an American president, knowing the devastation that one
crude and dirty bomb could wreak on U.S. troops stationed there, might hesitate to honor the
American commitment to defend South Korea.

The administration’s response to North Korea’s nuclear drive has not been distinguished. It has
been all carrot and no stick. As inducement to be nice, we have already given the North Koreans
their first direct high-level talks with the United States. We have dangled diplomatic recognition.
We are now dangling an offer to cancel joint U.S. military exercises with South Korea.

These are gestures of weakness. They have done nothing about North Korea’s nuclear program.
They only encourage conventional threats against a weakened South. Rather than relaxing our
pressure on the North, we should be increasing it: reinforcing our military presence in the South
to reassure our allies and preparing to impose severe economic sanctions against the North.

Sanctions, however, will be dangerous — more dangerous than any ever imposed. North Korea is
already on the ropes. There are reports of starvation. Unable to sustain an embargo, it might
resort to war. But there is no other lever available short of a preemptive allied military strike,
which, given the concealment of the North Korean nuclear sites, might not work and would
almost certainly precipitate a war.

Whatever the strategy — and ultimately attacking the nuclear sites might be necessary — it is
important for Clinton to get serious about the problem. One wonders how serious he is when,
defending himself against his foreign policy failures in a recent Washington Post interview, he lists
among his successes “nonproliferation issues relating to North Korea.”

If this is a foreign policy success, the administration either has highly secret talks going, of which
none of us knows anything, or the president, in his usual way, has convinced himself that talk is
action.

Perhaps Clinton counts North Korea’s “suspension” of its withdrawal from the nonproliferation
treaty a success. But this non-withdrawal is a joke, because at the same time North Korea refuses
inspections of its suspected plutonium processing sites. The bomb building continues, while we
talk.

Enough talk. The time has come for action. And the president had better prepare the American
people for it. If there is one lesson to be learned from the Persian Gulf War, it is that a president
has to prepare the nation for conflict if he is to expect popular support. The American people will
follow, but they demand leadership first. George Bush used the five months between the invasion
of Kuwait and the outbreak of the gulf war to focus the nation on the need for, and ultimately the
inevitably of, conflict with Iraq.

Bill Clinton makes a 10-minute TV speech on Somalia four days after the massacre in Mogadishu
and then, when the American people fail to rally to the cause, grouses about isolationist
tendencies. If he thought Somalia was important, he had eight months to make the case. He didn’t.

He still has some months left on Korea. The president’s task is clear. Lead. Stop talking to the
North Koreans — it is time for an economic blockade — and start talking to the American people.