Analysis: N Korea & Nukes

[Timber Loftis]

I posted last week regarding this that N. Korea either (1) wanted to slip "under the radar" while the world was Iraq-omized or (2) wanted to challenge other countries. Well, here's what those smarter than I think:

North Korea's Confession: Why?
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

TOKYO, Oct. 20 — When the United States announced last week that North Korean officials had acknowledged the existence of a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of a 1994 accord, a simple question could be heard echoing around the world: What were the North Koreans thinking?

With a tightly controlled, highly secretive country that is home to the world's only Communist dynasty, the temptation of outsiders to write off North Korea's leaders as crackpot Machiavellis or scarily unpredictable weirdoes is sometimes irresistible.

Many close watchers of North Korean affairs, however, say that for all of the leadership's eccentricities, the decisions are seldom outright irrational. Experts who disagree on many other matters concerning North Korea say decision making in the country whose future holds the key to peace and stability in northeast Asia is driven by an impulse for survival amid ever constricting options.

"A lot of people have interpreted the announcement by North Korea of its uranium enrichment program as a sudden tactical move, perhaps trying to take advantage of the fact that the United States is preoccupied with Iraq," said Victor D. Cha, a Korea expert at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. "But that's not the case at all. This was a case where Washington simply had the goods on them, and Pyongyang just didn't see any other way out."

For years, North Korea has perfected a kind of bloodcurdling official polemics used by the national radio and newspapers to denounce the United States, South Korea and Japan, and to warn its enemies that they will suffer humiliating defeat if they dare attack.

In fact, North Korea experts say, the tone has grown harsher in almost direct proportion to the country's underlying insecurity. Since the early 1980's, when it was still at rough economic parity with its capitalist rival, South Korea, North Korea's situation has grown steadily more precarious.

The late 1980's opened an era of disasters, from the disappearance of the Soviet bloc, whose countries were North Korea's main economic partners, to a series of catastrophic famines brought on by crop failures, droughts and flooding.

Against this backdrop, the United States, the North's great historical enemy, has emerged as the world's sole superpower, and one increasingly willing to move against nations it sees as threats. In another nightmare come true, South Korea, meanwhile, has become vastly richer.

Even China, long the ever dependable ally, has taken more distance from North Korea lately, as witnessed last month by Beijing's arrest of a Chinese investor who had just been handpicked by Pyongyang to oversee a newly announced capitalist enterprise zone.

Lacking in generous friends at a time when the economy is crumbling, the country's leader, Kim Jong Il, is facing a moment of unusual vulnerability. He has already introduced major reforms aimed at opening the economy, but he appears increasingly unable to resist pressures for more far-reaching changes. Among those changes, some experts say, may be the recent trend toward diplomacy by confession.

Faced with the urgent need to fend off economic collapse, Mr. Kim's confession of a uranium-based nuclear weapons program appears to many experts to have been a pragmatic, if ultimately misguided response to an insurmountable obstacle: a Bush Administration that had little interest in engagement.

Admission of the nuclear program rather than denial, appears to have been intended to "persuade the world that Kim Jong Il is a new kind of leader, and his leadership does not resort to terrorist means, or secrecy," said Han S. Park, director of the Center for the Study of Global Issues at the University of Georgia.

Mr. Kim tried the same approach last month, when he was host for a meeting with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan. Faced with Japanese demands for an explanation of the disappearance of 11 of its citizens in the late 1970's, the North Korean leader bluntly reversed a long tradition of angry denial, and apologized for what he acknowledged were official kidnappings.

(End Part 1)
NEW YORK TIMES