Global fears expressed over Korean crisis
By John Zarocostas
GENEVA, Switzerland, (UPI) -- Top arms control officials fear the North Korean nuclear crisis could adversely affect global disarmament efforts and they fault both Pyongyang's brinkmanship and the Bush administration for the latest flare-up.
Senior East Asian, Western, and U.N. diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, say it is difficult to estimate whether North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is playing a nuclear blackmail card to extract economic concessions for his isolated and impoverished nation, or to deter the Bush administration from planning to overthrow his regime.
The officials hope it is the former and that Pyongyang will step back from the brink and that current diplomatic efforts by the United States and the international community will help defuse the crisis.
President Bush said Tuesday: "I'm absolutely convinced this issue will be solved in a peaceful way."
Bush said that while the United States is willing to talk to North Korea, "what this nation won't do is to be blackmailed."
Mike Moore, a former New Zealand prime minister, told United Press International, the region is appalled by Pyongyang's actions and stressed Washington's strategy to pursue diplomacy along with its allies, is the correct thing.
"Bush is handling it correctly," he said.
But security analysts argue the Bush administration's policy toward North Korea may have contributed to the crisis.
Rebecca Johnson, executive director at the U.K.-based Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, said the Bush team "could have done more to keep the lid on the threat of North Korea."
There is a danger, Johnson fears, that to concentrate on dealing with Iraq, the United States might try to appease Pyongyang, "sending the wrong signal to North Korea and other potential proliferators."
The United States needs to rethink how it views its international security mix of international and national measures to restrict the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, she said.
Some experts believe the decision by North Korea on Jan. 10 to withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty -- the first time a country has walked out of a global arms control pact since World War II -- threatens to weaken the whole arms control structure.
Patricia Lewis, director of the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research, said in an interview, "Arms control is in a terrible situation. It has not been properly supported for years, and with this onslaught of North Korea, Iraq, and the India/Pakistan nuclear tests, the whole structure could crumble."
The Korean crisis, say arms control officials, is a blow to a stalled global disarmament agenda.
For years, the Geneva-based, U.N.- sponsored, Conference on Disarmament has been blocked by differences among its 66 member states. The conference is supposed to come up with a treaty that would ban production of material for making nuclear weapons.
In December 2001, the United States rejected what it considered a flawed draft accord on strengthening a bio-weapons control.
Jozef Goldblat, vice president at the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, said the Bush administration's decision to withdraw last year from the 1972 treaty with the former Soviet Union on the limitation of Anti-ballistic Missile systems set a bad precedent.
"North Korea has followed the example of the Americans," Goldblat said, quickly adding that if the U.N. Security Council decides North Korea poses a threat to international security, it can slap sanctions on Pyongyang. Pyongyang has warned, however, that sanctions would be regarded as an act of war.
In Geneva, the consensus is that the NPT regime can withstand the shock of the North Korean action.
North Korea is almost totally isolated, its huge armed forces are out of date, not well-trained, and it has no smart weapons, said a disarmament diplomat familiar with the nation's military capabilities.
In the meantime, some diplomats are concerned that if Pyongyang is not bluffing and is not stopped from building up its nuclear arsenal in the coming months, it could trigger an arms race in East Asia that could spill into other sensitive regions.
U.S. officials have said that North Korea possesses one or two nuclear weapons and Japan, which well-placed diplomats believe is not too sure of the U.S. strategic guarantee, has the requisite technology and plutonium to could acquire a nuclear-weapons capability within months if North Korea emerged as a serious threat.
But experts rule out such a scenario, given Japan's strong moral opposition to nuclear weapons.
Indeed, on Friday Japan Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi said Tokyo was concerned by North Korea abandoning the NPT and would urge it to reverse its decision.
Diplomats differ on whether North Korea is free of its NPT obligations.
According to some disarmament diplomats, Pyongyang's withdrawal took effect immediately as it had given the required 90-day notice in March 1993, but suspended its withdrawal on the 89th day after heavy pressure from the United States.
Other Western and Asian diplomats doubt the old notice applies, and maintain North Korea can only withdraw after 90 days have passed from the latest notice.
The 1993-94 crisis was defused when the United States and North Korea signed an Agreed Framework accord in Geneva in October 1994. The pact kept North Korea in the NPT and provided stability for eight years in the volatile peninsula, experts note.
According to senior Asian diplomats close to Pyongyang, North Korea believes the United States violated the framework agreement, leading it to quit the NPT.
Under the framework accord, North Korea agreed to freeze its existing nuclear program, to remain a party to the NPT, and to allow its facilities to be monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In exchange, the United States agreed to cooperate in replacing contested graphite moderated reactors with proliferation-proof light water reactors and to provide 500,000 tons of heavy oil for heating until the project is completed.