Approaching North Korea: Realpolitik plus Human Rights

Sunshine Policy Writ Large?

Let's not just flare up!

(Image from Wikipedia)

Let's assume that that, despite some nagging doubts, the North Koreans have indeed tested a nuclear weapon.

Granted, at about 500 tons of explosive force, the power was only one-fortieth the size of the atomic bomb that the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki. Thus, the test might have been faked using TNT.

However, Michael Levi, science and technology expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues in a New Republic article, "What Really Matters About North Korea's Nuke" (New Republic Online, October 12, 2006), that a faked test is unlikely:

Coordinating the detonation of several hundred tons of conventional explosives is not a simple task. More importantly, if any country could demonstrate that the detonation was indeed conventional, it would cause North Korea profound humiliation.

Levi doesn't explain this point, but I suppose that he means that getting a lot of TNT (or whatever) to go off simultaneously in one large explosion rather than sequentially in a number of smaller explosions is difficult. The test was therefore far more likely to have been genuinely nuclear than faked. Why, then, such a low payload? Levi cites three possibilities:

[T]he test may have been a partial failure. In an implosion bomb, which most believe North Korea has developed, high explosives are used to compress plutonium. If the explosives compress the material partially, but not as much as expected, the explosive power is reduced.

[Another] possibility is luck. A nuclear detonation depends on a certain random element. For this reason, U.S. military analysts estimated that the Nagasaki bomb, before it was dropped, had a twelve percent chance of falling short of its 20-kiloton potential. North Korea may have been unlucky in its roll of the dice.

A final theory holds that North Korea chose to test a more sophisticated weapon whose power was lower by design. Yet North Korea apparently told China that its bomb would have a power of four kilotons -- substantially larger than the actual explosion.

Levi leaves us hanging on that last point ... or are we supposed to reject number three? Anyway, I'd go with the first or second theory, neither of which is clearly enough distinguished to clarify the difference, but I suppose the difference is that even if the plutonium is properly compressed, the randomness of chain reactions leaves open the possibility of lower-level explosion.

Anyway, let's assume the explosion was indeed nuclear. What now?

Well, let's look on the bright side of this nuclear flash. It has illuminated -- by the bristly manner in which the North Koreans have conducted themselves -- the underlying tensions that North Korea has with China.

Realpolitik -- and here we need a Nixon -- would dictate that the U.S. take geopolitical advantage of this opening and make a bold offer. Along with Japan and South Korea, the U.S. could offer "a peace treaty, full diplomatic relations, economic investment, and ... implicitly ... independence from China, at whom the nuclear test was partially aimed" (as I suggested yesterday at DPRK).

I know -- this is the failed "Sunshine Policy" writ large, but hear me out. Some of you may recall my March 2005 meeting with Korea University's emeritus professor of philosophy Shin Il Chul, one of the intellectual forces behind Korea's "New Right" movement (but who has, regretably, since passed away). If you recall, I was impressed by Professor Shin, about whom my wife learned this:

[I]n the 1970s, Professor Shin was invited by then-dictator President Park to join the government in an important position, but Shin refused. Why? Because, as he privately told Min, "Someday, I will want to have the moral right to criticize this dictatorship, and I can't do that if I join it."

Interestingly, Shin did not oppose engagement with North Korea but argued that it needed grounding in the classical liberal tradition:

From my own talk with Shin as well as from an NKHR lecture that he gave in 2001, I know that by "liberty," he means more than merely economic freedoms. At that meeting, he told me that he intends the liberal tradition's grounding in human rights. Neither the left nor the right in Korea have emphasized this, he explained, and he argued that this neglect is the main flaw in the "Sunshine Policy" of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun.

Shin thinks that engagement with the North should have been modeled on the Helsinki Accords, which emphasized human rights and cited the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If this had been an integral part of South Korea's Sunshine Policy, then economic engagement would have been conditional upon the North's commitment to human rights.

Would this work? I don't know, but do we lose anything by trying? As things stand right now, North Korea has nuclear weapons that work and that will improve with further testing. China, despite its anger at Kim Jong-il, will be unwilling to apply tough sanctions because these might either drive the North into the arms of another (e.g., Russia) or send the North spiraling into chaos, with unpredictable consequences. China, therefore, will do nothing to endanger North Korea's stability. If the U.S., along with Japan and South Korea, were to impose sanctions and isolate the North further, this would have the effect of driving North Korea closer to China but do nothing to alter Kim Jong-il's behavior. The only effective card that we have is to make a generous offer of peace in return for a human rights agreement and hope that North Korea fears China's long-term aims more than it fears engagement with the U.S. and its Asian allies.

If North Korea would take the bait, then over time, we could open that society up through the lure of capitalist 'corruption' as North Korean officials come to see that its democratic, capitalist 'friends' have more to offer than the Kim dynasty ever has.