| So, let’s see if I’ve got this right.
Prologue:
Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the U.N. ordered economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Those sanctions didn’t work — they rarely do - and in January 1991 U.S. Congress voted 52 to 47 in favour of military force against Iraq. (Incidentally, this was the closest vote to endorse a war since America attacked Canada in 1812.) The U.N. quickly backed the U.S., and eventually 33 other nations lent their support for the action, effectively making it World War III. By March 1991, the shooting was all over.
Act I:
However, the Gulf War of 1991 failed to oust Saddam Hussein, something that, in hindsight, both George H.W. Bush and his son-and-heir must surely rue. Instead, Saddam spent the next decade taunting both the U.S. and U.N. weapon inspectors over Iraq’s alleged production or possession of nuclear armaments. In November 2002, the U.N. issued Resolution 1441, offering Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations" and declare any stockpiles of "weapons of mass destruction." Saddam once more refused to comply, and in March 2003 President George W. Bush ordered the second invasion of Iraq.
Once again, the actual war was brief, this time all over within a month. More to the point, perhaps, this time the defeat of Saddam’s armed forces was followed, in December that year, by the capture of the Iraqi leader himself.
Act II:
Almost two years before, in his State of the Union address in January 2002, Bush had — courtesy of speech writer David Frum — linked Iran and North Korea to Iraq as the so-called "Axis of Evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world." In doing so, Bush broke with the former Clinton administration’s efforts to reach an understanding with North Korea on the question of nuclear weapons. Under the "Agreed Framework", signed in 1994, North Korea had agreed to freeze its plutonium production program in exchange for American oil, economic co-operation and the construction of two modern light-water nuclear power plants.
When incoming Secretary of State Colin Powell announced, in March 2001, that he hoped to "pick up where President Clinton left off," there had been reason to hope that improved relations might continue. His boss’s harsher stand and refusal to stand by the "Agreed Framework" ensured that this would not be the case, however, and the agreement soon fell apart after North Korea complained that America had not lived up to its part of the deal. At the same time, it withdrew from the International Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
From now on, North Korea would pursue its nuclear program unfettered by outside opinion or intervention.
Act III:
Since 2003, North Korea, under Kim Jong-Il, has been more or less open in its ambition to acquire both nuclear weaponry and an effective delivery system. On May 1, 2005, it fired a short-range missile into the Sea of Japan. By Christmas that year, it had announced plans to resume construction of nuclear reactors. Both the U.N. and U.S. voiced their concern, but neither took direct action.
The recent announcement that North Korea had tested its first nuclear bomb should, therefore, have come as little or no surprise to anyone whose job it is to be interested in such matters. Russian authorities estimated the blast at between 5 and 15 kilotons; later calculations placed it much lower, perhaps as low as 0.5 kilotons. Yet this was hardly the point. North Korea had joined an elite club of nations who share the capacity to destroy life on a global scale.
Other members of this club – with dates of initiation in parenthesis – are: the U.S. (1945), the U.S.S.R./Russia (1949), the UK (1952), France (1960), China (1964), India (1974), Pakistan (1998) and possibly Israel (1979?). The list of nations that have pursued nuclear programs at one time or another is even longer, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Iraq, Japan, Libya, Poland, Romania, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and Yugoslavia.
In other words, the pursuit of nuclear power has followed no obvious historical pattern or trajectory. It mirrors no obvious Cold War division of superpower versus superpower or bloc versus bloc, or any post-colonial conflict in either Africa or Asia. All that can be said, it seems, is that those powers that have set their sights on securing nuclear capability have either done so, or have struggled in the attempt to do so.
Epilogue:
North Korea has now joined the ranks of the world’s nuclear powers. That prospect has scared many observers, not so much because of the possibility of a full-scale nuclear war but for fear that Kim Jong-Il may now share that technology with nations or forces hostile to the West in general and to America in particular. Hence the belated scramble by the U.N. to impose new sanctions on North Korea and to subject ships in and out of the peninsula nation to rigorous searches.
Yet even if successful, such measures are unlikely to secure a sense of peace in the long run. The crucial point is not the disputed size of the bomb that North Korea has just imposed, the reliability of its delivery system, or to whom it may or may not pass on nuclear secrets. Instead, it’s the fact that not one country that has acquired nuclear technology so far has ever given up that technology — put simply, knowledge cannot be undone.
The UN measures can only serve to further heighten North Korea’s already considerable sense of isolation from the rest of the world, born out of the same war — the Cold War — that led to its creation back in 1953. Only something like a return to the "agreed framework," in the short run, and a genuine rapprochement with South Korea, in the long run, can lessen the threat posed by a nuclear North Korea. |
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