Posted on 10/18/2002 7:49:10 AM PDT by anniegetyourgun
WASHINGTON- Over the years, the U.S. government has tried just about everything with North Korea - the threat of war, the cold shoulder, sanctions, lifting sanctions and billions of dollars in aid - to dissuade it from pursuing various arms programs.
So what will it do now that the hardline communist regime has admitted to secretly developing nuclear weapons?
The possibilities range from diplomatic pressure to more incentives to military action. But the Bush administration was keeping its options open Thursday, revealing little about how it will respond to the unpredictable, longtime adversary.
Asked whether the United States might use military force, Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "We're not planning anything of that nature right now."
Its hands full with Iraq and the global war on terrorism in general, the administration would be hard-pressed to take on North Korea, with its 1.7 million-man army and array of missiles, attack aircraft and other capabilities, analysts said.
"The reality of the United States using force unilaterally against North Korea is extremely difficult, if not impossible," said Daniel Pinkston, a Korea specialist at the Monterey Institute for International Studies.
Some 37,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea to help keep an uneasy peace because the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice instead of a peace treaty. And though successive U.S. military commanders have said a war there would be winnable, they estimate that casualties could be massive and destruction to South Korea catastrophic.
There is only one approach the administration has admitted to pursuing so far.
"It's diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy," said Charles Curtis, a former Energy Department official in the Clinton administration and president of the anti-proliferation Nuclear Threat Initiative.
North Korea told the Bush administration of its nuclear program on Oct. 4 and U.S. officials concealed the news for nearly two weeks before it was leaked to the news media. A senior administration official said officials still were consulting with U.S. allies and Congress, and would have liked more time to do that before the story got out.
So far officials have said they passed the information to China, which they described as stunned by the news, and they were sending emissaries to more than a half dozen nations for consultations about what to do next.
They must also pressure countries supplying North Korea with the equipment it's using in its nuclear program, one analyst said. China is believed among them, though Pakistan and Russia are the main suppliers, a senior defense official said on condition of anonymity. Some of the equipment has industrial as well as military uses and transits countries that may not know what North Korea is doing with it.
White House officials said President Bush and his senior advisers decided to confront the new revelation on North Korea in a low-key fashion. And while Bush spoke out against Iraq's Saddam Hussein on Thursday, he made no public statements on North Korea.
Stressing the diplomatic approach, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said, "I think we're going to see that no one wants to have a nuclear-armed North Korea and that effective international pressure may have an effect on North Korea."
China, Russia, Japan and South Korea are among the countries which have a stake in a nuclear-free North Korea, Rice said Thursday on ABC's "Nightline" program.
Analysts said the issue should be worked bilaterally as well as with those nations.
"This is a little bit on the back burner," Pinkston said. "I think they're taking the right approach ... in consultation with Japan, South Korea."
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said North Korea must allow international inspections of its nuclear facilities and agree to destroy whatever weapons of mass destruction it has.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested inspections could be skipped since North Korea already admitted it has had a secret nuclear weapons program.
Humanitarian food aid through the World Food Program is likely to continue because officials are loathe to use food as a weapon.
But analysts and several lawmakers said the Bush administration must terminate a 1994 agreement under which North Korea pledged to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in return for construction of two light-water reactors, financed mostly by South Korea and Japan.
Officials said the administration is talking with allies about shutting down the program, under which the United States provides North Korea with 500,000 tons of heating oil annually. The program is designed to help North Korea meet its energy needs during a transition period before the planned construction of the reactors.
"I think certainly that Congress and the taxpayers would want us to stop sending fuel oil to the North Korea military at tax payers' expense," said Fred C. Ikle, a former undersecretary for defense policy now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
He and others said that whatever options are decided upon, the United States should avoid falling into the trap of buying North Korea's cooperation.
A longtime and profitable tactic of the regime has been to do something that will cause an uproar, then negotiate to stop it in return for money or other payment.
"Past experience is that they do that, they get rewarded," Ikle said. "It has worked well for them."
Several analysts said they suspect this was part of the reason North Korea acknowledged the nuclear program this month - to use as a bargaining chip to negotiate new aid.
Nuke 'em.
This guy is such a cartoon.
I love this reply!. Notice Powell did not say we would not use force. And, since no doubt contigency plans for using force against NK's nuclear establishment surely exist and are kept up to date on a regular basis, there's no need to plan 'anything of that nature right now' as it's in the can.
Nuke whom? Kim and his criminal henchmen? A couple of million oppressed farmers?
While I see no reason for us to go off half-cocked, this sort of reply really irks me. In a war (if there is to be a war) innocent farmers get killed. It always happens. It's sad, but unavoidable. We can't decide not to got to war ever again, because we might kill an oppressed farmer.
I maintain that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the 2 greatest Humanitarian acts of the 20th century. I think Truman deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Why? Because at least a million (possibly 2 million) Japanese would have been killed if we had sent in the US Army to conquer all of Japan. Our atomic bombs made that unnecessary and killed 200,000 so that we could spare a further 800,000 (at least). That's a humane act, in my book.
"This January, 1989 Institute for Science and International Security image shows an overview of the Yongbyon nuclear site. The older buildings, the IRT reactor, the Isotope Production Laboratory, and the Institute of Radiochemistry are shown in the upper portion of these photographs. The 5 megawatts-electric (MWe) reactor and associated buildings are in an area just south of the oldest part of the center. ( Institute for Science and International Security via Reuters)"
However, what about fallout? How many South Koreans would it be acceptable to kill?
Says who? We are the most powerful nation the world has ever known, and if we deemed it necessary to confront N. Koreas 1.7 million soldiers their muster the next day would find the ranks several hundred thousand men short.
Why and how?
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