North Korea's Intent In Razing Tower Is Unclear

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
June 28, 2008 By Norimitsu Onishi
TOKYO — International television crews were invited to reclusive North Korea on Friday to witness the destruction of the cooling tower at the country’s main nuclear weapons plant. Viewers around the world later watched the most visible symbol of the North’s nuclear ambitions collapse in a cloud of shattered concrete.
In North Korea itself, however, the explosion was a nonevent. The state news agency carried no information about it on Friday, and the images had not found their way onto state television.
News blackouts are not big news in isolated North Korea, which also let a full day pass before it let its people know, on state television and radio, that President Bush had removed it from the United States’ list of countries that sponsor terrorism. It couched that development in a warning that Washington had not yet fully abandoned its “hostile policy” toward the North.
Mr. Bush characterized the latest steps toward denuclearization as a “moment of opportunity for North Korea.” But the North’s cagey reaction suggests that any lasting change in Kim Jong-il’s secretive, xenophobic approach to governing one of the world’s most cloistered nations is likely to be painfully slow, at best.
Though there are hints that North Korea’s powerful military may have relaxed what analysts have described as its wariness about bargaining in earnest on nuclear weapons, experts warn that it is far from clear that Mr. Kim intends to give up all of the country’s existing atomic bombs or the capacity to produce new ones.
Still, North Korea watchers in neighboring South Korea and China say that this week’s deal appeared to have emerged from the shifting dynamics between North Korea’s reform-oriented civilian officials and hard-line military leaders. If the civilian leadership keeps the upper hand, that could foreshadow a more robust pace of change in the country’s deeply impoverished economy, they say.
“I don’t think it was one group winning against the other, but I think this agreement came out of long discussions between civilian and military leaders,” said Song Min-soon, who served as South Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator and then as foreign minister from late 2006 to early this year. “Groups inside North Korea who want to reform will now gain a voice.”
In his past negotiations, Mr. Song said, his North Korean counterparts referred often to objections from “other institutions in Pyongyang,” the capital, which the South Koreans interpreted as the military and officials from the ruling party.
“For some time, I thought it was just an excuse not to make a deal, but later I came to believe that it was not just an excuse but the reality there,” said Mr. Song, who is now a member of the National Assembly.
Even if they disagreed about the nuclear program and relations with the outside world, however, reformers and hard-liners are driven by a shared goal of survival, experts said.
Paik Hak-soon, a North Korea expert at the Sejong Institute in Seoul, South Korea, said that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea had basically pursued the long-term goal of formally ending the Korean War and normalizing relations with the United States.
“That is the only way for North Korea to survive,” Mr. Paik said. “North Korea wanted the United States to come to the negotiating table, and since the United States did not want to come voluntarily, North Korea used the nuclear card.”
It is a card that the North is unlikely to give up easily. In Thursday’s declaration, the North disclosed its plutonium-related activities at the Yongbyon reactor, its main nuclear plant. But the much more difficult task of persuading the North to give up its existing nuclear weapons, estimated at roughly half a dozen, comes in the next stage of talks.
North Korea’s declaration did not specify how many nuclear bombs it had. Officials there have not formally addressed Washington’s contention that, in addition to its well-known efforts to make nuclear fuel from plutonium, the country has a parallel, underground program to make bomb fuel from enriched uranium.
Xu Guangyu, a Chinese analyst often sympathetic to North Korea, said negotiations were unlikely to advance much, given Mr. Bush’s short time in office.
“North Korea is not going to give up their nuclear weapons easily,” he said. “That is the last card they have to play with America. They want to keep their card to see what the next president will do with North Korea.”
Friday’s destruction of the tower, the most conspicuous element of the nuclear complex at Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang, did reaffirm the incremental progress that had been made in Chinese-brokered multilateral negotiations to end North Korea’s weapons programs. While the North has kept its nuclear activities shrouded in secrecy, steam curling from the tower into the atmosphere was captured in spy satellite photographs, providing outside observers with the most visible sign of operations at Yongbyon.
“As you all saw, the cooling tower is no longer there,” Sung Kim, a senior State Department official who witnessed the blast from a hill, told South Korean television. “It’s a very significant disablement step.”
But some experts in South Korea said the demolition did not answer critical questions, such as how many weapons North Korea has built or whether it has exported its nuclear technology to countries like Syria.
“It’s symbolic. But in real terms, whether demolishing or not a cooling tower that has already been disabled doesn’t make much difference,” said Lee Ji-sue, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Myongji University.
The demolition also shows that North Korea has concluded that the Yongbyon complex, in service for several decades, has served its purpose after producing an unknown number of nuclear weapons, Mr. Lee said.
Whether North Korea’s removal from the terrorism list and the lifting of other sanctions announced by Mr. Bush on Thursday lead to much economic progress could depend, again, on how the tensions between reformers and conservatives play out.
In the past, China has encouraged Mr. Kim to emulate its own success by reforming and opening its failing state-run economy. In recent years, North Korea has experimented with some isolated market reforms and allowed the opening of a South Korean-run industrial complex in Kaesong, just north of the demilitarized zone.
But Jin Linbo, a senior research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, said Mr. Kim had shown no real interest in a systemic economic overhaul. “These experiments can only be regarded as ways that North Korea is trying in order to find a way to make money,” he said.
As for large-scale economic reforms, “No, that is too dangerous for the regime,” he said.
But Moon Chung-in, a political scientist at Yonsei University in Seoul who was South Korea’s ambassador for international security affairs until earlier this year, said he believed that economic change would accelerate now that progress had been made on the nuclear accord.
“Whenever I’ve met party officials in the past, they’ve told me: ‘We don’t want the United States or South Korea to dictate how to manage our economy. You cannot make us open up and reform. But we really are desperate and want to modernize the motherland,’” Mr. Moon said.
“You have to be careful about not using the word ‘reform’; they are sensitive about that and prefer ‘modernize,’” he said.
Thursday’s deal could also provide a boost to North Korea’s special industrial zone, which, despite restrictions, has been growing steadily since opening in late 2004. Today, 72 companies employing 294,702 North Koreans operate there. They include three foreign companies: two Chinese manufacturers and a German auto-parts maker.
“European companies were careful about going to Kaesong because they didn’t want to be linked with North Korea,” said Jean-Jacques Grauhar, secretary general of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in Seoul, which toured Kaesong last month. “But now companies will be more serious about looking at business opportunities in North Korea.”
Jim Yardley contributed from Beijing, and Choe Sang-hun from Seoul, South Korea.
 
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