In my opinion the foremost U.S. expert on North Korea is Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. Eberstadt has long argued that any attempt to peacefully dissuade Pyongyang from proceeding with its nuclear program is essentially futile. Not only is the country impossible to trust, having broken numerous various agreements, but it views nuclear weapons as essential to its very existence:
Several important implications flow from the DPRK's conception of, and strategy for, its WMD program.
First, continuing and escalating international tensions are not the accidental and unwelcome side-effects of the program: they are instead its central purpose. Simply stated, the DPRK's growing WMD arsenal, and the threats it permits the North Korean regime to pose to other governments, are the key to the political and economic prizes Pyongyang intends to extract from an otherwise hostile and unwilling world.
Second, WMD threats--and especially nuclear and missile threats -- have already been used by North Korea with great success: as an instrument for extracting de facto international extortion payments from the United States and its allies, and as a lever of forcing the United States to "engage" Pyongyang diplomatically, and on Pyongyang's own terms.
The greatest potential dividends for North Korean nuclear and ballistic diplomacy, however, still lie in store -- and this brings us to a third point. For half a century and more U.S. security policy has been charged with imposing "deterrence" upon Pyongyang. Shouldn't we expect that Pyongyang has also been thinking about how to "deter" the U.S. over those same long decades?
Nuclear weapons (especially long-range nuclear missiles) might well answer the "deterrence question" for the North Korean state, as former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry incisively recognized in his 1999 "Perry Process" report: faced with the risk of nuclear attack on the U.S. mainland, he warned, Washington might hesitate at a time of crisis in the Korean peninsula. But if Washington's security commitment to the ROK were not credible in a crisis, the military alliance would be hollow: and vulnerable to collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. North Korea's WMD program, in short, may be the regime's best hope for achieving its long-cherished objectives of breaking the U.S.-ROK military alliance, and forcing American troops out of the Korean peninsula.
Fourth, those who hope for a "win-win" solution to the North Korean nuclear impasse must recognize the plain fact that Pyongyang does not now engage in "win-win" bargaining, and never has. The historical record is completely clear: Pyongyang believes in "zero-sum" solutions, preferring outcomes that entail not only DPRK victories, but also face-losing setbacks for its opponents. From the DPRK's perspective, "win-win" solutions are not only impractical--they leave adversaries unnecessarily strong--but actually immoral.
Eberstadt's viewpoint would seem to be supported by news that came out this week:
As the U.S. warns North Korea not to test a nuclear weapon, documents newly unearthed from Soviet-era archives show that Pyongyang has worked tirelessly for decades to build an atomic bomb, something it long has seen as essential to deter U.S. aggression.
The documents, uncovered and translated by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, display the North's deep-rooted fears of abandonment by allies and of an American attack, and suggest it won't be easy to persuade the country to give up its atomic ambitions.:...The collection of diplomatic telegrams and political analyses by Pyongyang's former Soviet bloc allies -- dating from 1962 to 1986 and released in Washington yesterday -- sheds light on when and why Pyongyang started on its nuclear quest. While the documents don't prove the North has actually built any weapons, they do provide new evidence from the country's former communist allies that it has been pursuing nuclear weapons.
According to the documents, Pyongyang began pestering the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies for assistance in developing a nuclear-research program at least as early as 1963. In August of that year, the Russian ambassador to Pyongyang informed Moscow that North Korea had asked East Germany for help in obtaining information about nuclear weapons.
North Korea has been in pursuit of nuclear weapons for decades. Nuclear weapons appear to be a fundamental element of its survival strategy. It has violated a previous agreement to give up those weapons. What reason is there for anyone to believe that they can be induced to surrender those aspirations?
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BTW, make sure to check out the KCNA Random Insult Generator. (hat-tip: No Illusions)
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