The morning after

[Below is my analysis piece from today's paper. The splash by James Bone and I is here; plus sterling background and analysis from Bronwen Maddox (on the world's limited options), Richard Beeston (on the potential for a nuclear arms race), Mike Evans (on the technicalities of delivering a bomb) and Jane Macartney (on China's dilemma).]

At times of hunger, when the rice has gone and all the dogs and cats have been eaten, North Korean schoolchildren scavenge the fields around their villages for crows, dragonflies and rats. The countryside is littered with abandoned factories – not only is there no fuel for the machinery, but all the metal from the power cables has been stripped and sold. Diplomats in the capital Pyongyang worry about sending their cooks out to shop for dinner parties because the few hundred pounds they carry with them is the equivalent of several decades’ wages for the average worker.

Economically, North Korea is a husk of a country, poor by the standards of sub-Saharan Africa, let alone those of booming East Asia. But yesterday, despite ideological bankruptcy, growing diplomatic isolation, and a famine in the 1990s which killed as many as 3 million people, it became the ninth member of the nuclear club. Whatever else is true about North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il – and there is no doubt that he is a tyrant and a killer on a historic scale – it is impossible to deny his genius in playing the weakest possible hand of cards with maximum shrewdness and skill.

Mr Kim is often spoken of as a madman and, in plenty of ways, North Korea is a ludicrous place. There is the quaintly ferocious Cold War rhetoric with its denunciations of the “imperialist aggressors” and “reactionary human scum”. There is the quasi-religious personality cult of Kim Jong Il and his late father, “President” Kim Il Sung, the only head of state to remain technically in power after his death. But North Korea’s government knows what it is doing; from its own position of isolation and siege, its actions over the past few years have been cool, rational and remarkably effective.

Mr Kim has a single goal: the survival of himself and his regime, which has been achieved against all predictions. The country he inherited in 1994 was a product of the Cold War and the brutal division of the Korean Peninsula into communist North and US-backed South. Under Russian and Chinese sponsorship it had survived, but in the decade after the collapse of the USSR it slipped into a seemingly unstoppable downward spiral.

Without handouts of oil, food and cash from Moscow, many if its industries lurched to a halt. floods washed away its fields and precipitated the deadly famine. By the late 1990s, it seemed only a matter of time before Kim Jong Il went the same way as other Stalinist depots like Romania’s Nicolau Ceaucescu.

But he was protected by his most loathsome attribute – his brutal intolerance and suppression of any visible dissent. East Germany’s communist rulers were driven from power not by tanks, but by the images of luxury and choice beamed across their borders by West German television. North Koreans have no such examples to judge Mr Kim by, mainly because anyone found in possession of a radio tuned to other than official channels will be sent to a Gulag.

As far as one can tell from a country from which little information except propaganda ever escapes, Mr Kim does not have to stifle dissent – there is no evidence that significant dissent ever shows its face. The heroic personality cult of the Kims is the only version of reality to which ordinary North Koreans have access. The regime’s cruelty, including the vast network of Gulags containing tens of thousands of prisoners and their extended families, is not crazed sadism but a coldly rational instrument of control.

In the absence of a functioning economy, Mr Kim has turned to crime. According to US government assessments (impossible, like almost anything else connected to the North to verify independently), many of the amphetamines sold in Japan and South Korea have been made in North Korean government labs. Mr Kim is accused of counterfeiting high quality dollar bills, all the time receiving foreign humanitarian aid. His nuclear programme can be seen in the same way – not as an ends in itself, but as a means of heading off the fate of every other Stalinist dictator.

Repeatedly, North Korea has stepped back from its nuclear programme. In 1994, it did so after a deal with the Clinton administration under which it froze its nuclear reactor in return for fuel oil and the promise of safe reactors, incapable of producing “weaponable” plutonium. The US never thought Mr Kim would survive to see the reactors put in place, and fell behind on its commitments. The came George Bush with his “axis of evil”, of which North Korea was the third member, and his doctrine of pre-emptive attack.

Mr Bush spoke of his personal “loathing” for Kim Jong Il - the fate of Saddam Hussein offered an example of what happens to those who have no way of deterring US attack. North Korea’s conventional forces have been deteriorating for years – what other means did Mr Kim of protecting himself but nuclear weapons?

The Bush administration accused the North Koreans of working on a separate uranium enrichment plutonium, and cut off the promised fuel oil. Mr Kim promptly walked out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and reopened his plutonium reactor. The US, China, Russia, Japan, South and North Korea sat down repeatedly for inconclusive talks – at the fifth and last round, North Korea offered to abandon its nuclear programme in stages in return for security guarantees; the US insisted that full disarmament must come first, a display of will which many today will regret.

Since then, North Korea has escalated the situation faster than ever. In July, it test-fired ballistic missiles despite a chorus of warnings not to do so. But the concrete consequences were few, and Mr Kim probably calculates that there is little that the world can do this time either, barring an unthinkably devastating war. The rest of the world calls him a madman and tells him that he is making things worse for himself with every step. But he is alive, he is still in power and that in itself is an astonishing success.

Comments

[David]

"Genius", "shrewdness", "skill"?
"Cool, rational, remarkably successful"?
"An astonishing success"?
The Times pays you to write this nonsense?
KJI has played the only possible strategy he could: extremist positions, lies, criminality and chaos. When Ahmadenijad started doing his US media tour, it was obvious KJI would get antsy. His bluffs are so absurd that everyone -- save the the Western media -- is now on to him. Roh wants to blame the US, but the issue -- not nuclear weapons, but refugees -- is squarely in the hands of the Chinese.

[chen]

em,well,I see, the nuclear weapon would be lesser wicked if the holder is a richer country. According to this theory, certainly, the nuke of Isreal's must be much cleaning than Iraq's/Iran's.

[Chris Stevens]

Your comments are some of the most interesting and well informed that I have read about this conflict.

North Korea confuses me, the government is so evil and is clearly a threat to the world community. However, I spent 10 days there a couple of years ago on a charity mission and could not believe that it is such a beautiful country with warm and friendly people. Meeting reasonably senior level officials I was bowled over by their incredible levels of English as well as French, Spanish and Chinese. Several had at least one degree from a foreign university and in appearance they seemed far easier to talk to and more westernised than many Chinese officials that i work with in Beijing.

With forward thinking and progressive officials who have a good understanding of the outside world can the Kim regime really last for much longer? North Korea is often portrayed as if it were directly transplanted from Mars. My experience was that although it is a very peculiar and isolated place, North Korea is just like anywhere else with people who care about and want the same things.

I don't know enough about the country to make any truly informed comments, however, my impression is that things must change eventually. How that will happen though is anyone's guess.

[Ken Worsley]

Thanks for your comments - I enjoyed the perspective here.

A lot of Americans seem to think Kim is overly paranoid - perhaps to the point of being insane - of a US attack. Most don't seem to be aware that he is under constant air and satellite survelience, he was the US 8th Army sitting in South Korea, the entire 7th Fleet of the US Navy in Japan, plus the possibility of nuclear-capable aircraft sitting on the tarmac at the US Air Force base in Misawa.

Certainly, there is good reason to watch him, and be ready in case he attacks South Korea. But the opinion I often hear - that Kim is pathalogically paranoid - seems to display a severe lack of knowledge of what role the US plays in the region.

[chen]

what would tbe American do if they change their role with North Korea?

[john gregory Flinn]

Has there been independent confirmation the explosion was nuclear?
A nuclear explosion has an irrefutable signature, but so far I have only read about; a 'failure', a 'fake' and an 'absence of artificial radio-active material in rainwater over Korea' (breaking news today 13 Oct).
Coupled with DPRK threats for further tests a 'failure' looks possible....
However the DPRK also know that perception is 'everything' in the West!

PS. Chris Stevens paints such a picture of bliss in DPRK, one wonders why they don't advertise it as such themselves. Perhaps there are opportunities for Saatchi and Saatchi there.....?

[Pedant]

At the start of the piece, shouldn't that be "splash by James Bone and me" rather than "I"?