Articles

Korean nuclear brinkmanship: pure terror financing

By David Nordell

North Korea, according to a report in the London Daily Telegraph, has informed the UN that it is in the "final phase" of enriching uranium, despite the UN’s economic and arms sanctions against it.

Pyongyang’s announcement that it is once again defying the rest of the world should come as no surprise to anyone. Apart from its consistent paranoid fear that any kind of openness or compromise will inevitably lead to the regime’s collapse, no doubt accompanied by the kind of fate for Kim Jong-Il that was meted out to Nicolae Ceausescu, Kim has rightly observed that the more aggressive and apparently irrational his actions, the better the deal it can wring out of the rest of the world, especially South Korea and the USA. South Korea has in the past cut off $1bn-plus of annual food aid to its perpetually hungry northern neighbour, and Kim no doubt believes that renewed talk of his nuclear capabilities will help renew the aid.

But this nuclear brinkmanship is in fact perfectly rational blackmail, directed both at potential donors and also at pressuring the international community into relaxing the sanctions regime. In today’s world, with both China and Russia increasingly assertive and the United States facing massive economic problems and very uncertain success in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and led by an overambitious but underperforming president, it’s most probable that nobody will do anything at all beyond protesting about Kim having added uranium enrichment to his existing small stock of plutonium-based warheads. And if Kim is lucky, he may even be able to squeeze economic aid or significantly relaxed sanctions, or both, out of the other countries in the Six Party disarmament talks.

But it goes without saying that any concessions Kim may manage to get out of the international community will not result in a genuine slowdown of his nuclear programme, still less actual disarmament. On the contrary, it seems almost certain that any additional economic resources he gets will be directed to stepping up the nuclear programme: after all, if the rest of the world is foolish enough to give in to his blackmail, then why shouldn’t he use their generosity to make the blackmail even more frightening in the next round?

In simple terms, this would be nothing less than North Korea pressuring the international community to finance the terrorism he is employing against the civilised world. And yes, it is terrorism, even if he doesn’t fire a single shot or let off a single bomb, because it is employing the threat of violence and war to scare political leaders into doing something they would very much prefer to avoid.

But this threat, however vile, doesn’t only affect a small chunk of east Asia. North Korea is Iran’s most important strategic ally and the source of much of its missile technology. And although North Korea is unlikely to ever need the uranium it’s enriching except as a threat, it is extremely likely to make some available to Iran, of course in exchange for hard currency: whether or not the reports are true that Iran’s centrifuge-based enrichment programme has slowed down, a secret pipeline of uranium from North Korea could easily put the lie to the various Western intelligence assessments of when Iran will actually have complete deliverable warheads, and induce Western leaders to make foolish decisions. Considering, therefore, that the financial sanctions regime the USA tried to impose on Iran has been totally ineffective and that any further economic sanctions the UN might impose in the near future will be too little, too late, the slightest weakness the world shows towards Kim’s odious regime over its nuclear grandstanding may also considerably worsen the danger from Iran.

If there is any moral to this situation, it is this: the free world’s leadership can not afford to give in to political blackmail, because every concession it makes to dangerous dictators like Kim or Ahmedinejad will only finance more terrorism.