Tremors from the blast North Korea cocks a snook at the world

Tremors from the blast
North Korea cocks a snook at the world
by H.K. Dua

DO you think North Korea will explode a nuclear bomb this time?” I asked Singapore Prime Minister last Friday on the sidelines of a Conference of Asian and European Editors.

Prime Minister Lee did not seem to think North Korea would go in for a blast. “He (North Korean Leader Kim Jong il) is perhaps bargaining, if not bluffing”.

This was only two days after North Korea made it known that it intended to go ahead with its plans to do so.

On Monday when President George W. Bush and the West were sleeping, North Korea announced it had carried out an underground nuclear test. It wasn’t a bluff this time.

Kim Jong il had indeed been telling the truth, believing perhaps: Tell the truth again and again until the time comes when no one believes you and then simply get away by just doing it.

The Singapore Prime Minister was not alone in believing that the North Koreans would not have the audacity to explode a nuclear bomb in the face of opposition of the rest of the international community. The theory that Kim Jong il was talking about the bomb only to strike a better bargain with the United States was also being adhered to by the US and most Western nations.

The Chinese who had earlier warned the North Koreans against crossing the nuclear threshold had also been assuring the West until recently that North Korea could be brought round by patience and talks, howsoever long the process may take. Similar assessments had come from the Russians who were part of the six-nation talks that included the US, China, Japan and South Korea.

By carrying out the nuclear blast in defiance of the world opinion, North Korea in one stroke has drastically changed the geopolitical landscape in North-Eastern Asia, cocked a snook at President Bush, shaken Japan out of its pacifist beliefs and in a way challenged Chinese assumptions that it was the dominant power of the region.

Americans are debating how small is the size of the bomb North Koreans have chosen to explode to mark their arrival as the ninth nuclear power in the world — after the US, Britain, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel. But howsoever small is the size of the bomb, it has sent enough tremors around the world, changing in the process a few easy assumptions of political seismology the high and mighty of the nations choose to indulge in.

For President Bush both the harsh truth of the blast and its timing must have come as a serious jolt. It was President Bush who in his super power hubris had described Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “Axis of Evil”. He took on Iraq on the moral plea that Saddam Hussein had in his possession weapons of mass destruction and succeeded in toppling Saddam, but came to find himself bogged down in Iraq. He has been able to do little to change the regime in Iran. And now he sees Kim Jong il – leader of a nation of just 23 million-odd people, smoking the nuclear pipe in his face towards the end of his presidency. The timing must be galling for President Bush when the Republican Party is to face Congressional elections and his own ratings are slipping.

And if the Republicans lose the Congressional elections next month and Presidential polls later to Democrats, Kim Jong il will have the last laugh on the contribution he will have made to bring about a regime change in Washington. The Democrats have already begun rubbing in salt by pointing out that what Pyongyang had done had only marked the utter failure of President Bush’s non-proliferation diplomacy.

The most serious impact of the North Korean nuclear blast will be on Japan, just a little stretch of water away and not far away from North Korea’s missiles. Koreans have been living under the bitter memory of Japanese occupation of their country just a hundred year ago and have also been jealous of Japan’s emergence as a major economic power.

Reports from Tokyo after the blast reflect its worry over the emergence of another nuclear power in its neighbourhood and also feeling that it should not have chosen to deny itself the right to develop its own nuclear weapons all these years.

There has been a tradition of Japanese militarism that suffered a defeat in World War II after the first two nuclear bombs were dropped by US aircraft over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, Japan opted for a pacifist and non-nuclear path. Although it has concentrated on its growth as a major economic power, for security it chose to live under the US nuclear umbrella, although somewhat uneasily with China’s emergence as a major power. Tokyo is no longer going to feel comfortable with Pyongyang becoming nuclear and China increasingly acquiring more muscle as an economic and military power.

There is indeed a strong likelihood now of revival of Japan’s militarism and its people demanding that it should spend more on defence and even developing its own nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who is just a few days old in office, has been elected on a nationalist platform and it will not be difficult for him to win the people’s support to add a military muscle to Japan’s economic power.

For China, for whom North Korea has been a natural ally, the nuclear blast has come as a “brazen act” and has punctured its claim as an emerging Super Power that could sit on the world’s high tables as an equal partner. How will the world take Beijing seriously when someone is showing the thumb to it in its own backyard? Beijing may also not like Japan’s choosing the nuclear path changing altogether the calculus of the Pacific Ocean geopolitics.

Understandably, the new Japanese Prime Minister’s first visit abroad was to Beijing but that was a day before the blast. Maybe the Japanese and the Chinese leaders will have to meet again several times lest the situation in the North-Eastern Asia should go out of hand.

South Korea has lately not been unduly critical of North Korea, hoping that better days will come for the Korean peninsula. What if the South Koreans also decide to opt for the nuclear path in the name of its security and acquiring parity with North Korea? How will North Korea react to it? And China? And Japan? And how will the US, whose troops are still present in South Korea? If nothing else, North Korea has by one blast changed much in North-Eastern Asia and opened up the area for many sensitive possibilities.

What needs to be watched is how the US reacts and what kind of punitive measures it can work out in concert with other nuclear powers in and outside the United Nations. President Bush — whose pride must have been hurt — has already said North Korea’s nuclear explosion will be unacceptable. Will the US — and the coalition of the willing he may have to forge — decide on UN sanctions that generally don’t work, or a naval blockade to choke North Korea, or much worse? A military strike against North Korea is unlikely — at least for some time.