North Korea's survival as a sovereign nation may hinge on the reactivation of its nuclear programme, writes Faiza Rady While the Bush administration is turning up the heat in the Gulf, preparing to "bomb Iraq back to the stone age" a second time around, they are casually pussyfooting their way around North Korea. Following the American suspension of fuel and oil sales to Pyongyang in November, the much- maligned regime of Kim Jong-Il announced it would reactivate its dormant nuclear programme. Although the Bush team made some threatening noises a few weeks ago, when Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld asserted that the US was perfectly willing, able and ready to wage a war on two fronts, the tables have since turned -- making way for a softer and more conventional "carrot-and-stick" approach. "The president has made it clear the US has no intentions of invading North Korea, and he has indicated he wants to find a peaceful solution to the current situation North Korea has brought on itself," White House spokeswoman Jeanie Marno said on Saturday. Pyongyang, on the other hand, claims it is only acting in self-defence and blames the US for consistently violating the Agreed Framework (AF), which the two countries signed in October 1994. The AF story started in June of that year, when the Clinton administration dispatched former President Jimmy Carter to Geneva with the mission of negotiating a truce of sorts with North Korea. Ever the successful emissary, Carter went, saw and conquered -- returning with the AF under his arm. The agreement stipulates that North Korea stop construction of its graphite nuclear reactors which, according to US intelligence information, could eventually be used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. Pyongyang's compliance with the AF was to be vigilantly monitored by the Korean Energy Development Organisation (KEDO), a US-controlled supervisory body that includes close American allies such as Japan, South Korea and the European Union. In addition, North Korea agreed to let the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) send their inspectors to investigate the country's compliance with the AF. In return, the US was to establish "full normalisation of political and economic relations", and pledged to install two electricity-generating light-water reactors by 2003. The AF further guaranteed Pyongyang an interim annual purchase of 3.3 million barrels of oil and fuel until the reactors were built. Although then US President Bill Clinton had initially pushed for engagement with Pyongyang, Congress never ratified the AF. At the time, the prevailing view in Washington was that Socialist North Korea would collapse in the wake of the Soviet Union and be absorbed by South Korea. Accordingly, the American political establishment viewed the AF as a politically dispensable agreement and quickly scrapped any attempts to normalise relations. Since the US signed the AF in October 1994, trade relations never took off. Instead, the 50- year-old embargo against the Stalinist regime remained intact for all intents and purposes, with one notable exception: the cereal manufacturer, Cargill, managed to finesse its way around the embargo and set up shop in the North. Although North Korea loyally stuck to its part of the deal, by allowing the IAEA to inspect its mothballed nuclear installations, the US stubbornly refused to comply with AF provisions. Besides reneging on normalisation in any perceivable shape or form, the US also failed to deliver on other fronts. Since 1994, no light-water reactor ever saw the light of day. By 2000, no construction crew had put in an honest day of work -- leaving the site hopelessly barren. A South Korean company in charge of developing the project, cited "financing problems" as a reason for the delay -- a common euphemism for US dilly-dallying and refusal to pay up. Preliminary construction on the site only began in 2002, which means that no electricity could realistically be generated until the end of the decade. Squeezed by the everlasting American boycott and denied trade normalisation in the foreseeable future, notwithstanding the AF -- in addition to being energy-strapped as a result of US non- compliance with its water-reactor construction pledges -- Pyongyong stubbornly stuck to its part of the agreement. Nevertheless, things finally came to a head last year. In his State of the Union address, President George W Bush defined North Korea as a sworn enemy of the US, placing the country, along with Iran and Iraq, on his notorious "axis of evil". This was merely the tip of the iceberg. Last year, the Pentagon released a list of potential rogue states, including China and North Korea, as countries the US would attack with nuclear weapons, if push came to shove. For Pyongyang, this latest US threat amounted to an effective declaration of war. At that point, the North Korean leadership decided they had lived under the sinister shadow of American nuclear sabre-rattling for too long. This latest in a long string of US threats constituted yet another violation of the AF guidelines. In fact, the agreement also stipulated that the US and North Korea would sign a mutual non-belligerency pact. Cornered by US nuclear warmongering and economically throttled by the embargo, the North finally decided to scrap the moribund, if not defunct, agreement. Pyongyang then proceeded to quit the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, throw out the UN IAEA's inspection team and "go nuclear" -- for self-defence as well as industrial purposes. "North Korea's step to lift its nuclear freeze is a just countermeasure taken by it to cope with the situation where all the articles of the North Korea-US Agreed Framework have been ditched by the US," explained the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). Notwithstanding the international outcry and the orchestrated chorus of condemnations defining Pyongyang as "a threat to the international community", the North Korean leadership was right on target. Reverting back to nuclear production would, at the very least, provide Pyongyang with a measure of deterrence against US attacks: a very real possibility that was recently confirmed by South Korean President-elect Roh Moo-hyun. On Saturday, Roh told a panel of university professors that the Americans had seriously considered going to war against the North. "At the time of the elections some US officials, who held considerable responsibility in the administration, talked about the possibility of attacking North Korea," said Roh. Nor was it the first time the US considered attacking the North: In the winter of 1950, during the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for permission to drop between 30 and 50 atomic bombs across the neck of the Korean peninsula. Unfortunately for MacArthur the military command denied his request. At the time, Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained a powerful deterrent to further American nuclear adventurism. More recent war threats date back to 1993 when US intelligence alerted the Clinton administration to Pyongyang's development of a plutonium-based nuclear programme. Gavan McCormack of The New Left Review reported that the Pentagon's Operation Plan 5027 (the code name for the projected war on the North) was ultimately shelved following detailed itemisation of its prohibitive cost. According to Pentagon estimates, about one million people would die in an all-out assault against the peninsula, including up to 100,000 American troops. In addition, the US would have to dish out an excess of $100 billion in expenses. As if this were not enough, the cost of destruction to property and interruption of business activity was estimated at $1 trillion. Faced with staggering costs and fearing the inevitable political fall-out from the left, the Clinton administration reluctantly backed-off, opting instead for negotiations. But the threats did not stop there. Since 1957, the Americans have turned South Korea into a vast warehouse for the stockpile of nuclear weapons, all targeting North Korea. "The US continued its rehearsals for a long-range nuclear bombing strike on North Korea at least up to 1998, and probably to this very day," wrote Hans Kristensen in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Threatened with nuclear weapons since 1950, North Korea's survival as a sovereign nation may very well be contingent on going nuclear.
