Bearing Witness To A Nuclear North Korea

It’s a long way from Paris to Pyongyang, but as the world ponders the jihadi attacks on France, let us not lose sight of the menace emanating on the other side of the globe from a nuclear-arming, weapons-vending North Korea. That, too, is a danger that has been growing on President Obama’s watch. The threats include not only North Korea’s program for making nuclear missiles with a range that could reach the United States, but the possibility that North Korean nuclear wares could end up in the hands of Islamic terrorists.

These perils will not be resolved by another set of nuclear talks with North Korea.   With a parade of broken promises stretching back more than two decades, North Korea has mastered the art of extorting concessions at the bargaining table and walking away to continue its progress toward a nuclear arsenal. Nor does it augur well that United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon may be planning a trip to Pyongyang, as reported recently by South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency (though the U.N. as of this writing had refused to confirm or deny). Ban’s record of bringing peace to the world is a near-empty slate, and a visit from Ban would likely do more to legitimize and fortify North Korea’s totalitarian regime of Kim Jong Un than to disarm it.

For clearer thinking about how to grapple with North Korea, let us turn to some sage advice offered more than nine years ago, in June, 2006. North Korea was then in the final stages of fueling a long-range Taepodong ballistic missile for a test launch when two prominent American defense experts recommended a dramatic U.S. response. In a Washington Post Op-ed headlined “If Necessary, Strike and Destroy,” these two experts urged the Bush administration: “if North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched.”

One of these experts was Ashton B. Carter, now President Obama’s secretary of defense. His coauthor, William J. Perry, had served as secretary of defense during the Clinton administration. In their article, they stressed that North Korea’s clear purpose in testing a long-range ballistic missile was to develop a delivery vehicle for nuclear bombs. They noted that there were risks to blowing up the missile on the launch pad. But they countered that “the risk of continuing inaction in the face of North Korea’s race to threaten this country would be greater.”

With impeccable foresight, they spelled out: “A successful Taepodong launch, unopposed by the United States, its intended victim, would only embolden North Korea further. The result would be more and more warheads atop more and more missiles.”

Bush ignored their call to action and, like Clinton before him, and Obama after him, declined to use force. North Korea today fields an arsenal vastly more dangerous than in 2006.

More specifically: On July 4th, 2006, North Korea tested the missile that Ash Carter and Bill Perry had urged Bush to destroy with a surgical strike. The U.S. watched — a process that the Obama administration has since enshrined globally as a process of “bearing witness,” or, in the case of North Korea, “strategic patience.” The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution, condemning, deploring and demanding that North Korea desist. But no such luck. Three months later, in Oct. 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test. In what has become the ritual response to every North Korean nuclear test, the United Nations passed a resolution imposing sanctions on North Korea. Bush then led the way, via the Six-Party Talks, to a nuclear deal in Feb. 2007, which collapsed by the end of 2008.

Since then, on President Obama’s watch, North Korea has carried out a second nuclear test in 2009, a third test in 2013, and has repeatedly threatened to carry out a fourth test, for which satellites last year picked up signs of preparation at North Korea’s Punggye-ri underground test site. Despite sanctions and international protest, North Korea appears to be both enriching uranium and reprocessing plutonium for bomb fuel, has paraded road-mobile missiles, advertised its program to develop submarine-launched missiles, and has accompanied all this with a lively cyber warfare program that last year hacked into Sony Pictures and issued death threats against American theater-goers.

According to both congressional testimony and press conference remarks by a number of senior U.S. military officials, North Korea has now mastered the ability — as yet untested — to mount a miniaturized nuclear warhead on a long-range missile and target the United States.

For months now, there have been reports that North Korea has upgraded the facilities at its Sohae missile launch site, and in the usual guise of a “peaceful” satellite launch may be readying another long-range ballistic missile test.

Would Ash Carter, now running the Defense Department under Obama, still favor the U.S. delivering a serious message to North Korea by threatening to destroy its next long-range missile on the launch pad? I submitted that question this fall to the Pentagon. A spokesman emailed back, “The 2006 article was written based upon the circumstances at the time. To assume that analysis would be appropriate nine years later would be to ignore a number of changes in the security situation.”

What’s changed? The Pentagon spokesman declined to get specific, emailing back, “We won’t comment on intelligence.” Adding that “We closely monitor the situation on the Korean peninsula,” he then invoked the grand talking shop of the United Nations, in all its impotent majesty:

“Multiple Security Council resolutions require North Korea to suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile program, re-establish a moratorium on missile launches, stop conducting any launches using ballistic missile technology and abandon its ballistic missile program in a complete and verifiable manner. As the U.N. Security Council states in 2012, any launch using ballistic missile technology, even if characterized as satellite launch or space launch vehicle is a serious violation of these resolutions.”

That’s all quite true. But it’s been about as effective as a U.S. “policy” of declaring that the desired situation in Syria is one of peace and democracy. North Korea has been seriously violating U.N. Security Council resolutions since 2006, first under the late tyrant Kim Jong Il, who died in late 2011, and since then under his son, current tyrant Kim Jong Un. There is every likelihood that if the UN passes more resolutions about this, North Korea will violate them, too.

Meantime, the danger keeps growing. This September, the head of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr., told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “North Korea is the greatest threat that I face in the Pacific.” This past February, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper repeated his annual warning to the same Senate committee that “North Korea’s export of ballistic missiles and associated materials to several countries, including Iran and Syria, and its assistance to Syria’s construction of a nuclear reactor, destroyed in 2007, illustrate its willingness to proliferate dangerous technologies.”

What’s the U.S. strategy for dealing with this? In early November, Ash Carter traveled to South Korea, and paid a visit to the Demilitarized Zone. While there, he spoke with reporters, stressing “just how dangerous this part of the world is.” One of the reporters asked him if he saw any reason to hope that North Korea might step off the nuclear path.

Carter, referring to the (empty) North Korean promises of the (failed) Six-Party Talks, replied , “We remain committed to achieving that negotiated outcome with North Korea, and believe that they should be on the path to doing less and ultimately zero in the nuclear field, not to doing more.”

That’s a nice wish, but does Carter himself believe that the endless replay of this diplomatic fantasy, absent clear and credible red lines, will do anything but embolden North Korea? Here, we might revisit another Op-ed that Ash Carter and Bill Perry published in Time magazine, a few days after North Korea’s July 4, 2006 missile test, in which they argued the case yet again for “a Preemptive Strike on North Korea’s Missiles.” They warned that “North Korea has a long history of selling its advanced weapons to countries in the Middle East,” and that “North Korean officials might be tempted to sell the ingredients of their arsenal to terrorists.” They denounced Washington’s out-sourcing of North Korean nuclear talks to regional players as “a strategy that has failed to produce any results except plutonium and missile tests.”

The country that’s currently on the path to doing less is not North Korea. It’s the United States, which is in retreat, gutting its military, shrinking its reach, cutting a feckless nuclear deal with Iran, deferring to an expansionist Russia, waiting for the “international community” to cap a jihadi-spawning cauldron in Syria, and hoping for peace and harmony at the end of that fabled long and slow-bending arc of history. Meantime, the road to that pot of gold is increasingly crammed with weapons-seeking jihadis, and North Korean nuclear wares.

Ms. Rosett is journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and heads its Investigative Reporting Project. Follow her on Twitter @CRosett