How does the world deal with a new nuclear power?

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This was published 6 years ago

How does the world deal with a new nuclear power?

By Kirsty Needham, David Wroe and Nick O'Malley
Updated

The Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's last redoubt was a ditch by a drainpipe. According to the most reliable accounts he was tormented with a bayonet before he was shot dead. Later they put his body on display in an industrial freezer.

The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was hauled out of a hole in the ground before a trial and a botched hanging that was captured on a jerky phone video. They buried him not far from his two sons, though the tomb has since been destroyed.

These acts of intimate violence, so redolent of our post-September 11 world, left a mark upon the impressionable young dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong-un.

Speaking at a security forum in July, Donald Trump's director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, explained that Kim "has watched, I think, what has happened around the world relative to nations that possess nuclear capabilities and the leverage they have and seen that having the nuclear card in your pocket results in a lot of deterrence capability.

A North Korean missile test in August.

A North Korean missile test in August.Credit: AP

"The lessons that we learned … is, unfortunately: If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don't have them, get them."

Kim reasoned that if his regime was going to survive - indeed, if he was going to live - he needed to have a nuke. When he was declared supreme leader of North Korea after the death of his father in December 2011, Kim set about achieving this goal with a single-minded determination that has impressed even his foes.

Whether or not the world chooses to recognise North Korea as a nuclear power, last Sunday it became, says the Lowy Institute's Euan Graham, a member of that small club of nations that can reach out and obliterate a distant foreign city at will.

The United States - and the world - can now either accept this fact, seek to have North Korea relinquish its weapons or destroy them by force. Any of these paths will reshape the world.

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North Korea's state news agency has rebuked the US ambassador to the UN for her 'tongue-lashing'.

North Korea's state news agency has rebuked the US ambassador to the UN for her 'tongue-lashing'.Credit: AP

So what next?

Since World War II, peace in Asia has been secured by the military power and diplomatic influence of the US. With Japan and South Korea sheltering under Washington's nuclear deterrent umbrella, and with trade routes kept open by the omnipotent presence of the US Navy, there was no point in Asia's rival nations engaging in an arms race.

The result was stability and the miracle of sustained economic growth. But as one of the key experts on the region, Richard McGregor, explains in his new book Asia's Reckoning, the old animosities never faded.

And with North Korea's new nuclear capacity, the Pax Americana may be fading.

Deterrence among allies only works when you can convince your adversaries that you are willing to go to war to defend your friend. The US achieved this in Asia with a semaphore of strong and consistent military and diplomatic signals. The US deploys troops across the region, maintains bases and holds joint military exercises to demonstrate to potential adversaries that its interests are utterly aligned with those of its allies.

The equation changed when Kim demonstrated he could strike an American city. It is harder to convince the world that you are willing to sacrifice your own on behalf of your ally. Now, due to North Korea's new weapons, the US will share in the true cost of any new Korean war.

In the game of nuclear deterrence, this effect is known as "decoupling", and Kim's long-term goal has been to decouple the US from its Asian allies. To what extent he has succeeded will become apparent over the coming months and years, and it is a key question to strategists in the region.

The most hopeful argue that Kim is a rational actor and there is no cause to believe that with his increased strategic power he will begin to menace his neighbours. Others fear that his behaviour to date - which includes the murder of his brother with a chemical agent in a crowded foreign airport - suggests he may harbour malign and unpredictable intentions.

Either way, there are already signs of growing instability.

The new world order

US President Donald Trump meets his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in at the White House in June.

US President Donald Trump meets his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in at the White House in June.Credit: New York Times

If the US accepts North Korea as a nuclear power - officially or tacitly - Washington will severely weaken its alliances with Seoul and Tokyo, upending the order of the hemisphere. This is not just an academic view. A senior Japanese defence official told Fairfax Media that Kim's objective was precisely to "break the ties between the US and Japan and South Korea".

"If the US recognises North Korea as a nuclear power, then Japan and South Korea can no longer rely on the US for a nuclear deterrent," the official said, making it clear he was expressing a personal opinion while adding that it was a view widely shared by other people.

Most senior observers in Japan, where Fairfax Media received a series of high-level briefings this week, do not expect this outcome. There is a widespread understanding, though, that the simple fact of Kim's new technology will have its own effect.

"Although I don't want to admit that North Korea is a nuclear weapon state … We will have to live with a nuclear North Korea for a while," a former high-ranking Japanese defence official told Fairfax Media. "But that does not mean North Korean nuclear status should be admitted."

The official advocated more pressure and no dialogue, saying that "a long-term policy of new containment of North Korea is necessary".

He questioned the long-term viability of the nuclear umbrella. "That's what the allies of the US, Japan and South Korea, have to think about.

"It is not 100 per cent sure, so we have to fill the gap. That's where the Japanese defence build-up must come in."

In South Korea, Defence Minister Song Young-moo said he had spoken to his US counterpart Jim Mattis about returning US tactical nuclear weapons, withdrawn from the peninsula in 1991. Song said it was "an alternative worth a full review", although it was swiftly rejected by South Korean President Moon Jae-in's office.

In Japan, former defence minister Shigeru Ishiba on Thursday questioned whether it was really right to say Japan, also without nuclear weapons, would be protected by the US nuclear umbrella.

He added another caveat: nuclear deterrence is supposed to create stability, as it did during the Cold War. But the US and its allies don't know the Kim regime like they knew the Soviets. "In the Cold War days, the US side shared a major part of the Soviet strategy. That's why MAD [mutually assured destruction] worked. But we are not so sure about the North Korean strategy."

Many analysts are also concerned that the North, feeling safe under its own nuclear deterrence, might feel emboldened to carry out lower-level, regular harassing and bullying tactics against the South.

How does a nuclear North Korea fit in to the world?

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned North Korea would not abandon its weapons program.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned North Korea would not abandon its weapons program.Credit: AP

With the rest of the world still insisting that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons, Russian President Vladimir Putin observed that even if struck by crippling sanctions, North Koreans would rather "eat grass" than give up their nukes.

It is hard to find an analyst who disagrees with him. Instead there is a growing sense that the world might have to accept North Korea's weapons progress to date in return for concessions.

Putin has tactically backed the Chinese "freeze for freeze" proposal, which calls for the US and South Korea to suspend large military drills on the Korean Peninsula in exchange for North Korea freezing its missile and nuclear program, in the hope this could draw Kim back to the negotiating table.

China argues that if North Korea's security concerns are eased, it may be persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons.

At a defence forum in Seoul, Alexander Nikitin, from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, elaborated on the Russian thinking, arguing "verifiable arms control" talks were a more realistic prospect than North Korea's denuclearisation.

Even Western commentators, dismayed by the rapid progress of North Korea's missile program in spite of heavy rhetoric and threats from the Trump White House, have started to conclude that the world may have to accept North Korea as a nuclear state.

The consequences are already being debated in China, South Korea and Japan, even if acceptance of this new reality remains officially unpalatable.

Shen Dingli, vice-dean of the Institute of International Affairs at Fudan University in Shanghai, says the world will become more unstable if North Korea isn't accepted as a nuclear state.

"Politically, China will not accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons power, as it doesn't accept Israel, India and Pakistan as nuclear weapons states. Realistically, all of the world, including China, have accepted Israel, India and Pakistan as factual nuclear weapons states," he says. "In this line, all of the world, including China, has to accept North Korea as a factual nuclear weapons state."

The US waived sanctions against Pakistan and India, which tested nuclear weapons and refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in 2001. The treaty allows only the US, Russia, China, Britain and France to have nuclear weapons.

Gareth Evans, Australian National University chancellor and former co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, said it would be "nightmarishly difficult to completely wind back the clock now and achieve total denuclearisation" of North Korea.

He believes the best hope is for cool heads - of which there are few - to negotiate a freeze. "Nobody wants to formally acknowledge that North Korea is now a nuclear power. But that is the new reality, and the only way of dealing with it is through a strategy of containment, deterrence – and keeping the door open for negotiation," he said.

A glimpse of a reshaped global order that accepted North Korea was outlined by South Korean president Moon in Vladivostok on Thursday. After meeting with Putin, he called for the creation of a North Asian supergrid, to become the world's largest energy community, linking South Korea and Russia and potentially drawing in North Korea.

US leadership runs aground

President Xi Jinping of China, the only nation that has the power to rein in North Korea.

President Xi Jinping of China, the only nation that has the power to rein in North Korea.Credit: AP

Moon's flirtation with Putin reflected not only the reality of changing power relationships in Asia, but US fecklessness in response.

In recent weeks, as this crisis boiled away, Trump issued declarations via Twitter that as often as not contradicted those from the Pentagon and the weakened US State Department. The US Navy's Pacific fleet made headlines throughout the region for a series of accidents that led to an "operational pause" of its warships' movements.

As the crisis intensified, Trump unleashed trade threats against his ally, South Korea, and the only nation that has the power to rein in North Korea, China, which could obliterate the regime if it cut off energy supplies for long enough.

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The display of diplomatic incompetence stunned and angered senior South Korean officials, said Jean Lee, a veteran foreign correspondent and fellow of the Wilson Centre based in Seoul.

South Koreans, she said, were used to provocations from the North. The difference between this crisis and those of past has not been the menacing messages emanating from Pyongyang but the confounding signals from DC.

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