If the addition of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (ie DPRK or North Korea) to the United States’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism on January 20, 1988, had somehow failed to capture the attention of the general public, surely that country’s significance and threat was emblazoned on their collective consciousness on January 29, 2002 when President George W. Bush elevated the rogue state to the status of Iraq and Iran in his State of the Union Address, labeling the three as the “Axis of Evil.” Yet, remarkably, whereas the international community had clear and convincing evidence of North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear power dating back to the 1960s, nuclear weapons development beginning in the 1980s, the manufacture of, and training with, chemical weapons in the 1990s, and a rudimentary biological weapons program by the 2000s, the US-led coalition targeted Iraq first and most forcibly to counter that axis. One of the unfortunate effects of that decision is that North Korea now periodically rattles its saber to extort concessions within the context of the Six Party talks (which include South Korea , Japan , China , Russia , and the US).
Often North Korea’s saber rattling is timed to capitalize on American political missteps or when the US is otherwise diplomatically vulnerable. North Korea is already diplomatically and economically isolated due to aggressive military and diplomatic tactics, rejection of most regional and global norms and expectations, and blind adherence to the failed Communist economic model. As such, North Korea possesses little to entice international attention and, thus, has resorted to the threat of expanding its nuclear program as well as tests of increasingly sophisticated missiles to exact technical and humanitarian assistance to prop up the failing regime. With the loss of the international barter system that North Korea relied upon during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which now rejects communism, and China, which has significantly liberalized its economy, the DPRK has resorted to drug trafficking, counterfeiting western currency, and selling weapons and technology to raise money for basic necessities, including food, technology, infrastructure, and to prop up its massive military.
Although the US states that all its options are open should North Korea test its Taep’o-dong 2 (TD-2) Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), “all” is actually a restrictive term. There is little the US can do economically or diplomatically that it has not done already. Therefore, the likely response falls along a military response continuum ranging from doing nothing to unilateral surgical military strikes against missile and/or WMD sites. Within that range, fall bilateral or multilateral preemptive or retaliatory attacks or utilizing more sophisticated Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)-type technologies to shoot down a missile. US forces are forward-deployed in South Korea and on Navy assets in nearby waters for just such a purpose, but policy makers may neither wish to demonstrate that capacity nor reveal possible vulnerabilities of the program if the anti-long range missile system were to fail.
Careful review of North Korea’s missile infrastructure reveals that it is neither designed for either a sustained strategic testing or deployment program nor to launch its arsenal at once. For example, the Musudan-ri test facility is not supported by any major transportation infrastructure. There are neither railway connections nor paved roads leading to the facility. As a result, it would be very difficult to deliver supplies required to support a robust and continuous testing program of TD-2 test flights if assumptions are based on the US and Soviet missile program models, which typically require approximately 20 tests flights before the missile can be reliably deployed as a defensive deterrent. The Musudan-ri missile testing facility is, however, suited to support infrequent missile tests. Even without extensive testing, North Korea could deploy nuclear tipped TD-2 missiles either publicly as a deterrent or secretly as a retaliatory weapon and accept that some or even all of the missiles might not work. Nonetheless, North Korea gets plenty of leverage with the threat of a test and need not up the ante to gain the attention of the US, the remaining Six Party negotiating partners, or international community.
Perhaps learning the negotiation tactics the North Koreans employ (i.e., begin all discussions from extreme positions to gain currency by giving in on marginal issues) could benefit the overall productivity of regional talks. Since North Korea lacks resources to trade, it creates military capacities for leverage. Whereas both Iraq and Iran have oil and other resources that the West seeks in negotiations, within the Axis of Evil, North Korea has only its military capacity to trade away. While Iraq and Iran had active involvement supporting terrorist groups into the 2000s, North Korea has not been involved in sponsoring terrorist activity since 1987. However, the Kim Jong-il regime remains on the terrorism state sponsors list for its weapon development and proliferation efforts. In the context of formal negotiations, perhaps by toning down its “terrorism state sponsor” and “Axis of Evil” rhetoric, the US might entice North Korea to a more responsible position. Thus far, such inflammatory vocabulary has not helped the US public diplomacy efforts and, in fact, has only underlined its ineffectiveness regarding North Korea and highlighted its incongruence since in so many ways North Korea remains a greater threat than Iraq ever was.
