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(回答先: 「北朝鮮、核起爆実験をすでに実施」 投稿者 中央日報 日時 2002 年 11 月 18 日 09:53:21)
Up to the Same Old Tricks
The Korean peninsula faces its second nuclear crisis in less than a
decade as evidence surfaces that the North has been continuing its
weapons programme in areas such as Kusong. But, while
Pyongyang remains unpredictable, there is room for guarded
optimism
By John Larkin/SEOUL
Issue cover-dated November 21, 2002
THE SMALL CITY of Kusong in the mountains north
of Pyongyang is secretive even by North Korea's
obsessive standards. A complex on its outskirts has
long been a suspected testing ground for detonators
needed for atomic bombs and compelling new
evidence, including a map of the facility seen by the
REVIEW, adds weight to these fears. The tests,
according to information smuggled from North Korea,
are conducted deep inside two mine shafts to elude
snooping satellites. Machine-gun nests guard key
facilities. All to maintain the fiction that the North
abandoned its nuclear plans as promised.
Kusong and facilities like it throughout North Korea
are key reasons why the Korean peninsula is facing
its second nuclear crisis in less than 10 years.
Pyongyang has used secret facilities to pursue a
nuclear programme, even after accepting two
proliferation-resistant reactors in return for
promising to quit its atomic ambitions. That deal,
known as the Agreed Framework, is on the brink of
collapse following Pyongyang's confession in early
October to enriching uranium as bomb fuel.
The pact was forged in 1994 after North Korea
rejected international pressure to shut down a
reactor suspected of producing weapons-grade
plutonium. The peninsula was led to the brink of war.
Another showdown could ensue if the North reacts to
any nullifying of the Agreed Framework by pushing
ahead with plutonium and uranium-fuelled nuclear
bombs.
The first signs of imminent crisis are emerging. The
Korea Energy Development Organization (KEDO),
which was set up to oversee construction of the
promised reactors, will soon decide whether or not
to continue shipments of oil to North Korea. The oil
is used to provide energy until the reactors are built.
But even if the shipments go ahead, a
Republican-controlled United States Congress is
unlikely to approve next year's deliveries. That would
effectively doom the Agreed Framework.
"It's all about whether the U.S. will pay for the heavy
fuel oil and I think it's highly doubtful," says Scott
Snyder, the Asia Society's representative in Seoul.
"At the moment, I would be absolutely shocked if
KEDO ended up building two reactors in North Korea."
There is, however, room for guarded optimism as the
international community has more leverage and unity
than it did eight years ago. The U.S. has mounted a
diplomatic offensive to isolate Pyongyang, and it
may just work.
In 1994, North Korean Leader Kim Jong Il was helped
by China's refusal to support economic sanctions as
punishment for his nuclear shenanigans, paving the
way for the generous deal. This time around, China
might see its interests lying more with the U.S.,
whose economic muscle is crucial to the future of
its own economy.
Also, the new leaders emerging from China's 16th
Communist Party Congress in November will contain
cadres who did not stand shoulder-to-shoulder with
Kim's father, North Korean founder Kim Il Sung,
during the 1950-53 Korean War. "If South Korea stops
giving assistance to the North, I don't think China
will come out all the way to fill the gap," says
former South Korean Foreign Minister Han Seung Joo.
South Korea will be key. Under President Kim Dae
Jung it has assiduously courted North Korea with
hard currency and aid. But a presidential election in
mid-December could return a conservative leader
who opposes such assistance if Pyongyang doesn't
reciprocate with political concessions. Conservative
opposition leader Lee Hoi Chang, who is leading
opinion polls, would be more willing to join the U.S.
in isolating the North. "The Bush administration will
hold tight until Lee rides to the rescue," says Marcus
Noland of the Institute for International Economics
in Washington. "Nothing much will happen until after
the election."
Japan, the third player in Washington's diplomatic
front, is also weary of Pyongyang's backsliding and
may yet be convinced of the value of containment.
The initial euphoria over Kim Jong Il's return of five
Japanese nationals kidnapped by his agents in the
1970s has soured amid anger over the deaths of at
least eight other abductees. Normalization talks
promising multibillion-dollar payments from Japan
as settlement for its 1910-45 colonial occupation of
the peninsula have all but derailed amid threats by
the North to resume missile tests. "Public opinion in
Japan is so against the North right now that it's
almost impossible for the government to give it any
money," says Robert Fouser, a Korea expert at Kyoto
University.
A LOT TO LOSE
On paper, North Korea has a lot to lose as well. It is
now dependent economically on the outside world to
a much greater degree than it was a decade ago. Kim
Jong Il relies on hard currency from trade,
particularly with South Korea, to prop up what's left
of the national economy and to keep crucial backers,
like the army and elite bureaucrats, well fed.
Russia and China, which as North Korea's key Cold
War allies provided massive subsidies to its
command economy, now have more affinity with the
global money centres of New York and London than
with Pyongyang. Another round of nuclear
brinkmanship could end North Korea's burgeoning
relationship with Europe, and dash any short-term
hope of obtaining loans from international financial
institutions to rebuild its industrial infrastructure.
"The idea that the threats apply to us and not North
Korea is just nutty," says Henry Sokolski, executive
director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education
Centre in Washington and an advocate of containment.
"North Korea has a hell of a lot to lose."
The big question is whether Pyongyang feels it can
afford to bargain away its most potent negotiating
card. Pyongyang's greatest fear is of being
defensively impotent and poverty-stricken in a
region filled with industrial and military
powerhouses. The question then becomes whether
Pyongyang would react to being contained by lashing
out, or suing for peace.
On this point, Kusong does not inspire much hope. The
facility is located just 30 kilometres northwest of
Yongbyon, where a Soviet-era reactor was shut down
under the 1994 pact. According to details of the
Kusong facility's layout smuggled out of the North
and obtained by the REVIEW in South Korea,
machine-gun emplacements overlook entrances to
key facilities. The site is guarded by 2,500 soldiers,
some of whom are deployed as spy-hunting teams in
nearby mountains, according to information from
people who have seen the facility.
News broke in 1998 that high-explosive tests needed
to produce detonators for nuclear weapons had been
conducted at two sites located deep underground at
Kusong. South Korean newspapers have reported that,
in late 1997, a North Korean soldier handed over
sachets containing topsoil from the area to a South
Korean intelligence agent posing as a businessman.
The soil was found to contain radioactive particles
typical of residue from a full-scale high-explosive
test using fissile material. Parts needed for the
tests are manufactured at factories located just
south of the test sites.
Kusong should help prove one truism: North Korea
appears unwilling to halt its march toward
nuclear-power status so long as it meets flimsy
resistance from the international community. "From
a North Korean perspective it's entirely
understandable why pursuit of the nuclear option
would be a win-win situation," says the Asia
Society's Snyder. "If they don't get caught they have
nuclear capability. And if they do get caught they can
bargain it away."
The North's record on nukes and its tactics in the
current stand-off support that argument. There are
more than 20 nuclear facilities inside North Korea,
according to the Federation of American Scientists,
including nuclear fuel plants and reactors, uranium
mines and refinery plants, and reprocessing and
research sites.
Those, like Kusong, which are suspected of being
used to help in bomb-building, are in violation of the
international treaty on the nonproliferation of
nuclear weapons, which Pyongyang has signed. The
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency believes North Korea
may have enough weapons-grade plutonium for two
nuclear devices, an estimate backed by a North
Korean army colonel who defected to South Korea in
the mid-1990s.
North Korea's unexpected confession to an
enriched-uranium programme also smacks of a return
to the brinkmanship that has served it so well in the
past. The 1994 crisis was ignited in part by North
Korea's declaration in 1992 that it had separated
plutonium. That led to the maddening back-and-forth
on inspections that resulted in the Agreed
Framework.
READY TO GAMBLE
The latest admission, made on October 4 by North
Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju in a
meeting with U.S. emissary James Kelly, suggests
Pyongyang is ready to gamble that the world will pay
it off once again. Experts say North Korea is not in
the habit of owning up to bad behaviour unless it
calculates that it suits its interests to do so. "We're
right back at square one," says Snyder. "A level of
intrusiveness is now required [for inspections], and
it's not clear if North Korea feels it can live with
that."
War is an outcome that, hopefully, neither side
wants. In an ideal world, both Pyongyang and
Washington would bend. North Korea would disarm,
and in return would get the normalized relations
with the U.S. for which it has campaigned so hard.
The economic benefits would flow, and Kim Jong Il
could begin the process of rehabilitating his
shattered economy.
But, as the troubles of the Agreed Framework and
sites like Kusong show, the world according to Kim
is far from ideal. Having all but destroyed what
remains of the trust he built with the outside world,
it's now his turn to bend.
http://www.feer.com/articles/2002/0211_21/p016region.html
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