Unending nuclear threat

By Donald Kirk

In the rarefied atmosphere of luxury hotel meeting rooms, the horrors of nuclear warfare seem like a distant apparition, a mirage on a shimmering horizon.

You don’t exactly worry about the holocaust while dining out on gourmet menus during and after sessions on ``our nuclear future,” sipping endless cups of weak coffee and nibbling on cookies during 15-minute breaks between panel discussions or buttonholing dark-suited, white-shirted ``experts” for their view of those contentious issues that think-tankers love to analyze to death.

That’s how it was this week at a ``plenum” (I never really have grasped what that word means, what’s the difference between a plenum and a plain old conference) sponsored by the Asan Institute. The tone was conservative, and the message was clear. North Korea remains as always public enemy number one, and big brother China goes along as its willing collaborator in a contest of nerves to which no good end is in sight.

For an event in which no effort was spared for luminaries ranging from retired American and Korean military officers to professors to diplomats to the chief Washington correspondent of the New York Times, nothing was left to chance.

They all owed a debt of gratitude to the late Chung Ju-yung, founder of the Hyundai empire. His sixth son Chung Mong-joon, main shareholder of Hyundai Heavy Industries, long-serving National Assembly member, Korean football kingpin and sometime presidential aspirant, is the Asan Institute’s principal benefactor. Asan, of course, is the name of the village near the North Korean east coast, north of the port of Wonsan, that Chung Ju-yung fled at the age of 18 to seek his fortune in Seoul.

In this congregation of influential people, types whose names pop up with incredible regularity on op-ed pages and the kind of quotes that editors demand for purposes of verisimilitude in articles about six-party talks, certifiable truths about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions were the coin of the realm.

Gary Samore, White House nuclear adviser, stole the show on the first day with the revelation that a U.S. Navy destroyer had intercepted a North Korean vessel as it churned the waters southward along the China coast, bound for the Straits of Malacca and ultimately, he surmised, Burma, aka Myanmar.

Actually, Yonhap had the story first, on Sunday, before the conference had opened, but the attribution was vague and the foreign media missed it until Sanger put out a detailed version, presumably from Samore. While that story was going around, Samore was happy to spill out details, with on-the-record quotes, in between conference sessions. The saga of a North Korean vessel reversing course and fleeing home under U.S. military pressure added a high note to a conference in which the dominant theme was one of incipient failure.

Inside the main conference hall, there was Samore saying, on the final night, that ``the North Korean leadership has been convinced for a long-time that nuclear weapons are essential for survival.” There would, he said, ``never be peace on the Korean peninsula as long as they have nuclear weapons.”

Not too many people would argue with any of that, but the essential issue of whether or not the Americans would bring nuclear weapons back to South Korea did need a little clarification. For the benefit of those who think a nuclear warhead is the equivalent of a magic bullet, Samore was clear. ``Tactical nuclear weapons don’t serve any military capability,” he said. Their ``only value” was ``assurance” ― ``symbolism.”

Nor would either China or Russia be happy to see the Americans deploying nukes for the first time since George H.W. Bush, that is the first President Bush, withdrew them from South Korea in the prelude to the conclusion by South and North Korea near the end of 1991 of their “joint declaration on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.”

It seemed appropriate that the conference should have been held nearly two decades after North and South Korean negotiators worked out that declaration, a milestone event whose significance in hindsight is how absurd it was to think the North Koreans would honor it.

An undercurrent of the conference was whether South Korea should join the nuclear club. If the North can have them, why not us? Cheon Seong-hwan of the Korea Institute of National Unification put the case bluntly. ``They have nuclear weapons, and we do not have them,” he said. ``This is a huge flaw.”

The word ``asymmetric” was a favorite. Basically, it means one side has a whole lot more of something than the other side. ``Why this asymmetric balance,” asked Cheon. In the audience, Cho Sung-min, countered, ``If South Korea has nuclear weapons, it will probably give him (Kim Jong-il) more justification to build up nuclear weapons.”

No one imagined the Dear Leader would make good on any deal. ``We have to assume they have a weapon they can deliver,” said Burwell B. Bell, who retired three years ago as general and commander of U.S. forces in Korea. “The North continues unimpeded in obtaining nuclear weapons capability.”

In an atmosphere of wining and dining, good cheer was infectious. The specter of nuclear war was too unreal. Anyway, said Hahm Chai-bong, president of the Asan Institute and genial host, ``there might not be an end, there might not be a resolution.” By now, ``the realization is beginning to sink in,” he said. ``We have to live with a nuclear North Korea.” But for how long before the good times end? After the partying was over, nobody had a clue.

Donald Kirk has written a number of books on Vietnam as well as Korea, most recently ``Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine.” He can be reached at kirkdon@yahoo.com.