What Does North Korea Want?

“North Korea’s Weapons Quest” by Nicholas Eberstadt, in The National Interest (Summer 2005), 1615 L St., N.W., Ste. 1230, Washington, D.C. 20036.

Most discussions of how to deal with North Korea’s quest for nuclear weapons begin with the assumption that it’s largely a problem of diplomacy. Pyongyang’s aim is to obtain as much food, fuel, and other benefits as it can through international blackmail, this logic goes. Indeed, by crying nuclear, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has extracted more than $1 billion from the United States since 1995. Eberstadt, an American Enterprise Institute scholar, argues that the Communist North Koreans are playing a far more brutal game that many observers recognize.

From its founding in 1948, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has sought the reunification of the divided Korean peninsula under its own rule. For Pyong­yang, the Korean War never ended, and unconditional victory over South Korea remains its aim. With a deeply impoverished population of less than 23 million, North Korea for years has nonetheless fielded an army of more than a million soldiers, the fourth largest in the world. But as long as South Korea is allied with the United States, even this immense force cannot do the job.

“To deter, coerce and punish the United States, the DPRK must possess nuclear weaponry and the ballistic missiles capable of delivering them into the heart of the American enemy,” says Eberstadt. “This central strategic fact explains why North Korea has been assiduously pursuing its nuclear development and missile development programs for over 30 years—at terrible expense to its people’s livelihood, and despite all adverse repercussions on its international relations.”

The North Koreans already possess short-range Scud-style missiles and biochemical weapons that menace Seoul, and intermediate No Dong–type missiles capable of reaching Japan. They are now working on improved long-range missiles that will be capable of striking the U.S. mainland. Armed with nuclear warheads, such missiles, as former U.S. secretary of defense William J. Perry warned in 1999, might make Washington hesitate at a time of crisis on the Korean peninsula. And uncertainty in Seoul about what Washington would do might lead to a breakup of the U.S.–South Korean military alliance long before any actual strike. Nuclear weapons, in short, may be Pyongyang’s best hope for achieving its long-cherished objective of reunification.

No one should have been shocked—though many around the world apparently were—by Pyongyang’s claim in February that it possessed nuclear weapons and would not give them up “under any circumstances.” U.S. intelligence has long assumed that North Korea has one or two nuclear devices. To renounce such weapons would be tantamount to giving up its vision of reunification, Eberstadt argues, and with it the justification the regime has used since its founding for all the terrible sacrifices it has demanded of its people. Keeping the world safe from North Korea will be a more “difficult, expensive, and dangerous undertaking” than many people want to believe.