Global Courant 2023-04-26 12:00:14
WASHINGTON — In the four years since President Donald J. Trump’s leader-to-leader diplomacy with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un collapsed after a failed meeting in Hanoi, the North’s arsenal of nuclear weapons has expanded so rapidly that US and South Korean officials admit they have stopped trying to keep an accurate count.
North Korea’s missile tests are so frequent that they elicit more shrugs than major headlines in Seoul.
So when President Biden welcomes South Korea President Yoon Suk Yeol to the White House on Wednesday, only the second state visit of Mr Biden’s presidency, there will be few pretenses that disarming North Korea remains a plausible goal.
Instead, US officials say, Mr Biden’s most vibrant commitment to Mr Yoon will center on what arms control experts call “comprehensive deterrence,” renewing a renewed vow that America’s nuclear arsenal, if necessary, will be used to deter or respond to a North American attack. Korean nuclear attack on the south.
The emphasis on deterrence is a striking admission that all other attempts over the past three decades to contain Pyongyang’s nuclear program, including diplomatic persuasion, crushing sanctions and occasional pledges of development aid, have all failed. It also aims to quell growing calls in South Korea for its own independent arsenal, on the very remote chance that North Korea would make the suicidal decision to use a nuclear weapon.
The North’s armory won’t be the only topic of conversation during Mr. Yoon’s visit. He and Mr. Biden will also celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance between their countries, pledges for more South Korean investment in semiconductor manufacturing and plans to strengthen Seoul’s ever-charged relationship with Japan.
But North Korea’s rapid expansion of capabilities is a subject of ongoing mutual concern for both countries. At a recent security conference held by the Harvard Korea Project, several experts said they believed Mr Kim’s goal was to approach the size of Britain’s and France’s arsenals, which each contain 200 to 300 weapons.
Mr. Biden and Mr. Yoon are expected to raise the possibility of pursuing a diplomatic solution to what a succession of governments have called the “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.” But the North, government officials say, has declined to respond to a series of public and private messages from Mr Biden and his aides.
And what now seems irreversible is North Korea’s entrenched and sophisticated program.
With China expanding its arsenal to 1,500 weapons by 2035, according to Pentagon estimates, and Russia threatening to use tactical weapons in Ukraine, “this is not an outside environment where it’s easy to have a conversation with North Korea,” said Victor Cha. , a professor at Georgetown University who led policy to the north during the George W. Bush administration. “They look around their neighborhood and say, ‘I don’t think so.'”
Mr Trump vowed “fire and fury like the world has never seen” as North Korea greeted his presidency with missile launches; he eventually tried the innovative approach of direct diplomacy with Mr. Kim. He emerged at one point predicting that Mr. Kim would begin disarming within six months and at another, he stated that the North was “no longer a nuclear threat”. The arsenal just kept growing.
North Korean foreign minister Choe Son-hui on Friday reiterated a line her government has often expressed in recent months, saying North Korea’s status “as a world-class nuclear power is final and irreversible.”
Few experts believe that the shift in rhetoric or the threats of first strikes indicate a greater willingness by the North to use nuclear weapons. The reaction would be devastating. But the days when US officials thought the armory was a bargaining chip, something to trade for trade deals, or for the series of hotels Trump said America would help build on North Korean beaches, are over.
There was a mistaken belief, said Joseph S. Nye, who oversaw one of North Korea’s first intelligence estimates for the US government, “that they would try to cash in their chips and get something” for the nuclear weapons. But instead of developing the country, he said at the Harvard conference, the North’s overriding goal was “to preserve the dynasty,” and that meant holding on to its arsenal and expanding it.
North Korea’s new confidence in its arsenal expansion, US officials said in interviews, is partly explained by a change in its relationship with China. Previously, the United States worked with Beijing, the supplier of critical energy and trade to the north, to keep the country in check. In the mid-2000s, the Chinese even hosted the so-called Six-Party Talks — North Korea, along with Japan, Russia, the United States, and South Korea — to solve the nuclear problem. When Pyongyang conducted nuclear tests, Beijing often voted for sanctions and imposed a few.
Rather than seeing North Korea as an unruly, angry neighbor, China has now welcomed it, along with Russia and Iran, as part of what White House officials call a coalition of aggrieved. While Chinese officials presumably fear that North Korea’s nuclear tests could go awry and create a radioactive cloud, it seems perfectly happy that the North is troubling the United States and its allies with regular missile tests.
Pyongyang’s most recent tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles — including one powered by solid fuel, allowing it to quickly roll out of hiding and launch — suggest that North Korea can now almost certainly reach US territory, even though its ability to hit specific targets to get imprecise. . And over the past year, the North has enshrined its nuclear capability in its laws and started talking about its first-strike capabilities, rather than viewing its arsenal as purely defensive.
On March 27, North Korea also released photos of Mr. Kim inspecting Hwasan-31, a small standardized warhead kit that can be mounted on his various nuclear missiles and drones.
If the module was genuine, the photos indicate that the North is flaunting its ability to mass-produce standardized warheads, said Hong Min, an expert on North Korean weapons at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul. Mr Kim has also called for mass production of nuclear warheads for an “exponential” increase in the country’s nuclear arsenal. Last month, he ordered his government to ramp up production of nuclear material for nuclear weapons.
South Korean officials said some of the North’s claims, such as the purported capabilities of its underwater drones and supersonic missiles, were exaggerated. The response in Washington and Seoul has been to promise to strengthen their alliance – made easier by the fact that Mr. Yoon has a much more aggressive view on how to deal with the North than his predecessor, Moon Jae-in, whom Mr. Jae-in visited. Biden in May 2021.
So the two leaders are expected to speak publicly at length about “expanded deterrence,” with Mr Biden offering more regular, visible visits by nuclear-armed submarines and aircraft to South Korea, in support of the recently restored and expanded joint military exercises. (The exercises were variously suspended and scaled down under Mr. Trump.)
Kim Tae-hyo, a deputy national security adviser to Mr Yoon, said a key agenda item at the summit was how to build South Korean confidence in Washington’s commitment to protect its ally with its nuclear umbrella. But Korean officials say it depends more on their confidence in the incumbent US president — and whether Washington, amid a North Korean attack on the south with tactical nuclear weapons, would be willing to risk a nuclear strike. to fight.
Mr Biden’s words at a press conference on Wednesday will be picked apart for what they may or may not say about his determination to take the risks of a nuclear engagement.
A new cyber initiative will also be announced: the North is financing the nuclear program with cryptocurrency theft and attacks on central bank reserves, and the South, though rarely talking about it, has developed a proficient offensive cybercorps loosely based on the US Cyber. Command.
Outsiders will also look for signs of temporary or permanent damage from the leaks of Pentagon and CIA documents in recent weeks, which made it clear that the United States listened to South Korean national security officials as they debated whether or not to send of artillery shells to Ukraine. The revelation was deeply embarrassing for Mr. Yoon, as it suggested a lack of confidence in his greatest ally.
But officials say they believe Mr. Yoon will pass, honoring cultural ties to the United States and South Korean companies’ booming investment in semiconductor factories.
There is one thing South Korean officials say they will not ask for: a return of US tactical nuclear weapons to their country. They were withdrawn in 1991.
Mr. Yoon’s assistants say they don’t want them back.
David E. Sanger reported from Seoul and Washington. Choe Sang-Hun reported from Seoul.
