Opinion: With all eyes on Iran, North Korea could get away with nuclear murder

LONDON, United Kingdom — The American news outlets have trouble focusing on more than one serious issue at a time. And in these turbulent times, they have more than one to choose from: Iran, Afghanistan, health insurance, the continuing banking crisis, the economy, the persistent threat of terrorism and on and on.

Right now, Iran is near the top of the news agenda. Crucial talks are set for Thursday in Geneva between the Obama administration and other world powers set on preventing Tehran from developing nuclear warheads.

But by concentrating on the Iranian threat, the media, and perhaps our government as well, may be failing to pay enough attention to a threat that is more imminent and potentially more dangerous than Iran’s uranium enrichment and missile programs.

North Korea already has the bomb, and is presumably more advanced than Iran in the techniques of making nuclear warheads. It is also testing missile systems and is the major supplier of missile technology to Iran. Indeed, North Korea is a major proliferator of the technologies that are the key to becoming a nuclear weapons country. Its past clients have included Libya and Syria. So why is North Korea being treated as a less urgent problem than Iran? The short answer — often given by experts working on the problem of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons — is that Iran is not yet a nuclear power, so there is still time to stop it from becoming one. That’s true, but it is no reason to neglect the much more imminent and unpredictable North Korean threat.

The real reason why less attention is being paid to the North Korean threat may be that most Western experts simply don’t know what to do about it. A debate has now begun within the world of think tanks and foreign policy wonks. It goes something like this:

Traditional thinking says that carrot and stick negotiations — the approach that the Obama administration is using with Iran — are the best way to deal with the North Korean dictatorship. That was the approach used by the Clinton and Bush administrations. But so far it has not worked.

The North Korean regime makes promises to stop its nuclear weapons program in return for international aid, and then reneges on its promises. Then it does the same thing all over again. Former President Bill Clinton once remarked at a private gathering in Davos, Switzerland, that “North Korea’s nukes are the only crop they have to sell.” They keep selling the same goods, and the West keeps paying for them in aid that keeps a nasty regime in power.

Then-President George W. Bush even announced last year that he would take North Korea off the bad boys list of states that sponsor terrorism. And the new Obama administration offered a symbolic outstretched hand to both North Korea and Iran.

But the end result has been that the despotic North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, has now torn up previous agreements with the international community, conducted new nuclear and missile tests and abandoned the six-party talks that have been the main forum for negotiating with the secretive regime. Kim suffered a stroke last year. Many experts believe his sudden about face may reflect an internal struggle over who is to succeed him if he dies or loses his grip on power.

This week, Ja Song Nam, the North Korean ambassador to Britain, gave an unusual talk to a London think tank on the topic of his country’s nuclear weapons program. I was anxious to hear what he had to say, but he would only agree to speak on the condition that no one in the audience ask him about the problems of the succession to the ailing Kim.

The ambassador had a simple message. North Korea rejects the six-party talks and will not give up its nuclear weapons unless the United States recognizes the country, stops “threatening” it with nuclear weapons and removes all obstacles to normal economic and political relations.

But some foreign policy experts who have long favored the carrot and stick approach now think it’s time to get really tough with North Korea. Few would advocate military action against an unpredictable regime that has the bomb, but some experts, including former State Department official Mark Fitzpatrick, think North Korea should be squeezed with economic sanctions until it yells uncle, or collapses. Fitzpatrick suggests the latter might be the most desirable outcome. Really tough sanctions would only work if China — which supplies much of North Korea’s food and energy needs — agrees. But China fears chaos and a flood of refugees across its border if the North Korean regime were to implode. Fitzpatrick believes that would be better in the long run than allowing the paranoid regime in the North to threaten the world with nuclear-tipped long-range missiles.

On the other side of the debate, there are experts who advocate letting North Korea keep its nuclear security blanket, and who believe the best way to tame the Stalinist regime is to try confidence-building measures and recognize unconditionally the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

What is the right approach to North Korea? There are no easy answers. Western intelligence on North Korea is surprisingly skimpy. When American spy satellites spot a North Korean missile on the launch pad, no one back in the Pentagon can be dead sure what payload it will be carrying. That’s alarming.

So the discussions over what to do about North Korea are not a purely academic matter. It is time for this debate to break out of the rarified circle of policy wonks and into the mainstream. The mistaken assumptions that helped the Bush administration sell the invasion of Iraq may have made the American intelligence community too timid in their assessments of current and potential nuclear threats.

As former weapons inspector David Albright recently said: “Governments have a responsibility to warn their publics better about what is their evidence on nuclear weaponization.” Questions about the North Korean threat need to be aired in the mainstream media. Congress needs to weigh in, and the public should have their say. It’s too important to be left to wonks and generals.