Mick Hartley

Somehow this fails to strike terror:

North Korea already has the capacity to launch a nuclear missile strike against Seoul and Tokyo, even before the long-range rocket test that it is promising in the next few days, an international think-tank has reported.

According to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, foreign intelligence agencies believe that the North has successfully miniaturised nuclear warheads to the extent that they can be mounted on tried and tested medium-range Nodong missiles. Such a development would seriously alter the balance of power between North Korea’s large but poorly equipped military and the South Korean and US forces ranged against it.

It also suggests that the intense international anxiety being expressed about the imminent ballistic rocket test is misplaced. The Taepodong 2, which potentially has the range to strike Alaska or Hawaii, is in its earliest stages of development — and in any case appears to be the vehicle for a space satellite rather than a warhead.

Pyongyang’s inventory of short-range and medium-range road-mobile ballistic missiles poses a more imminent threat,” says the ICG report. “Although North Korea has not demonstrated the capability to assemble a miniaturised nuclear bomb for delivery with a ballistic missile, intelligence sources believe it has recently assembled and deployed nuclear weapons for the Nodong.”

Western military planners have long calculated that North Korea could never win an all out war with the US and South Korea — the only question is how much damage it could inflict before aerial bombing and land invasion disabled its military machine. With 13,000 artillery pieces buried close to the border between the two Koreas, and chemical and biological warheads, it was always understood that the North could inflict economically devastating conventional damage on the South Korean capital, Seoul.

If the new report is correct then North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, may have the potential to kill millions of people in Japan, as well as the South, and to lay waste to US bases and airfields in both countries.

But why on earth would he want to? Whatever we've learnt about the Dear Leader, we know at least that he's not insane. The way it works: he blusters, issues threats, calls everyone names, but ultimately what it's all about is the survival of his regime. It's blackmail, basically: the South Koreans and the West have paid him off for years with the aid that's managed to prop up his basket-case of an economy and prevent it from total collapse, in return for….well, ostensibly for not developing more nuclear weapons, or reigning in the aggression, but in fact for nothing, as Kim never keeps his side of the bargain. Now the South Koreans, under the new leadership of Lee Myung-bak, has dropped the Sunshine Policy in favour of a more hardline approach, and Kim's only choice is to up the bluster level; whether it's threatening to fire missiles, kidnapping US journalists, or detaining South Koreans at the Kaesong industrial complex (and see here). One thing he's not going to do, though, is launch an all-out war on the rest of the world.

An article like this, building up the image of a burgeoning military super-power, will delight Kim: more bargaining muscle.

Of course, the possibility of the North Koreans selling the technology on to any interested third party is a different matter….

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