North Korea as a Nuclear Power and the Prospects of Its Control, by Hans-Joachim Schmidt

[This is a paper for German readers of CanKor. The author, Dr. Hans-Joachim Schmidt, is Senior Research Fellow at the Hessische Stiftung Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (HSFK) – also known in English as Peace Research Institute Frankfurt/M (PRIF) – and an expert on the Six-Party Talks. Dr. Schmidt is a good friend of CanKor and has previously submitted his work for our benefit. We thank the author for making the full German version of this paper available to CanKor. A brief summary of his latest paper follows here in both English and German. For the full version of the German paper, please follow this link: Nordkorea als Nuklearmacht - Chancen der Kontrolle, or by clicking on the image of the title page below. – CanKor]

North Korea as a Nuclear Power and the Prospects of Its Control

In the latest HSFK-Report, Hans-Joachim Schmidt evaluates the prospects of both cooperative and confrontational approaches against the North Korean nuclear weapons program.

Since its first nuclear test in 2006, a nuclear North Korea cannot be prevented anymore. Therefore, one major aim of international politics must be to delay, constrain and control the North Korean nuclear weapons program.

In HSFK-Report 1/2012, Nordkorea als Nuklearmacht – Chancen der Kontrolle (North Korea as a Nuclear Power and the Prospects of Its Control), Hans-Joachim Schmidt presents the multifaceted regional and global threats of both conventional and nuclear armament of North Korea and analyzes how the North Korean leadership can be urged to follow its international commitments.

He examines problems and prospects of cooperative and confrontational approaches by South Korea, the US, Japan, China and Russia who seek a political arrangement with North Korea regarding nuclear technology. Against the background of their different interests, the author develops specific propositions for a relaunch of the six-party talks following the presidential elections in the USA and South Korea.

An Insider’s Account of Obama’s North Korea Strategy, by Jeffrey A. Bader

[On 8 March 2012 the Brookings Institution held a launch for Jeffrey Bader's latest book, “Obama and China's Rise: an Insider's Account of America's Asia Strategy”. Bader is currently John C. Whitehead Senior Fellow in International Diplomacy, Foreign Policy at the John L. Thornton China Center in Washington DC. Previously, he was President Obama's Senior Director for Asia on the National Security Council for the first 3 years. The following is a selection of what the author had to say about US North Korea policy, which figures prominently in the book. This selection is taken from the 9 Mach 2012 edition of The Nelson Report. To hear the entire speech, please click March 8, 2012 book launch at Brookings. --CanKor]

Jeffrey A. Bader

(…) Instead of describing how seamlessly we executed plans drawn up in the first days, let me lay out what we did in reaction to events. As one of my colleagues said to me after a frustrating day dealing with demands for elaboration of a strategy, “there’s no such thing as strategy; there’s only tactics.” An exaggeration, to be sure, sort of like the observation that history is just one damned thing after another. But it frequently feels like the complete truth when you’re in the middle of the fray.

First, North Korea, since that was the issue that posed the most immediate dangers and consumed so much time, effort, and energy.

We came into office on something like automatic pilot, prepared to pick up implementation of Assistant Secretary Chris Hill’s plan for dismantling the Yongbyon plutonium reactor. But North Korea quickly eliminated that option. Intelligence in February 2009 showed North Korean plans to launch an ICBM, later announced to be a satellite launch. We could not proceed with implementation of dismantlement, and further international shipments of heavy fuel oil, under the shadow of an ICBM launch. So it’s fair to say that North Korea’s plan produced a very significant hardening of attitudes in the Obama national security team.

Books: “Witness To Transformation” by Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland

---

WITNESS TO TRANSFORMATION: Refugee Insights into North Korea, by Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland. Washington DC: Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2011. 182 pp. US$23.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-88132-438-9. This book review was written by CanKor Human Factor Editor Jack Kim.

---

In a former life as a management consultant, there was one lesson my superiors drilled into me: good decisions were all about data, data, and data. The more data you collected that was of superior quality, the more likely you were going to make a recommendation that would benefit the client.

Of course, that seems like common sense to most of us. But sometimes this simple lesson is lost upon those who make the “above-my-paygrade” decisions in life. Notwithstanding the limits of evidence-based decision-making, there are plenty of instances we can point out in the geopolitical sphere where catastrophic decisions were made with little regard to the data available. For example, Iraq comes to mind. The Rwandan massacre is another example of the world ignoring the evidence available.

But in many cases it is not only the qualitative analysis of data that is the issue – it is a lack of data in itself that prevents us from making decisions we should have otherwise made. When it comes to human rights, the world’s experience with the Cambodian genocide comes to mind. One of the reasons, especially early on, that the world stood idly by as at least two million Cambodians were murdered by Pol Pot and his cronies, was the Khmer Rouge’s ability to manage the information that came out of the country. In short, the atrocities themselves were hidden behind the curtain of control, sparking doubts of credulity in the outside world.

Of course, if there’s any a regime that has been as successful as the Khmer Rouge in controlling information flows, it is Pyongyang.

Books: “The Orphan Master’s Son”, reviewed by James Church

[James Church is the pseudonym of a former Western intelligence officer with intimate knowledge of the DPRK, who has authored four "Inspector O" mystery novels set in North Korea. There seems to be much excitement about a new novel by Adam Johnson that purports to be a “window into North Korea”. Adam Johnson is a creative writing teacher at Stanford University known mostly for short stories published by a wide range of magazines from Paris Review to Esquire. He has no North Korean experience whatsoever, except for one visit to Pyongyang as a tourist, but has reportedly spent the past six years working on what would become “The Orphan Master's Son”. His second novel, this book follows a fictional young man’s journey through fictional tunnels and torture chambers of a fictional North Korea. The main character is the son of a kidnapped singer and an influential master of a work camp for orphans. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do (John Doe?) comes to the attention of superiors in the state and rises in the ranks. He becomes a professional kidnapper and … well, there's violence, romance, and eventually heroism, as well as reconfirmation of all the cliches about the horrors of life in the DPRK. --CanKor]

---

THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON, by Adam Johnson. Random House Publishing Group, 2012. 464 pp. US$30.00 hardcover. ISBN 978-0-8129-9279-3 (0-8129-9279-2). This review by James Church was first published by our partner-site 38North under the title “The Orphan Master’s Son”: No Window.

---

The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson (Random House)

The range of topics for authors is endless, the techniques of story telling as diverse as the stars in the sky, limited only by what eyes can see—with or without reading glasses—and the public’s brain can comprehend.

All of this applies in spades to Adam Johnson’s new book, The Orphan Master’s Son. Many readers are blown away by its pyrotechnic, shape-shifting, picaresque (choose one or all) approach. It may, indeed, be the best book of the year. The reviews are stellar. All the same, there is a little-noted fly in this ointment, and it is this: For some reason someone decided somewhere along the line to sell the book as a window into North Korea.

That, decidedly, it is not.

If readers like the writing, like the plot twists, like the characters, then good on them. But the book is packaged, touted, and sold as “insight” into North Korea. Someone ought to stand up and gently point out that it isn’t. It might as well be me. I’ve written a few stories set in North Korea, and I’m happy for some company. Let me be clear. What I’m mainly concerned about here is the sales pitch, not the book itself.

We might begin with a simple fact. The author of the book admits he knows next to nothing about North Korea. That would be the end of the problem, except he doesn’t follow through and simply clam up on the subject in his public remarks. How could he set a book in North Korea and say nothing about the country in all the interviews and book tour appearances? That’s a dilemma, but solving it by letting North Korea be the sizzle for the book isn’t the answer. That may be the publicists’ idea. It may simply have been a decision that came out of thin air. No doubt, it wasn’t such a difficult decision to make. If no one knows anything about North Korea, if everyone is equally ignorant, then there is no danger, and certainly no harm, in taking everyone for a nice ride, is there?

Homefront and the DPRK bogeyman, a review by Michael Yee

[Homefront is a video game that posits a future history in which North Korea's new leader Kim Jong Un takes over parts of Asia following the death of his father Kim Jong Il. This review was submitted to CanKor by Michael Yee, who has worked in Pyongyang (2004-05) as a development aid staffer for Global Aid Network (www.globalaid.net). You can follow Michael on Steam at steamcommunity.com/id/michaelvyee or on Twitter at twitter.com/michaelvyee. --CanKor.]

Watching the political circus when the US government struggled to avoid defaulting in August 2011, made me reflect on the premise of the video game Homefront. In the fictional parallel universe of the game’s plot, US troops and military installations withdraw totally from Korea, Japan and other locations by 2017, returning home because of cutbacks. The current 2011 US budget discussions include proposals for cutbacks to the US military. Could the writers of Homefront have some type of crystal ball that allows them to peer into the future? How accurate could they be? I suppose time will tell, but I wanted to look at the game’s presentation and atmosphere as it attempts to create a DPRK empire in America.

Aidan Foster-Carterhas already written an extensive review of Homefront for 38North (See: Just a game? Homefront’s sick, stupid Korean invasion fantasy, March 2011). Since I enjoy playing video games, in particular FPS (First Person Shooters), and since I have also previously worked in the DPRK, I would like to add my own comments to those of Foster-Carter.

The Survival of North Korea by Suk Hi Kim

[From the Nautilus Policy Forum comes the following summary of a new book by Suk Hi Kim, Editor of North Korean Review. Entitled "The Survival of North Korea: Essays on Strategy, Economics, and International Relations", the book interweaves threads of argument and evidence to reflect the complicated nature of the international conflict focused on and in Korea and the urgency of ending the standoff on the Peninsula to avoid what could easily escalate into a catastrophic, nuclear war. This summary provides an overview of the engagement options that the USA and its allies should consider as part of a long-term strategy to complement short-term efforts to address North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities. --CanKor.]

The Longevity of North Korea and Solutions to its Nuclear Standoff

In the late 2000s, North Korea faced its third wave of possible state collapse, a phenomenon largely rooted in Kim Jong-il’s poor health, an impending power transition to his son, Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s ongoing food shortages, and its failed currency and economic reforms. This latest speculation of North Korean collapse came from an array of intelligence analysts, Asian and American scholars, think tank specialists, and workers in relief organizations. [1] The first wave that predicted North Korea’s collapse occurred in the 1980s, when the North Korean economy spiraled downward as the country’s chief allies–the Soviet Union and China–discontinued new loans and demanded repayment of outstanding debts. [2] The second wave came in the mid-1990s, when the great North Korean famine claimed the lives of between 200,000 and 3,000,000 people. Since the end of the Cold War, most communist countries either collapsed or carried out significant economic reform except for North Korea. Why should we assume that North Korea, one of the survivors that did not implement economic reform, will continue to be an exception to the pattern of history and survive?

IISS Strategic Dossier: NORTH KOREAN SECURITY CHALLENGES

The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) released a new dossier warning that DPRK provocations increase the risk of retaliation from South Korea. A press release issued by IISS summarizes the dossier as follows:

The latest IISS Strategic Dossier, North Korean Security Challenges: a net assessment, is the most systematic and thorough public analysis of the range of threats emanating from the state. This includes its two nuclear programmes, the world’s third largest chemical weapons arsenal, a range of ballistic missiles – all of which it appears willing to sell – plus the world’s fourth largest army. North Korea is the most militarized country on earth. North Korea is also threatening because of the criminality that seems hard-wired into the regime and the human security problems created by its repression and economic mismanagement.

The press release and a launch statement by its editor, Mark Fitzpatrick may be read by following these links:

IISS Press Release: North Korean provocations increase risk of retaliation

Launch statement by Mark Fitzpatrick, Editor, North Korean Security Challenges: A net assessment

Books: “Getting to Yes in Korea” by Walter C. Clemens, Jr.

---

GETTING TO YES IN KOREA, by Walter C. Clemens, Jr. (with a Foreword by Governor Bill Richardson). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2010. x, 262 pp. paperback. ISBN 978-1-59451-407-4. This book review was written by CanKor Editor-in-Chief Erich Weingartner.

---

Many papers and books have been published over the years about North Korean negotiating behaviour and how to defend against it: Over the Line: North Korea’s Negotiating Strategy by Chuck Downs (AEI Press, 1999), Negotiating on the Edge: North Korean Negotiating Behavior by Scott Snyder (USIP Press, 1999) and To the Brink and Back: Negotiating with North Korea by Richard Saccone (Hollym, 2003), to name just three.

Walter C. Clemens, Jr., takes a different approach. He examines Washington’s negotiating behaviour for clues about what elements have failed and what might succeed in getting to “yes” with the DPRK. This is done by first taking the reader on a tour of history that illustrates major missed opportunities in negotiations of the past, as well as dramatic and surprising breakthroughs involving the USA and its Cold War adversaries, the USSR and China. The fourth chapter on the fateful decisions that produced the permanent division of Korea should be required reading for anyone intending to become involved with the DPRK, whether students, humanitarians or diplomats.

Books: “Nothing to Envy” by Barbara Demick

---

NOTHING TO ENVY: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009. xii, 314 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$26.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-385-52390-5. This book review by CanKor Editor-in-chief Erich Weingartner was published in Pacific Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 4, December 2010, pp. 809-810.

---

Nothing to Envy

It is said that the devil is in the details, but there are plenty of angels in the details as well. It is the details that interest Barbara Demick, Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, as she profiles personal triumph in the midst of the multiple tragedies that have engulfed the people of North Korea. Nothing to Envy reads like a novel, though Demick is a stickler for historical accuracy and has added chapter notes for academic interest.

Having interviewed a hundred North Korean “defectors” in South Korea and China, Demick selected an assortment who represented different social strata in the highly layered class system of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The author weaves a tapestry of contemporary history by means of the personal stories of six North Korean protagonists: a teacher, a doctor, a housewife, a broadcaster, a student and a homeless orphan.

Publication: Bridging the chasm between human rights and peace

Pro-engagement activists have often argued that the pursuit of peace and reconciliation with the DPRK requires that human rights take a back seat in negotiations. At the other end of the spectrum have been anti-engagement activists who have argued that negotiation for peace and reconciliation is futile in the absence of human rights.

In May 2010 the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) published a report entitled, “PURSUING PEACE WHILE ADVANCING RIGHTS: The Untried Approach to North Korea,“ by David Hawk. To my knowledge, this is the first serious attempt to bridge what have been assumed to be irreconcilable positions.