(note: I find it interesting that North Korea lowered the military height requirement to something like 4.3ft (1.3 m))
Time's running out for North Korea. Its weapons are old and its people are worn down. Any attempt to cordon off its ships may be all the provocation it needs for a last-ditch nuclear strike. Hamish McDonald reports.
Across North Korea at 7am each day, loudspeakers come to life and blare a rousing song titled 10 Million Human Bombs for Kim Il-sung and, according to recent visitors, it is common to see people of all ages singing along fervently. That Kim Il-sung has been dead for nine years does not seem to have diminished the song's appeal.
Kim was the communist guerilla leader who, with the help of Soviet occupation forces, founded the North Korean state in 1945. From being the isolated nation's "Great Leader", Kim has now been promoted to "Eternal Leader". In ceremonies last week, on the anniversary of his death, he was extolled by state propaganda as the "greatest statesman of the 20th century".
With his late wife, the senior Kim has been elevated into a trinity along with their son, the current leader Kim Jong-il, in what some regard more as a state religion than just a bizarre ideological variant of Marxism-Leninism: it even has its own nativity scene, set in a mountain-top log cabin during wartime Japanese rule.
North Korea's Juche or self-reliance doctrine borrows these and other elements of Christianity and combines them with the patriarchism of the ancient Chinese sage Confucius and a millenarian Korean sect called Chondogyo. Kim Jong-il is the chief shaman or priestly miracle worker in this quasi state religion.
"It's a lot worse than even George W. Bush thinks it is," says a senior Western diplomat who frequently visits Pyongyang. "It is something very depressing to the human spirit. They want everyone to think the same thing at the same time, and they are close to getting it. That's what makes it horrible." The tight grip of this leadership cult, and the suicidal militancy expressed in the song, make this and many other observers in the region wonder whether the Bush Administration really understands the beast it is now tackling through hardline diplomacy and tightening inspections of North Korean export shipments. "The idea that this is a ... state that only needs a prod to collapse is false," the diplomat said.
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Despite North Korea's failed economy and the misery of most of its 22.5 million citizens - trapped in poverty and decayed housing and ravaged by malnutrition and periodic famine, power blackouts and diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera - its core belief still burns bright in the country's self-isolation from the world. The cult tells North Koreans they are a special people who evolved separately to other humans, according to neolithic "discoveries" by North Korean archaeologists. They learn that they are ruled by special leaders and that the hardship is merely the prelude to an early paradise that will come through a sudden convulsion.
Elites at the top of a social ranking divided into 54 classes - from Kim Jong-il's inner circle down to hereditary class enemies and collaborators - are, meanwhile, kept quiet with privileges and supplies denied the ordinary population. "They are very eager to keep the regime in existence," says Choi Jin Wook, a senior researcher at Seoul's Korea Institute for National Unification. "If it fails, it's the end of their privileges."
Also fully keyed up is the formidable war machine:
The 1.2 million-strong Korean People's Army (KPA) poised along the Demilitarised Zone, the 50-year-old truce line with South Korea;
The heavy industry that backs this force; and
The rapidly advancing missile and nuclear laboratories that make the only North Korean products anyone wants to buy.
In the past two months, Kim Jong-il has intensified his "army first" doctrine in which the KPA has effectively replaced the Communist Party as the key structure in the regime. This may signal that advocates of economic liberalisation in the trade and light industry ministries and the committees dealing with Asia-Pacific relations and flood rehabilitation have already lost out to the old-guard military-heavy industry camp.
But a clock is ticking in this war machine. The newest artillery, tanks and aircraft were supplied in the last days of the Soviet Union, and are more than a decade old. The struggle to shield heavy industry from North Korea's overall economic decline is getting harder. Even the human quality of the KPA is shrinking: the height requirement for new recruits is now 1.3 metres, reflecting the effects of nearly two decades of malnutrition.
"There is a critical crossover point some time in the future - which we don't know and which we can't know - where the North Koreans calculate they won't be able to fight the Americans and win," the diplomat said. The idea of a "use it or lose it" deadline for North Korean conventional war capability adds a frightening new dimension to the crisis over the US-led effort to eliminate Pyongyang's nuclear threat.
Another incalculable element is the extent to which the KPA's top generals share the widespread expectation that the millenarian event will be the reunification of the two halves of Korea, under the Kim dynasty. Some may have their private doubts, but the KPA's doctrine is based on quick and massive attack and counter-attack, hoping to replicate its rapid dash towards southern Pusan in 1950 after catching the American garrison and South Korean military off guard. That drew a counter-invasion by the US general Douglas MacArthur from Japan. MacArthur later requested permission to use nuclear weapons when China entered the war (and was refused and sacked by President Harry Truman). The increasing reliance of the present-day US military on precision air strikes and its unwillingness to carry casualties is said to be encouraging some KPA generals to think they could prevail, helped by Korea's difficult terrain and weather.
There is deep unease in South Korean political and military circles at the realignment of the 37,000-strong US force in South Korea, particularly the planned shift of the 15,000 frontline troops from the Joint Security Area of the DMZ, which directly defends Seoul, to a base further south. They worry about removing the reassuring "tripwire" which has long meant that if any war starts, the US is immediately involved and taking heavy casualties. The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, says this is obsolete thinking and that the redeployment will allow US forces to respond more effectively to attack.
A further unknown deadline, which may be the real restraint on the KPA, is the point at which North Korea is able to deliver nuclear weapons. A report compiled for the White House, Nuclear Posture Review, and leaked in 2001, indicated that the US could use nuclear weapons on non-nuclear adversaries in a wide range of contingencies. It may have been that review, far more than Bush's later "axis of evil" rhetoric, that provided the impetus for Pyongyang to speed up and diversify its nuclear weapons effort so that it would have a counter-deterrent.
Experts don't dispute that North Korea had collected enough plutonium to make one or two bombs by the early 1990s. This week's report by South Korea's intelligence chief that the North had conducted 70 tests of the non-nuclear trigger of a bomb - the conventional explosive that sharply compresses the plutonium core and sets off nuclear fission - is new only in the number. Such tests have been going on since 1983. How many have occurred recently would have been far more interesting, but that was not revealed.
Some South Korean analysts think any bomb may yet be an unwieldy, untested device that could not fit the 1000-kg maximum payload of the North's proven medium-range missiles, which could hit US bases in Japan. But one expert, a Swiss nuclear physicist and nuclear proliferation analyst, Andre Gsponer, thinks this underestimates the extent to which North Korea can use published data on nuclear weapons. "North Korea has displayed excellent technical skills in building long-range missiles, something much more difficult than building atomic bombs," Gsponer said. "I would think that the weight of the North Korean plutonium-239 bombs would be in the range of 500 kg to 1 tonne, at most."
North Korea made its open claim to have nuclear weapons during talks with US and Chinese officials in Beijing in April. That galvanised China into ever-more-intense efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis which had begun the previous October when Pyongyang privately confessed to the US that it was building a second path to nuclear weapons - centrifuge enrichment of its plentiful uranium reserves.
Until then, the Chinese had believed Pyongyang's nuclear rhetoric was bluff, aimed at getting Washington to deliver the power stations and other aid promised in the 1994 "framework" agreement in return for a cap on North Korea's nuclear programs. Aside from a small oil contribution, that aid never arrived: the Clinton administration had made the promise expecting the Pyongyang regime to collapse before it had to be delivered.
The new Chinese leadership under President Hu Jintao has fewer sentimental ties to North Korea than Beijing's old guard. Further, a nuclear North Korea threatens Chinese interests because of its potential to provoke a lurch to the right by Japan, which has eight tonnes of plutonium in storage and the capacity to go nuclear within weeks.
In March, Beijing turned off the spigot on its oil pipeline into North Korea for three days to reinforce a warning against resuming ballistic missile tests. Since then, the Chinese Communist Party's "leading group" on North Korea, formed in February and chaired by Hu himself, has studied all options to head off a Korean war because it would be ruinous to China, too. China's tearaway 7 to 8 per cent annual growth is founded on massive trade and investment links with the US and its strategic partners. Even China's trade with South Korea totalled $US44 billion ($67 billion) last year, and is expected to reach an annual $US100 billion in five years. As well as cutting this off, a Korean war would force the closure to international shipping of all Chinese ports north of Shanghai, including the major export outlets of Qingdao, Tianjin and Dalian.
As revealed this week in the Herald, these studies included the feasibility of China's People's Liberation Army conducting a lightning strike to disarm North Korea. The conclusion was that the PLA did not have the logistics capability to reach the DMZ fast enough to prevent the North Korean military attacking south to engage US troops. Hence a frantic Chinese drive to get the Americans and North Koreans back to a second round of talks.
China's changed attitude is revealed in a directive recently issued to the Chinese media by the central propaganda directorate: "Regarding the DPRK [North Korea] nuclear crisis, China and DPRK now have divided opinions on many issues, so we require media not to play on this nuclear issue and stick to the Xinhua [official news agency] version only."
The intensifying economic blockade of North Korea by the US and its allies - with the notable exception of a reluctant and worried South Korea - brings new threats of military conflict. Japan's recent deployment of squads of safety inspectors to check North Korean shipping has effectively blocked a sizable flow of cash and high-tech goods provided by pachinko (pinball) operators and other donors in the
pro-Pyongyang camp of Japan's ethnic Koreans.
The "proliferation security initiative" discussed by the US, Australia, Japan and several European nations at this week's Brisbane meeting threatens a more critical cut. A naval cordon around North Korea would threaten Pyongyang's major source of hard currency if it stopped its $US600 million-a-year ballistic missile exports to the Middle East and Pakistan.
The Prime Minister, John Howard, seems to be backing away from Canberra's earlier enthusiasm for such a blockade. And such a blockade could have some "nasty consequences", the senior Western diplomat warned this week. "It is entirely likely that those ships in the blockade will be attacked by North Korea."
He pointed out that North Korea's small navy wielded some potent weapons and its vessels were crewed by fanatical regime supporters willing to carry out suicidal missions. Indeed, a modified North Korean fishing boat, seized after a recent clash with Japan and put on public display, included a secret missile compartment and extra-powerful engines. This recalls German raiders of World War II, such as the Kormoran, which sank the Australian cruiser Sydney with all hands in a close-range encounter in 1941.
The prospects of an early diplomatic solution are not good. At the Beijing talks in April, the North Koreans asked for a non-aggression pact and some $US3.5 billion in economic aid. They promised to respond with unspecified nuclear concessions once it started flowing. The Americans wanted a complete and verifiable closure of all nuclear programs before they would even discuss aid. A formal non-aggression treaty would have no hope of ratification by the US Senate.
"The situation is very different from 1994," said the Seoul unification institute's Choi, referring to the deal that ended the last North Korean nuclear crisis. The US is holding back, watching to see if North Korea crosses a "red line" by resuming reprocessing of its spent nuclear fuel stockpile to extract more plutonium. Pyongyang has meanwhile shown much of its hand.
"They do not have any more cards," Choi said. "Unless they escalate." But a dramatic move, such as reactivating the reprocessing plant or even conducting an underground bomb test, might convince Washington that containment was more realistic than diplomacy, and China might see its long-term interests as being in co-operating with a quarantine of its awkward ally.
Those who know the North Koreans say they are in a corner. "Do nothing and eventually they will collapse," the senior Western diplomat said. "Open up and they draw into question their social stability which is dependent on complete isolation. The conundrum is the reason why there are different factions arguing over how to go forward. The problem for all of them is that this regime cannot survive a breath of fresh air."
