Abstract
In 2007 North Korea began to come back from the brink of nuclear confrontation
with Western powers.
In hindsight, the point of maximum danger appears to
have come in 2006, both in July, when the
reclusive state test-fired seven
missiles including the long-range Taepodong-2, and more significantly in
October, when it exploded its first nuclear device. By February 2007, however,
Pyongyang had agreed in
principle with its main diplomatic contact group
(made up of the US, China, Russia South Korea and
Japan) that it would
shut down its nuclear plant at Yongbyon and allow nuclear inspectors to visit.
By
early November 2007 a team of US specialists had been allowed to visit
the country to oversee the
disablement process, in return for promises to
deliver 1mn tonnes of heavy fuel oil or equivalent aid, and
for moves by
Washington to take North Korea off its terrorism blacklist.
BMI’s
view is that danger is not over. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and the state
he has built up
around himself remain unpredictable and paranoid. It is
evident that posing a credible nuclear threat – and
eventually
agreeing to remove it under certain conditions – had been part of his
approach all along,
designed to leverage maximum concessions from the
West. Those concessions may stabilise the situation,
but a return to the
path of confrontation over real or imagined grievances cannot be ruled out.
Reports of
flooding and new food shortages inside the country in the
second half of 2007 were a further factor to
bear in mind. For the moment,
a summit with presidents Obama, Lee of South Korea, and Hu Jintao of
China, along with a generous economic aid package and an end to the diplomatic
isolation of North
Korea, might be the kind of medium-term objective Kim
Jong-il would judge as a satisfactory outcome.
North Korea remains a
difficult player in the region, and one that the US continues to be fearful
of. North
Korea’s defence industry, while unsophisticated, is
capable of producing military equipment to sustain its
outdated armed
forces, and to maintain a healthy illicit arms trade. Its extensive, if not
advanced, defence
industry provides it with a self-reliance that can rival
most other states’ defence sectors. Should North
Korea ever fully
come in from the cold and its arms trade move from the illicit to the lawful,
it could
boast a very profitable defence industry.
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