I Lied The UK Times reports egg on everyone's face in the wake of North Korea's announcement that it has nuclear weapons. The pol...
I Lied
The
UK Times reports egg on everyone's face in the wake of North Korea's
announcement that it has nuclear weapons.
The political, as distinct from military, significance of North Korea’s
move is considerable. Since being confronted in 2002 with US evidence that it
had cheated on a 1994 agreement to suspend all its nuclear weapons programmes,
the regime has tried bluff, bluster and partial truths. Both forced admissions
and boastful hints emanated from behind closed doors, in official negotiations
or in easily retracted hints to reporters. Never before has it made a formal
public statement that it possesses nuclear bombs.
The regime of Kim Jong Il may not have intended to make life more difficult
for Beijing, but it has surely done so. China’s stance throughout has been
that it opposes a nuclear-armed Korean peninsula, but that since it was
unclear whether North Korea was even close to the point of developing actual
nuclear weapons, the US and Japan should have the patience to fall in with
China’s preferred strategy of gradual engagement. Only last week, US envoys
were in Beijing to show the Chinese evidence of a North Korean sale of a
uranium compound to Libya, and to deliver a letter, from George W. Bush to
President Hu Jintao, speaking of “the greatly heightened urgency” of tackling
the problem. Now that Pyongyang itself has made that case, Beijing must have
been thankful yesterday that the Chinese new year holiday excused it from
early comment.
Well how about that? Kim Jong Il actually lied to Jimmy Carter and Bill
Clinton. Who would have thought it possible? The problem with nuclear weapons
nonproliferation agreements today is that they create the temptation to plan
contingencies on the basis of intent rather than capability. North
Korea is a case in point. The diplomatic approach toward North Korea depended
not on its actual capability but on the perception of its capability. Nothing
changed over 24 hours except the North Korean press release claiming the
possession of nuclear weapons; yet the announcement, not the reality, made all
the difference. The reason the fiction, if fiction it was, lasted so long is
that so many desperately wanted to believe that WMDs could be contained, so that
the music could keep playing and everyone could return to the old games
of saving the whales, dancing in ethnic costumes and clapping their hands.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
who have never been happy or good.
--
WH Auden
The alternative is to abandon the "sophisticated" view of a stable
international order and understand that we are a planet in crisis; that in some
meaningful sense humanity is in a death match with terror.
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