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Kim Jong Il¡¯s Nuclear End?
Dangerous reports from North Korea, the likes of which could lead the Korean Peninsula into a fiery inferno, continue to fill the news. The Ministry of National Defense just announced that last year the North deployed a missile battalion, armed with the Rodong-1, which can hit anywhere in the South or Japan. The New York Times now reports that evidence of a second plant for producing weapons-grade plutonium in North Korea, aside from the one known to be at Yongbyon, has been discovered. Then there is how the North itself has said it completed reprocessing of its roughly 8,000 nuclear fuel rods, and both U.S. and Korean intelligence agencies have confirmed that the North has engaged in approximately 70 high-explosive tests over the past five years.
The trend proves how the Kim Jong Il regime considers nuclear arms to be its only means of survival, and how it has no intention of giving up on its desire to posses them. Nuclear arms will not guarantee the longevity of the regime there, however. In truth, North Korea is on the road to destruction, regardless of whether it has nuclear weapons or not. A few nuclear warheads are not going to maintain a regime when its people are risking their lives to escape from starvation and political oppression.
In addition, the United States and the rest of the four major powers surrounding the Korean Peninsula, as well as the international community, are not going to accept a nuclear North. The North is actually going to speed up its own demise, as the international community will find it hard to justify giving humanitarian aid to a country developing nuclear weapons. If there¡¯s one choice for survival still open for North Korea, that would be to give up on the nuclear option and quickly engage in the kind of reform and openness that would win more help from Korea and the international community.
The Korean government needs to realize that the nuclear issue is the final death throes of an end-stage North. It needs to understand that only a callous perception of the situation will allow it to be realistically prepared for the issue to grow close to war or for a collapse of the regime there hurting the South as well.
July 21, 2003
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