The United States has drawn a line in the sand for North Korea on the subject of nuclear testing.
Sort of…
What the U.S. has done is to warn North Korea that there will be consquences if it conducts nuclear tests….but it doesn’t give any hint of what the dire consquences are. The New York Times reports:
The Bush administration on Sunday warned North Korea for the first time that if it conducted a nuclear test, the United States and several Pacific powers would take punitive action, but officials stopped short of saying what kind of sanctions would result.
“Action would have to be taken,” Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush’s national security adviser, said on the CNN program “Late Edition.” Asked earlier on “Fox News Sunday” about recent reports that intelligence agencies have warned that North Korea could conduct its first test, Mr. Hadley added: “We’ve seen some evidence that says that they may be preparing for a nuclear test. We have talked to our allies about that.”
But he cautioned that North Korea was “a hard target” and that correctly assessing its intentions was nearly impossible.
Mr. Hadley’s warnings represented the first time anyone in the Bush administration had approached drawing a “red line” that North Korea could not cross without prompting a reaction. The term red line was often used during the cold war to set the boundaries in confrontations, with perhaps the most extreme example President Kennedy’s action in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis to curb a nuclear risk.
But North Korea’s threat has emerged much slower than Cuba’s and various administrations unsuccessfully dealt with the issue. There is often talk of the North Korean diplomatic “style” — a kind of verbal brinksmanship. One expert notes that it’s “Negotiating On The Edge.” And the Times notes it as well:
In the case of North Korea, the threat has risen incrementally over 15 years. Mr. Bush’s aides have said in interviews over the past year that if they drew a clear line, they believed that the North Koreans would see it as a challenge and walk right up to it.
On Sunday afternoon, senior administration officials said that concerns about baiting North Korea helped to explain why Mr. Hadley did not specify what kind of penalty was possible. Instead, Mr. Hadley noted that “the Japanese are out today already saying that those steps would need to include going to the Security Council and, potentially, sanctions.”
Indeed, Japan is issuing stern warnings to North Korea:
TOKYO: Japan will impose economic sanctions against North Korea if Pyongyang conducts a nuclear test, a senior leader of the country’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party said Sunday.
Shinzo Abe, acting secretary general of the party, said a nuclear North Korea is the biggest threat to Japan and it would be “unthinkable� for Tokyo to do nothing in case of Pyongyang’s nuclear testing.
“If their possession of nuclear weapons is fully confirmed and they conduct a nuclear test, we must bring the issue to the UN Security Council and call for economic sanctions,� Abe told Asai TV.
Abe, known for his hardline stance on North Korea, met with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier this month to discuss the North’s nuclear issues as well as other topics. “We imposed economic sanctions when they fired the Taepodong missile,� Abe said, referring to the long-range North Korean missile which flew over Japan into the Pacific Ocean in August 1998.
Earlier this week China criticized U.S. policy towards North Korea and the kind of diplomacy towards it practiced by the Bush administration. Washington seemingly shrugged off the criticism. The controversy of North Korea’s nuclear plans has a long, turbulent history…and it appears as future events could entail a roller coaster ride as well. If the U.S. talks tough, will North Korea push it to the brink? And could pushing it to the brink mean some kind of limited test? Than what, if anything, would the U.S. realistically do?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.