Pyongyang's Pressure

North Korea (DPRK) has been an inadvertent catalyst and the primary ostensible threat cited by Clinton administration officials as motivating the accelerated U.S. drive for an NMD program. ¹ Despite limited progress in addressing nuclear issues through the U.S.-DPRK Geneva Agreed Framework of 1994, deep mistrust between the United States and North Korea has driven repeated cycles of tension followed by protracted negotiation. In the United States, the primary concerns continue to be about North Korean nuclear and missile development programs. North Korea's leadership expresses concern about the continued U.S.-led drive (along with increasingly sophisticated South Korean forces) for military modernization, including U.S. development of sophisticated missile defense systems, as an attempt to "dominate the world." ²

North Korea's missile development and export efforts, when seen from Pyongyang's perspective, have been a primary source of hard-won foreign currency through exports to Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. For North Korea, unconventional weapons development is also a relatively inexpensive means of maintaining deterrence by enhancing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) delivery capabilities against perceived enemies including the United States, Japan, and South Korea. The overt North Korean response to U.S. NMD development efforts has come primarily in the form of vitriolic media attacks against U.S. characterizations of North Korea's own missile development efforts as the primary driver for pursuing NMD. The North Korean media has also responded strongly to Japanese cooperative involvement in the development of theater missile defense (TMD). ³ The emergence of NMD as a major issue in the U.S.-North Korea relationship has complicated an apparent North Korean willingness to hold negotiations over missile exports and development, although both sides have yet to put forward realistic proposals necessary to give serious momentum to such a negotiation.

North Korean public reactions to U.S. NMD efforts predictably presume that NMD really is all about Pyongyang. This is not surprising, given the self-aggrandizing nature of the regime's propaganda and the fact that North Korea is indeed consistently named as the primary threat justifying the pace of NMD development efforts. North Korea's own unorthodox invitation to a missile negotiation with the United States in June 1998, the catalytic political impact of North Korea's August 1998 rocket launch on the U.S. political debate over NMD, and subsequent North Korean public comments through the spring of 2000, suggest that both sides have been talking past each other all along.

North Korea's Missile Gambit

North Korean missile development and export of the Hwasong (300- to 500-kilometer range) and No Dong (range of up to 1,300 kilometers) missiles, adapted from Scud technology, were most active during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Yet it was North Korea's nuclear program, rather than its missile exports, which received paramount attention in the United States until the signing of the Geneva Agreed Framework. ⁴ That agreement froze known North Korean plutonium reprocessing activities and suspended construction of two large graphite-moderated reactors in return for U.S.-led provision of two proliferation-resistant 1,000 megawatt light-water reactors through the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization. The Agreed Framework also indicated that the United States and North Korea would address other issues, including concerns about North Korean missiles, as part of a process of improving the bilateral relationship over time. Several sporadic unsuccessful rounds of missile negotiations with North Korea were led by then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Robert Einhorn in 1996 and 1997 without significant progress beyond a restatement of opening negotiating positions.

Two reports released during the summer of 1998 set the stage for a negative action-reaction cycle between North Korean missile development and U.S. NMD efforts. First, in an aggressively worded June commentary entitled "Nobody Can Slander the DPRK's Missile Policy," the North Korean government both foreshadowed its own progress in developing the multi-stage Taep'odong rocket...