Nuclear Proliferation in Northeast Asia: The Quest for Security

NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION IN

NORTHEAST ASIA

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NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION IN NORTHEAST ASIA The Quest for Security Andrew O’Neil

Nuclear Proliferation in Northeast Asia Copyright © Andrew O’Neil, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-7466-2 ISBN-10: 1-4039-7466-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O’Neil, Andrew. Nuclear proliferation in Northeast Asia : the quest for security / Andrew O’Neil. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-4039-7466-7 (alk. paper) 1. Nuclear nonproliferation—East Asia. 2. Security, International. I. Title. JZ5675.O54 2007 327.1’747095—dc22 2007003835 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: October 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

This book is dedicated to my mother, Denise Elizabeth Mielonen (1943–2002)

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CONTENTS Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

Part I Framework Chapter 1 Northeast Asia’s Security Order Chapter 2 The Failing Strategy of Nuclear Nonproliferation

11 13 35

Part II Two Case Studies Chapter 3 Can a Nuclear-Armed North Korea Be Managed? Chapter 4 China and Japan: Is Nuclear Coexistence Possible?

55 57 79

Part III Future Directions Chapter 5 Northeast Asia’s Nuclear Future: The Quest for Security

103 105

Conclusion

125

Appendix The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)

129

Notes

135

Bibliography

167

Index

193

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe many thanks to a range of individuals who have helped shape this book in different ways. Robert Ayson, James Manicom, and Alex Stephens each took the time to read carefully through the entire manuscript and provided invaluable comments. Vlado Vivoda prepared the index with impressive efficiency and helped proofread the final version. Curt Andressen, Martin Griffiths, Richard Leaver, Rod Lyon, and Michael Wesley read through early drafts of the manuscript and offered insightful comments on a range of issues for which I am very grateful. Thanks also to Peter Burns, Dave Cox, and Bill Tow for moral support over the life of the project. I am also indebted to students at Flinders University, the Australian Defence College, the Australian National University, and the University of Queensland for their willingness to listen to many of the hypotheses and arguments contained in this book. Some suffered in silence, but many provided beneficial feedback and criticism that helped to influence my thinking as the development of the book evolved. The School of Political and International Studies at Flinders University provided a wonderful working environment in which to complete the book manuscript between 2005 and 2007. I would particularly like to thank George Crowder, Maryanne Kelton, Anthony Langlois, and Haydon Manning for their encouragement. Thanks are also due to Anthony Wahl at Palgrave Macmillan for his professional help and advice during the book proposal and manuscript preparation stages. I would also like to thank Kristy Lilas at Palgrave and Dale Rohrbaugh at Scribe for all of their invaluable guidance during the production process. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Jo Fox, and our two children, Hannah and Matilda, for their love and support. They are a constant source of joy and inspiration that helps to keep perspective on the important things in life. Parts of the book draw on two previously published articles in Taylor and Francis journals: “Learning to Live with Uncertainty: The Strategic Implications of North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Capability,” Contemporary Security Policy 26, no. 2 (August 2005): 317–34; and “Nuclear Proliferation and Global Security: Laying the Groundwork for a New Policy Agenda,” Comparative Strategy 24, no. 4 (October–November 2005): 343–59. Any errors or flaws in what follows are exclusively my responsibility.

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ABBREVIATIONS APEC ARF ASEAN CSBMs CSCE CTBT DMZ DPRK EAS EU FDI GDP EASI IAEA ICBM KCNA MRBM MW NAM NATO NPT NSG NWFZ ODA OSCE PLA PRC PSI ROK SDF SLOCs SLV SRBM SSBN UNSC WMD

Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum ASEAN Regional Forum Association of Southeast Asian Nations Confidence and Security Building Measures Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Demilitarized Zone (Korea) Democratic People’s Republic of Korea East Asia Summit European Union Foreign Direct Investment Gross Domestic Product East Asia Strategy Initiative International Atomic Energy Agency Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Korean Central News Agency Medium-Range Ballistic Missile Megawatt Non-Aligned Movement North Atlantic Treaty Organization Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Nuclear Suppliers’ Group Nuclear Weapon Free Zone Overseas Development Assistance Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe People’s Liberation Army People’s Republic of China Proliferation Security Initiative Republic of Korea Self Defense Force (Japan) Sea Lines of Communication Space Launch Vehicle Short-Range Ballistic Missile Ballistic Nuclear Missile Submarine United Nations Security Council Weapons of Mass Destruction

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INTRODUCTION Despite widespread use of the term “weapons of mass destruction” to encompass nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, nuclear weapons remain the only genuine instruments of mass destruction in the international system. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 demonstrated with appalling clarity that nuclear weapons are capable of wreaking a level of devastation that is simply beyond comparison to the damage wrought by other weapons systems. Only nuclear weapons can cause the instantaneous destruction of life and the physical and ecological infrastructure critical to sustaining life. This inescapable fact was recognized remarkably early on in the post-1945 era when the United States proposed under the 1946 Baruch Plan to devolve control over all international atomic energy to the United Nations and to eliminate all nuclear weapons under international controls. Soviet opposition to the Baruch Plan meant that it never attracted the international support necessary to succeed, but the very fact that the United States had proposed it when it still enjoyed a monopoly over the possession of nuclear weapons underscored the degree to which Washington believed that all policy makers had a special responsibility to manage a weapon with a unique set of destructive characteristics.1 Nuclear weapons remain in a singular class. And, despite the best efforts of disarmament advocates, after six decades of the nuclear age, they have established a highly conspicuous presence on the global strategic landscape. Notwithstanding periodic attempts by policy makers during the cold war to “conventionalize” nuclear weapons by assigning tactical battlefield missions to some low-yield warheads, there was a general appreciation that Bernard Brodie’s celebrated 1946 observation in relation to the nuclear revolution contained a compelling logic: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.”2 When both superpowers achieved the capacity in the early 1960s to strike the homeland of the other after absorbing a first strike (a socalled “second-strike capability”), a traditional nexus between the use of force and policy was broken: nuclear warheads launched on ballistic missiles made it possible to destroy an enemy’s state infrastructure and society without first

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having to destroy the latter’s military forces. In the nuclear age, civilians rather than soldiers would bear the brunt of major war. One of the key questions for policy makers flowing from this was: what possible policy aims could justify the use of a weapon that had the capacity to obliterate another country’s state and society? The strategic implications of the nuclear revolution, as Thomas Schelling observed, were indisputable: Nuclear weapons do make a difference, marking an epoch in warfare. The difference is not just in the amount of destruction that can be accomplished but in the role of destruction and in the decision process. Nuclear weapons can change the speed of events, the control of events, the sequence of events, the relation of the victor to the vanquished, and the relation of homeland to fighting front. Deterrence rests today on the threat of pain and extinction, not just on the threat of military defeat.3

The fundamental paradox of the nuclear revolution was that the ability of one superpower to deter the use of nuclear weapons by the other was essentially predicated on conveying a credible intent that they themselves would respond to a nuclear attack by using nuclear weapons. In a variation on his earlier observation on the imperative of avoiding war in the nuclear age, Brodie commented during the late 1950s that “deterrence now means something as a strategic policy only when we are fairly confident that the retaliatory instrument upon which it relies will not be called upon to function at all.”4 Largely due to their destructive power, which has increased in quantum leaps since 1945, nuclear weapons are generally acknowledged as providing states with a proven military deterrent capability and a claim to enhanced political influence in the international system. The fact that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council are all nuclear weapons states is a telling indication of the status that nuclear weapons confer internationally. States with relatively weak conventional military forces facing a high-spectrum threat environment often perceive nuclear weapons as furnishing a critical “force multiplier” capability against stronger adversaries. For these reasons alone, determined proliferators will devote massive resources to nuclear programs, take considerable risks in pursuing a weapons capability, and court international opprobrium in operationalizing nuclear weapons as part of their armed forces. International pressure can raise some of the costs for individual states intent on acquiring nuclear weapons, but it cannot dissuade countries that have made a decision to go nuclear. Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have each demonstrated a willingness to absorb international censure, and limited sanctions, in pursuit of their nuclear national interests. In light of their unparalleled politico-strategic properties, nuclear weapons clearly need to be managed by states. Since the late 1960s, the strategy of

INTRODUCTION

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choice for the international community has been nonproliferation. Enshrined in the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which commits non-nuclear member states not to acquire nuclear weapons, the strategy of nonproliferation aims to preserve the nuclear status quo in international relations. It seeks to do so by upholding an essential principle: the legitimacy of a two-tier international nuclear system. That is, those states that tested nuclear devices prior to January 1, 1967, are deemed to be “legitimate” possessors of nuclear weapons, while all other states in the international system (including those that tested after this date) are deemed to be non-nuclear weapon states. Traditionally, states other than the big five that crossed the nuclear threshold have been regarded as “illegitimate” or “de facto” nuclear states. In this sense, unlike virtually every other international treaty, the NPT institutionalizes discrimination as the core rationale of states’ legal commitments.5 In addition to ensuring that non-nuclear weapon states have the “fullest possible” access to civilian nuclear technology, the key quid pro quo for non-nuclear states in accepting this discriminatory arrangement is that the five nuclear weapon states agree to gradually reduce their nuclear weapons stockpiles over time while according decreased emphasis to the role of nuclear weapons in their respective strategic doctrines. Under Article VI of the NPT, the nuclear weapon states are committed to commencing a negotiated process of nuclear disarmament with a view to the entire elimination of nuclear weapons “under strict and effective international control.” A central argument of this book is that the strategy of nonproliferation as we have known it since the early 1970s is rapidly breaking down. In particular, since the end of the cold war, the essential principle underlying the strategy of nonproliferation—acceptance of a two-tier international nuclear order—has become unsustainable. Policy makers and those in the academic world need to turn their attention to exploring new proliferation management strategies that are premised first and foremost on recognizing that nuclear weapons are here to stay and that, short of using military force to terminate individual weapons programs, determined proliferators can not be stopped from going nuclear. In what follows, I develop this argument in relation to the role of nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia.6 This book is primarily concerned with addressing the following key questions: To what extent does the failing strategy of nonproliferation pose serious challenges for Northeast Asia’s security environment? Are there alternative strategies for managing nuclear weapons in the region? Should the presence of nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia necessarily be seen in exclusively negative terms, as many experts believe? The Northeast Asian region is the world’s most robust center of economic growth and is home to the largest concentration of military firepower on the face of the globe. For these reasons alone, it is a region worth studying. But there is another, more compelling, reason why Northeast Asia merits close

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attention: it is the single most nuclearized region in the international system. It already houses three nuclear powers (China, Russia, and North Korea), the world’s most advanced threshold nuclear weapons state (Japan), two nuclearcapable states (South Korea and Taiwan), and it hosts a major strategic presence by the largest nuclear weapons power in the international system (the United States). There can be little doubt that nuclear weapons will play a critical role in shaping whether this pivotal region is characterized by stability or instability in the years ahead. Indeed, nuclear weapons may well be the dominant variable determining regional security and the propensity for conflict in Northeast Asia in the first half of the twenty-first century. Nuclear weapons have long been a factor in Northeast Asia’s regional security environment. During the cold war, the United States and the Soviet Union maintained a significant nuclear presence in the region, China assumed the mantle as the region’s first nonsuperpower nuclear weapons state in 1964, and North Korea’s long-standing nuclear ambitions were an established feature of the region’s security environment long before that country’s formal withdrawal from the NPT in 2003. As Kent Calder observed more than a decade ago: Northeast Asia’s flirtation with the nuclear [weapons] option has a long history, extending to every nation in the region. But countries seem to wax and wane in the seriousness with which they consider this possibility. An underlying energy vulnerability and apprehension about a nuclear China seem common to all. Beyond those universals, diplomatic isolation, the prospect that other regional powers might go nuclear, and doubts about the credibility of US nuclear guarantees, when these factors emerge, also appear to provoke local impulses toward proliferation.7

Since the end of the cold war, every country in the region has reinforced its commitment to expanding civilian nuclear energy programs as a central component of national economic development. In contrast to a subregion like Southeast Asia, where there is not a single operational nuclear reactor, Northeast Asian states have already laid the groundwork for the exploitation of nuclear energy in the long term.8 For Northeast Asia’s non-nuclear weapon states (especially Japan), there has traditionally been an important connection between civil nuclear programs and the less publicized strategic aim of keeping future military options open.9 Ever since the use of atomic weapons against Japan in 1945, the international relations of Northeast Asia have had a strong nuclear dimension. Indeed, it is difficult to think of another region where nuclear issues continue to loom so large. Given the pervasive influence of nuclear weapons on Northeast Asia’s contemporary politico-strategic dynamics, it is somewhat puzzling that no substantive study has yet been undertaken on the topic. In light of the

INTRODUCTION

5

region’s central location in powering much of the world’s economic growth, and its seemingly combustible mix of historical grievance, lack of regional identity, and hunger for new military technologies on the part of regional states, this serious gap in the academic literature is not just remarkable; it is also cause for some concern. Understanding the contemporary situation with respect to nuclear proliferation in Northeast Asia and evaluating whether regional states are capable of managing nuclear arsenals and capabilities peacefully in the years ahead remains one of the most urgent scholarly undertakings of our time. The potential price of failure—nuclear use almost certainly occasioning the destruction of social well-being, massive economic dislocation, and the possible devastation of regional order—is something that the international community simply cannot afford. Avoiding the catastrophic costs stemming from a nuclear conflict in Northeast Asia is undoubtedly a strong incentive for states to manage nuclear weapons responsibly, but it is not enough. One of the key assumptions underpinning the analysis contained in this book is that states in the region need to have strategies in place to reduce the risks of nuclear war in an evolving international context where the strategy of nuclear nonproliferation is not viable in the long term. This book is concerned with exploring the key challenges associated with nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia today and into the future. It also puts forward a number of policy recommendations aimed at improving the management of nuclear weapons in the region in the years ahead. I recognize from the outset that there are no easy answers or panaceas in addressing the issue of nuclear proliferation in Northeast Asia. What may look like an elegant blueprint for dealing with nuclear weapons in the halls of academe can look very different from the vantage point of regional foreign and defense ministries. While nuclear disarmament in Northeast Asia would eliminate altogether the knotty policy conundrums associated with nuclear weapons, the fact that regional policy makers have remained resolutely disinterested in disarmament as a serious option—despite active lobbying from a range of nongovernment organizations—reflects broader calculations in the region about the strategic utility of possessing nuclear weapons, or at least retaining the option of acquiring them at some future point. Thus the final recommendations in this book are formulated not only on the basis of whether they will contribute to security in Northeast Asia, but also whether they are likely to be politically feasible for states in the region. The analysis in the pages that follow is directed just as much at policy practitioners in government as it is at those in the academic world (as well as laypeople) interested in international relations, strategic studies, and Asian studies. In framing this book I have taken to heart the point made by William Wallace about the importance of policy relevance for those undertaking research in the broader discipline of international relations, which itself grew

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“out of reflections on policy, and out of the desire to influence policy, or to improve the practice of policy. The distinction between the academic theorist and the practical policy maker was a matter of degree: a degree of detachment from day-to-day practical concerns, but not a denial that those day-to-day concerns were relevant or real.”10 This study is based on the view that there is little point putting forward a series of recommendations for managing nuclear weapons and proliferation in Northeast Asia if they do not take into account the political and strategic exigencies of how states interact in the regional context. Policy recommendations that endorse radical options such as nuclear disarmament may satisfy a scholarly desire for intellectual purity. But there is a high risk they will bear little relationship to the complex and decidedly less than pure motives that drive states’ policies in the region. They will, in short, lack policy relevance. This book is comprised of three parts incorporating five separate chapters. Part one provides a framework for the book’s overall analysis and argumentation. In Chapter 1, I outline the regional security order in Northeast Asia and discuss key trends and turning points during the cold war and post–cold war eras, as well as security dynamics in the region today, and the factors likely to shape the region’s future security environment. In the cold war period, Northeast Asia’s security landscape was influenced particularly by the advent of Communist China in 1949 and the bitter Korean War, which lasted from 1950 until 1953. Both of these developments underlie ongoing territorial disputes in Northeast Asia (North-South Korea, China-Taiwan) that remain part of its contemporary landscape and that have influenced, in no small part, nuclear weapons trends in the region over the last six decades. The end of the cold war in the early 1990s lessened the ideological intensity of these disputes, but did not have much of a discernible impact on the strategic intensity of interstate rivalry on the Korean peninsula or across the Taiwan Strait. Unlike Europe, where the end of the cold war served to heighten multilateral cooperation at the institutional level, Northeast Asia has not experienced a similar transition. While bilateral relations between the region’s key major powers, the United States and China, have undergone considerable change since the early 1990s, there has been little movement toward a meaningful multilateral security dialogue among Northeast Asian states. This can be attributed to a range of factors, not least of which is the region’s lack of sustained engagement with multilateralism as a diplomatic instrument. However, the fact that Northeast Asia has not experienced a single armed conflict since the brief Sino-Soviet border conflict in 1969—contrast this with Europe’s numerous Balkan conflicts during the 1990s—tends to weaken claims that the absence of established security dialogue is necessarily inimical to regional security and stability. In Chapter 2, I argue that the current global nonproliferation regime, with the NPT as its centerpiece, is an inadequate tool for managing nuclear

INTRODUCTION

7

weapons at the international and regional level in Northeast Asia. Although many (including many in government) claim that the nonproliferation regime is worth preserving because it represents the optimum set of arrangements given real world political constraints, the fact remains that the coherence and integrity of global nonproliferation arrangements are now at the lowest point they have been since the NPT came into force in 1970. The continuing diffusion of nuclear technologies across the international system, the fundamental lack of resolve by the permanent five members of the UN Security Council, particularly the United States, to consistently uphold nuclear nonproliferation principles internationally, and an unwillingness by NPT member states to implement the Treaty’s key provisions after three and a half decades of its operation have all corroded the credibility and effectiveness of the nonproliferation regime. Indicative of how ineffectual and increasingly irrelevant the regime has become is that the NPT still defines a nuclear weapons state as one that “has manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon prior to January 1, 1967.” The clear lesson for Northeast Asia is that regional states need to move beyond the nonproliferation regime and explore viable alternative avenues for managing nuclear proliferation and nuclear weapons more generally in the twenty-first century. Part two of this book comprises two chapters, each concerned with examining the most salient case studies of proliferation management in Northeast Asia. Chapter 3 critically assesses whether a nuclear-armed North Korea can be integrated into Northeast Asia’s security environment, while Chapter 4 evaluates the question of whether peaceful coexistence between a nucleararmed China and a nuclear-armed Japan is possible. In most areas of social scientific academic inquiry, as J. David Singer observes, “there are always several ways in which the phenomena under study may be sorted and arranged for the purposes of systematic analysis.”11 The case study approach adopted in this book is designed to aid our capacity to achieve “statements of regularity about the structure, behaviour, and interaction of phenomena” relating to nuclear weapons and regional security in Northeast Asia.12 The specific case studies in part two have been selected because together, they represent the two most serious nuclear-related challenges facing regional policy makers in the early part of the twenty-first century. Of course, it is entirely possible that South Korea or Taiwan (or both) may acquire nuclear weapons at some future point. Like dozens of other states in the international system, both countries have the technological wherewithal to manufacture nuclear weapons, and both flirted with embarking on dedicated weapons programs in the 1970s. However, in contrast to Japan, whose emerging regional great power rivalry with China will increase the perceived strategic logic of acquiring a “defensive” nuclear force, proliferation pressures in South Korea and Taiwan are likely to remain relatively subdued. And, unlike Japanese policy

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elites, policy makers in South Korea and Taiwan have shown no inclination toward reviewing the non-nuclear status of these countries. A nuclear-armed North Korea is now a reality in Northeast Asia and presents the region with a major choice: Do states continue to insist on North Korea disarming its nuclear forces when Pyongyang has given little indication that it is willing to jettison its newfound capability? Or do regional states bite the proverbial bullet and accept North Korea as a nuclear power in spite of its past dishonesty on nuclear matters? I argue that despite the popular view of North Korea as a “rogue” state, there are strong grounds to conclude that it will maintain its defensive, deterrent-based nuclear posture in practice. There is therefore considerable scope for the United States in particular to reinforce a deterrent relationship with North Korea and for regional countries, including China, to encourage and foster responsible nuclear behavior on Pyongyang’s part through a blend of targeted incentives, technological assistance, and communicating in unambiguous terms the likely costs of serious nuclear misbehavior. The worst possible outcome would be if North Korea were further isolated, a path that some conservative American and Japanese analysts have recommended. Increased isolation of the already insecure Pyongyang regime would only serve to heighten the dangers of misperception and, as a consequence, increase the likelihood of regional conflict, possibly involving the use of nuclear weapons. Overall, as I argue in Chapter 3, the prospects for managing North Korea as a nuclear weapons state are much better than many of the pessimists in government and the academic community would lead us to believe. The overwhelming majority of observers claim that a nuclear-armed Japan would have seriously adverse implications for regional security in Northeast Asia. As a state with the most advanced threshold nuclear capability in the world, Japan could acquire an operational nuclear force within a timeframe that most analysts estimate in months rather than years. Yet, as I show in Chapter 4, the deleterious security implications of Japan going nuclear have been exaggerated. This can best be appreciated by considering how such a development would impact on what will probably be Northeast Asia’s single most important relationship in the twenty-first century, that between Japan and China. Contrary to the views of some, there is actually little China would be able to do to counter any Japanese acquisition of nuclear weapons. Despite occasionally tough rhetoric, domestically Chinese elites face significant constraints at the economic, political, and social level that would inhibit their capacity to embark on a nuclear or conventional arms race with Japan. Preemptive military strikes by China against Japanese nuclear assets are equally unlikely given Japan’s advanced conventional military capability and the likely reaction such strikes would provoke in Washington. Concerns that Japan acquiring nuclear weapons would trigger proliferation moves in neighboring South Korea and/or Taiwan overlook the fact that both of these states

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ultimately remain most concerned about hostile regional powers that have designs on their respective territories (for Seoul, North Korea, and for Taipei, China). In short, it is unlikely that a nuclear-armed Japan would generate nuclear proliferation pressures in either of these countries. Finally, the chapter argues that both Japan and China will continue to have powerful incentives to ensure that any nuclear relationship remains stable and peaceful. The high degree of interdependence in the bilateral relationship between Tokyo and Beijing is exemplified by large-scale trade and investment links and shared concern over ensuring the continued free passage of energy supplies into Northeast Asia. Both countries understand that the most important prerequisite for maintaining these favorable outcomes is to avoid serious strategic tensions in their bilateral relationship and in Northeast Asia more generally. In part three of this book, the final chapter explores a range of policy alternatives for managing nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia in the longer term. It begins by critically assessing the viability of proposals for nuclear “rollback” and disarmament in the region. In considering these proposals, I argue they lack credibility in the sense that it is not clear how they would be achieved in practice and that they tend to discount the compelling motives all nuclear powers have to hold onto their nuclear arsenals. This is particularly the case in Northeast Asia, where the chances of China and/or North Korea agreeing to disarm their nuclear forces are virtually nil and where, despite their formal non-nuclear status, Japan and South Korea have refused to support regional nuclear weapon free zone proposals from nongovernment groups. In the context of an unraveling global nonproliferation regime, proposals for the radical contraction and elimination of nuclear arsenals in Northeast Asia do not provide a foundation for managing nuclear weapons peacefully in the years ahead. In charting a way forward, I deliberately eschew “grand bargains” that would recommend formal commitments on the part of some states to disarm or for others to renounce (yet again) the acquisition of nuclear weapons in exchange for enhanced security assurances, expanded economic aid, and the like. Initiatives aimed at enhancing security in Northeast Asia will need to recognize implicitly that nuclear weapons are a strategic fact of life in the region. With this in mind, I argue in favor of two relatively modest initiatives. First, greater priority needs to be accorded to the role that deterrence can play in strengthening the prospects for nuclear peace in Northeast Asia. Unless states are willing to embark on military action to terminate or degrade the nuclear weapons capabilities of rivals—a highly dangerous and destabilizing route—they will actually have little choice but to reinforce deterrence as a strategy for managing nuclear weapons. While there remain some challenges in achieving successful deterrent relationships, there is no shortage of examples from the cold war era and post–cold war era where deterrence has worked. Second, regional states need to vigorously explore specific nuclear-related

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confidence and security building measures (CSBMs) tailored to fit local conditions. These CSBMs would be graduated and aimed less at reducing stockpile numbers and more at encouraging responsible stewardship of those stockpiles. The aim would be to build on these initial CSBMs to address more problematic issues, including the possible export of nuclear material and equipment from regional states. The final section of Chapter 5 addresses key counterpoints to the argument that I put forward. It should be emphasized at the outset that this book is not optimistic about the proliferation of nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia. It does not argue that more nuclear weapons “may be better” in improving security for states and peoples in the region.13 Nor does it downplay the immense challenges confronting regional policy makers in the years ahead as they endeavor to manage nuclear weapons strategically and politically. But this study as a whole is far less pessimistic than most others tend to be about the implications of nuclear proliferation for Northeast Asia’s regional security. This book is founded on the assumption that nuclear weapons will remain a fact of life for Northeast Asian policy makers for the foreseeable future and that the prime task for policy makers will be to prevent these weapons from being used, either purposefully or by accident. It would be ideal if nuclear weapons had never been invented or if states in Northeast Asia did not regard them as important strategic instruments of power. The reality, of course, is very different. To accept that nuclear weapons will remain a strategic staple in Northeast Asia is not to embrace a “pronuclear” view, but to acknowledge the broader importance of “understanding international politics as it actually is and as it ought to be in view of its intrinsic nature, rather than as people would like to see it.”14 Rather than reflexively portraying nuclear weapons as antithetical to security in Northeast Asia, we should be seeking ways in which they can be managed in future without precipitating conflict. This book is a small contribution to that quest for security.

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FRAMEWORK

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C

H A P T E R

1

NORTHEAST ASIA’S SECURITY ORDER Compared to several other regions in the international system, Northeast Asia remains somewhat loosely defined. In large part this is due to the fact that the region does not have a single institution that reflects a common identity among states. Unlike Southeast Asia, which has the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Northeast Asia has no multilateral institutions that mirror unity of purpose among its constituent states. As Gilbert Rozman has observed, unlike Europe and Southeast Asia, where formal regional institutions are relatively mature and well-developed, for most states in Northeast Asia regionalism is more of a concept than a reality.1 Locating reasons for Northeast Asia’s lack of common identity among states is not particularly difficult. If we use the baseline criteria of geographical proximity, density of interactions, shared institutional frameworks, and shared historical experience, it is clear that regional integration in Northeast Asia is partial at best. Geographically, countries of the region are fairly close, there remains a high degree of deep interaction between states at the level of bilateral trade and investment, and culturally there are salient links between the states of the region (the two Koreas, China, and Taiwan). However, the region’s institutional frameworks for interstate cooperation on political, economic, and security issues are underdeveloped, and historical experiences vary dramatically across the region (e.g., Japan as indigenous imperial power, China and the Koreas as victims of this imperialism). Yet in spite of this, Northeast Asia remains a distinctive region in the international system with a unique security order. This chapter explores that security order and analyzes the primary dynamics driving the region’s strategic environment. A primary focus is evaluating the effect of the cold war on Northeast Asia, how the end of the cold war influenced the region’s security landscape, how it has evolved since the early 1990s, and the variables that are likely to shape Northeast Asia’s security order in the years ahead. The overall

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aim of the chapter is to provide readers with a framework within which many of the issues raised in subsequent chapters relating to the role of nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia can be assessed.

THE COLD WAR

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REGIONAL GEOPOLITICS

The dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 and that country’s subsequent unconditional surrender presaged an extended period of geopolitical fluidity in Northeast Asia. The region had already suffered large-scale physical destruction as a result of Japan’s ill-fated attempt to achieve a “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” and the grinding Allied effort to terminate Japanese imperialism in the Pacific. Aside from the physical cost, the primary legacy of World War II in Northeast Asia was a major geopolitical reordering of the region. Yet the full implications of this new order were not readily apparent when Japan surrendered in August 1945. Like almost all major structural shifts throughout world history, Northeast Asia’s transition after 1945 was a gradual process involving a series of key events that significantly altered the power balance in the region and, more generally, the way in which states interacted with one another. The overriding influence in shaping Northeast Asia’s geopolitical transition and its strategic environment in the postwar era was the cold war. The cold war in Asia as a whole was distinguished by three important hallmarks. The first was the transition of Asia’s political and security order from one dominated by “old” European colonial great powers to a regional system overlaid by East-West geostrategic rivalry. As Barry Buzan has noted, this “superpower overlay” was particularly robust in Northeast Asia where “indigenous security dynamics were effectively suppressed throughout the Cold War.”2 The ejection of the European colonial powers from the region in the thirty or so years after World War II was accompanied by the entrenchment of bipolar rivalry between two non-Asian superpowers as the dominant engine of security interactions in Asia. At its core, this engine was powered by an intense zero-sum logic according to which both the United States and the Soviet Union believed that any strategic gain for the other side was, ipso facto, a strategic loss for them. In practice, Asia’s cold war dynamics were evident at three interdependent levels: the impact of U.S.-Soviet global rivalry in shaping the security frameworks and strategic dynamics of interstate relations in the region; regional-level rivalries involving Asia’s indigenous great powers, particularly China; and “the competition, conflict, and cooperation among the local powers at the subregional level . . . overlaid by the rivalries among the major powers.”3 It would be tempting to conclude that Asia merely exchanged one form of imperialism for another after 1945. Yet, as Mark Berger points out, the cold war “empires” of the United States and the Soviet Union were composed of sovereign states; in contrast with the previous

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colonial order, “the relationship between the respective superpowers and their allies was increasingly mediated by systems of military alliances, regional organizations, and international institutions such as the United Nations.”4 The second hallmark of the cold war in Asia was that, of all the regions in the international system, Asia bore the brunt of armed conflict along EastWest lines. Although Europe remained the regional cockpit of U.S.-Soviet confrontation, Asia did not fit the popular Eurocentric characterization of being on the “periphery” of the cold war, along with Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Asia was a far more significant cold war theater than any of these other regions and remained, in effect, the frontline region for cold war hostilities. The Korean War and the various protracted conflicts in Indo China, while not the only “hot wars” during the cold war period involving the superpowers and their proxies around the world, were by far the most intense and destructive in scale and their geopolitical impact the most enduring. For instance, the estimated death toll of the Korean War significantly surpassed all other single cold war–related conflicts outside Asia, including the 1979–89 war in Afghanistan.5 As outlined below, the absence of any peace treaty formalizing the end of the Korean War has had serious geopolitical consequences for Northeast Asia. The third hallmark of the cold war in Asia was that, compared to Europe, where the depth and breath of superpower strategic confrontation was allpervasive, the Asian region was characterized by distinctly uneven patterns of superpower penetration. As outlined below, Northeast Asia’s security order was characterized by deep cold war penetration. By contrast, however, Southeast Asia’s cold war experience was less all-consuming. Despite various cold war–related conflicts in Indo China, and the presence of American and (after 1975) Soviet forces in the region, the penetration of superpower rivalry into Southeast Asia’s security interactions was diluted by several factors, the most salient being the role of the Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN), formed in 1967. While there remained a high degree of anti-Communist sentiment among Southeast Asia’s non-Indo Chinese states comprising the core ASEAN membership, there was an equally strong desire by these states to avoid simply becoming pawns of the United States. Benefiting from Indonesia’s role as the de facto Asian leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, ASEAN provided its members with a collective mechanism to “opt out” of the cold war struggle in Southeast Asia. The Association’s coherence was bolstered by members’ similar historical experiences as colonies and a shared willingness to explore institutional cooperation on political, economic, and security issues.6 There was no remotely analogous multilateral process in Northeast Asia. The uneven impact of the cold war across Asia can be attributed to at least four factors. The first is that, unlike Europe, where virtually every state belonged to either the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or Warsaw Pact alliances, the regional environment in Asia was never conducive to the formation

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of monolithic bloc alliances along East-West lines.7 As one author has observed, “The integrative tendencies operating in Asia were much less pronounced than in Europe,” and most states were disinclined—in some cases even hostile—to enter into formal multilateral alliances along East-West lines.8 Second, the sheer political, historical, cultural, and ethnic diversity across various regions in Asia militated against the cold war having a roughly uniform impact in the region as a whole. To paraphrase Desmond Ball, given the enormous diversity of Asia, any articulation of common regional themes inevitably risks gross generalization.9 Third, at no stage was Asia regarded by either superpower as being on a par with Europe in their respective list of global strategic priorities. In Europe, both the United States and the Soviet Union remained locked into strategic commitments they regarded as integral to containing and deterring each other globally. With the notable exception of bilateral U.S. security commitments in Japan and South Korea, the same could not be said of Asia where both superpowers essentially picked and chose specific commitments over time.10 In the immediate postwar years, when U.S.-Soviet bipolar rivalry was rapidly taking shape, neither Washington nor Moscow took Asia very seriously from a geopolitical perspective. Although the United States had sacrificed more blood and treasure than any other Allied nation in the Pacific theater, and notwithstanding America’s role as chief occupying power in Japan, the Truman administration and Congress did not regard Asia as especially relevant to America’s strategy of containing Soviet power.11 The prevailing logic in Washington was that if the United States could contain Soviet expansionism in Europe, most things would fall into place globally. Indicative of this mindset was that each of America’s key postwar containment initiatives—the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the creation of NATO—were focused squarely on Europe.12 For its part, the Soviet Union exhibited even less interest in Asia than did the United States between 1945 and 1949. Perhaps understandably in view of Russian history and the searing Soviet experience in World War II, Moscow was preoccupied with shoring up satellite alliances in Central and Eastern Europe to provide a buffer against what it saw as potential American expansion and possible German revanchist designs on the continent. This lack of interest in Asia occasionally translated into an acute lack of strategic foresight. For instance, the Soviet Union inexplicably maintained its formal recognition of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists as the sole legitimate government of China right up until four months before the triumph of Mao Tse-tung’s Communist forces in December 1949.13 As the preeminent historian of the cold war period has observed, after a five-year hiatus where Moscow and Washington were preoccupied with strengthening alliance fortifications in Europe, “the Cold War’s sudden expansion into Asia in 1949–1950 caught everyone by surprise.”14 Two events were critical in bringing the cold war to Asia and ensuring that it

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remained the central generator of security dynamics in Northeast Asia: the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, and the outbreak of the Korean War less than a year later on June 25, 1950. Together, these two watershed developments were decisive in convincing the United States and the Soviet Union that their political, ideological, military, and economic interests globally could only be safeguarded in the longer term if they countered the power and influence of their superpower rival in Asia. Both of these events essentially laid the foundation for Northeast Asia’s security order in the postwar period. From the perspective of U.S. policy makers, the defeat of the Nationalists by Communist forces and the subsequent proclamation of the PRC on October 1, 1949, crystallized the Communist threat in Asia. Although some senior American policy makers (concentrated in the State Department) privately concluded that a Communist China would not upset the overall balance of world power, the fact that the largest country in Asia had “gone Communist” was portrayed as a major setback for U.S. strategy.15 The domestic political impact on the Truman administration of Republican accusations that it had “lost China” was evident in substantial Democratic losses in mid-term congressional elections in 1950.16 Washington’s staunch political and military support for the Nationalists who fled to Taiwan against the Communist mainland would remain a centerpiece of America’s Northeast Asia strategy until rapprochement between the United States and the PRC in the early 1970s. For the Soviet Union, the advent of the PRC confirmed to a previously skeptical Soviet elite that revolutionary success in Asia was indeed possible, and with negligible direct support from Moscow. If the USSR were to throw its full weight behind Communist forces in the region, then it might just be possible to outflank the United States ideologically, and possibly geopolitically, in Northeast Asia. In return for agreeing to furnish China with significant amounts of economic and military aid, under the Sino-Soviet Treaty signed in 1950, Moscow secured highly favorable terms on economic investment and military basing rights. Indeed, the Sino-Soviet Treaty provided the USSR with a significant payoff for minimal investment.17 The emergence of the PRC transformed China from a bit player in Asia, hindered by widespread internal dislocation, into a united country with a revolutionary agenda. As the cold war progressed, and particularly following the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s, China’s role and influence in shaping Northeast Asia’s security order grew substantially. Growing strategic rivalry and military confrontation with the USSR following the Sino-Soviet split, China’s acquisition of nuclear weapons in 1964, and the shift toward a de facto alliance with the United States during the 1970s meant that China played a central part in shaping the security order in Northeast Asia. Having greater strategic weight in Northeast Asia than the Soviet Union, but always less than the United States, China could never exercise decisive authority

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over events on the Korean peninsula, or even across the Taiwan Strait, for as long as the United States maintained its strategic presence in Northeast Asia.18 But, as a rising economic and military power armed with nuclear weapons, in addition to being the largest indigenous country in Northeast Asia, by the 1980s China could convincingly lay claim to rising great power status. Unlike the two superpowers, most observers appreciated that China’s geostrategic influence in Northeast Asia would only increase in the longer term.19 The advent of the PRC signaled the onset of the cold war in Northeast Asia, but it was the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 that underscored its arrival in the region. The decision by Moscow to support North Korea’s invasion of South Korea reflected a growing belief in Soviet elite circles that Asia, while still secondary to Europe, was emerging as a crucial cold war battleground. In supporting the unification and communization of the Korean peninsula by force, the Soviet Union hoped to balance America’s growing military presence in Japan and underscore U.S. strategic vulnerability in Northeast Asia.20 From Washington’s perspective, Soviet support for the North Korean invasion, and China’s entry into the war in October 1950, confirmed that Communist expansion was a tangible threat in Asia and that merely containing Soviet power in Europe could not ensure the containment of Soviet expansionism globally.21 Coming so soon after the loss of China and the Sino-Soviet Treaty, the outbreak of the Korean War left Washington with little choice but to “globalize” its containment strategy. For American policy makers, the critical lesson of the Korean War would be that accommodation to Communism in one sphere meant capitulation everywhere.22 The armistice ending the Korean War in 1953 heralded the beginning of a seemingly intractable confrontation between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (ROK) that continues to this day. The sharp divisions on the Korean peninsula both symbolized and reinforced the impact of the cold war on Northeast Asia. The strong support from Moscow and (to a lesser extent) Beijing for the regime of Kim Ilsung, and equally enthusiastic backing from Washington for successive pro-Western governments in Seoul, significantly raised the stakes of EastWest confrontation in Northeast Asia. The fact that no peace treaty was concluded after the cessation of armed conflict in 1953 meant that the two Koreas have remained technically at war for more than half a century.23 Despite occasional evidence of thawing relations between Pyongyang and Seoul, and notwithstanding the inaugural inter-Korean leadership summit in 2000, there are few grounds for assuming that either side is genuinely committed to reunification along peaceful lines.24 The major powers in Northeast Asia are similarly ambivalent about supporting a reunited Korea due to the sheer cost of underwriting the absorption of North Korea by the South and the realization that a reunified Korea would challenge a central pillar of

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the geopolitical status quo in Northeast Asia and possibly exacerbate tensions in regional security dynamics.25 After the Korean War, Northeast Asia was one of the few areas of the world where the political, economic, and strategic interests of the great powers intersected to such an extent that each was willing to go to war to defend those interests. The high degree of cold war influence in Northeast Asia was manifested across several dimensions. These included the acutely high premium placed on the role of military cooperation in alliances and the propensity for armed conflict along East-West lines. But by far the most enduring impact of the cold war in Northeast Asia was the inhibiting effect of EastWest rivalry on the capacity of regional states to institute formal cooperative mechanisms to address major security and strategic issues. Both superpowers, especially the United States, actively discouraged the formation of multilateral security institutions in Northeast Asia, largely because they sought to preserve their bilateral leverage over individual states and avoid a situation where their superpower rival would be in a position to manipulate multilateral diplomacy to its strategic advantage. This is one of the key reasons why the United States has traditionally preferred using bilateral alliances, rather than multilateral instruments, in attempting to achieve its geostrategic objectives in the region. Consequently, a prominent feature of the cold war in Northeast Asia was the overwhelmingly bilateral nature of interstate relations on security issues. This effectively foreclosed the emergence of any tangible regional identity.26 When the cold war ended, very few could disagree with Friedberg’s observation that “Next to Europe, Asia appears strikingly under-institutionalized. The rich ‘alphabet soup’ of international agencies that has helped to nurture peaceful relations among the European powers is, in Asia, a very thin gruel indeed.”27 As argued below, while Southeast Asia has been at the forefront of strengthening regional multilateral security institutions, the cold war legacy of “under-institutionalization” remains the most prominent feature of Northeast Asia’s contemporary security order.

THE END

OF THE

COLD WAR

AND ITS IMPACT

Given the significant regional geopolitical impact of the cold war, it was inevitable that its demise in the late 1980s would also have an important influence on Northeast Asia’s security dynamics. The cold war was certainly a perilous time in the history of the region, and it had a corrosive effect on key dimensions of Northeast Asia’s security, not least of which was the tendency for zero-sum logic to perpetuate and reinforce tension and conflict among states. The absence of any peace treaty on the Korean peninsula and the continuing ideological hostility permeating inter-Korean relations, the ongoing tensions between China and the United States over Taiwan’s sovereignty, and

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major power rivalry in the region more generally meant that Northeast Asia was never able to free itself completely from the constraints of cold war imperatives and forge a regional security architecture that reflected states’ interests and aspirations outside East-West confrontation. With the evaporation of East-West confrontation and the demise of associated geostrategic tensions worldwide in the late 1980s, it seemed that Northeast Asian countries would finally be able to embark on a new era of multilateral cooperation without the obstacles stemming from superpower confrontation. It was in this spirit of optimism that most observers greeted the cold war’s demise in Asia overall as signifying the advent of more constructive era in security relations between states. A widely shared assumption in much of this commentary was that countries would band together to capitalize on the absence of East-West confrontation to bolster existing multilateral security institutions and (in the case of Northeast Asia) construct new ones that would provide a framework for developing stable strategic and politicostrategic relations among countries in the region.28 Writing in 1993, Andrew Mack noted that while there had been no “security debate in the region comparable to that which engaged Europeans in the 1980s,” the end of the cold war had “undoubtedly improved the security environment of the Asia-Pacific region.”29 Arguing along similar lines, James Hsiung observed that “the new era has rendered obsolete the old patterns of international alignments in [the] Asia-Pacific . . . It has called into question previous concepts of allies and adversaries, now that security has taken on more economic overtones. Allies and adversaries now are separated by a blurring line at best.”30 One of the most salient impulses in the academic literature on Asia-Pacific security around this time was a belief that the continuing strong levels of economic growth among the “tiger economies” of Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia would serve to underpin regional security by raising the costs of conflict in an increasingly interdependent economic environment. A closely related argument was that new regional institutions, particularly the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum instituted in 1989 and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) instituted in 1994, would provide a framework for promoting regional integration after the cold war.31 With a more economically and politically integrated region, states would be less inclined to embark on destabilizing behavior in the security realm. This assumption, deeply embedded in liberal theories of international relations, appeared to be strengthened by what many identified as an irresistible tide of democratic impulses sweeping across the post-Communist international system.32 From this perspective, the greater the number of like-minded democracies in Asia, the less chance for conflict, and the more secure the region would be overall in the long term.33 However, this optimistic take on post–cold war Asia was subjected to serious challenge from scholars operating primarily within the realist tradition.

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The cold war had been a dangerous period, to be sure. And it had certainly made meaningful progress on regional security issues highly problematic. But for many analysts it had at least provided a degree of certainty about the systemic dynamics underlying Asia’s regional security. Moreover, in a bipolar system both superpowers had at least been willing to try and manage thorny regional issues with the potential to transmute into crises. According to this viewpoint, a multipolar system, with all its inherent risks and uncertainties, “especially in a region as fast changing, and full of antagonisms and suspicions as Asia,” would raise the prospect of conflict and a long-term lack of regional equilibrium among large and smaller powers.34 With little experience of navigating their own indigenous regional security dynamics, there was a danger that “an escalation of military spending and arms rivalry could well occur in the context of regional political relations marked by many lines of hostility and ill-will, and unmediated by traditions and institutions for cooperation.”35 For analysts, this pessimistic interpretation was even more pertinent in relation to Northeast Asia, a region with no extant multilateral security architecture and one that was the epicenter of superpower confrontation in Asia after 1945. This sense of pessimism was magnified by an appreciation that Northeast Asia was home to deep-seated historical antagonisms—the most conspicuous surrounding Japan’s regional role—in addition to residual cold war–era tensions.36 As Buzan noted in the mid 1990s, “The price to East Asia of its freedom from foreign rivalries is that it now has to deal with indigenous insecurities that have deep roots of their own.”37 A more immediate concern for others was the apparent spike in regional military expenditure despite the end of cold war confrontation in Northeast Asia. While some regional specialists were quick to draw a triangular linkage between accelerated high-tech military acquisitions, the unprecedented economic resources available to states, and the coveting of increased status and prestige among some regional countries,38 a striking trend was that almost three-quarters of total defense spending across all of Asia in the 1990s was concentrated in Northeast Asia alone.39 This fact, combined with active and more latent strategic tensions between regional states, served to temper the optimism of many commentators in the decade following the end of the cold war. The end of the cold war had a number of specific consequences for states in Northeast Asia. The regional state hit hardest by the demise of the cold war was North Korea. Virtually overnight, the DPRK had lost its great power benefactor, the Soviet Union. This was accompanied by the collapse of several Communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe with which North Korea had enjoyed close “familial” ties during the cold war. These unwelcome developments had a major psychological effect on the leadership in Pyongyang and drove it further toward a garrison state mentality. As countries traditionally aligned with North Korea began to court an economically

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and politically dynamic South Korea, Pyongyang began its descent into deep diplomatic isolation. The Soviet Union had already normalized diplomatic relations with South Korea in 1990 and China quickly followed suit in 1992. As Buzo notes, the DPRK leadership was woefully ill-equipped to deal with the changing regional and international climate after the cold war. Instead of actively considering a shift in policy in response to the passing of Communism globally, the Kim Il-sung regime refused to counter the dramatic erosion of its diplomatic support base and “remained committed to the aggressive view that identified increases in the insecurity of its adversaries as gains in the security of the DPRK.”40 The end of Soviet support had calamitous economic consequences for North Korea.41 The sudden loss of large-scale trade and aid following the demise of the USSR in the early 1990s triggered a decade-long contraction of North Korea’s economy. The deleterious effects of this were exacerbated by a protracted leadership succession struggle following the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994. According to Natsios, the onset of nationwide famine in 1995—accentuated by catastrophic flooding across the country the same year—culminated in the deaths of anywhere up to two and half million people.42 The extraordinary decline of North Korea’s economic base was made all the more dramatic by the brilliant economic performance of South Korea and China’s rapid economic ascent in the wake of its decision to jettison socialist dogma from its national economic policy. All of this encouraged the common assumption in the first half of the 1990s that North Korea would be unable to survive as a unitary state beyond 2000 and that the timeframe for Korean reunification would be measured in years, rather than decades. While these predictions turned out to be premature, North Korea was nevertheless forced to scale back its long-term ambition of reunifying the peninsula on its terms and embrace the comparatively modest national strategy of regime survival.43 Another consequence of the end of the cold war in Northeast Asia was rising uncertainty about the future of America’s strategic presence in the region. While the United States had endured its fair share of public criticism across Asia, privately most governments (including high-profile critics like Malaysia and Indonesia) regarded an American strategic presence as an important stabilizing factor in the region.44 Even China, against which many saw the American presence as a necessary strategic hedge, occasionally indicated that it considered U.S. forces stationed in Japan as a necessary evil to keep Tokyo’s strategic ambitions in check.45 Yet, the commencement in 1990 of a major drawdown of Soviet/Russian naval and air forces in the North Pacific theater provoked concerns among U.S. allies in particular that Washington would have little strategic rationale to maintain its military presence in Northeast Asia in a climate where calls from U.S. taxpayers for a substantial post–cold war “peace dividend” were gaining momentum.46 Moreover, the U.S. East Asia Strategy Initiative (EASI) reports released in 1990 and 1992

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23

conspicuously failed to provide a convincing set of reasons why American forces should remain in the region.47 It was not until the 1995 EASI (often referred to as the “Nye Report”), which was deliberately framed to reassure states in the region by ruling out further reductions in U.S. force levels and reaffirming America’s commitment to its bilateral alliances, that many of these concerns were properly addressed.48 From the perspective of the Clinton administration, the need to maintain a stable regional environment in Northeast Asia to buttress American trade and investment interests, as well as a highly visible level of military engagement in a key region for America’s broader global strategy, outweighed any economic or political benefits that may have been gained by withdrawing U.S. forces from Northeast Asia. More specifically, American policy makers realized that endeavors to counter North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and contain China’s emerging regional aspirations would be made considerably more difficult without a tangible U.S. strategic “footprint” in the region. However, despite the clear strategic rationale for a continuing U.S. presence, throughout the 1990s American policy makers confronted skeptical audiences in the region who believed that a further significant drawdown of America’s Northeast Asian commitment was simply a matter of time. The end of the cold war sounded the death knell for close strategic cooperation between Washington and Beijing. As noted above, for much of the latter cold war period, the shared commitment to containing Soviet power regionally and globally was a potent rationale that helped justify an increasingly close relationship between the United States and China throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This served to paper over many of the underlying tensions in the relationship, especially those relating to human rights, governance, and sovereignty. For many Americans, the brutal suppression of student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 underscored just how vast the gulf was between the Chinese Communist sociopolitical system and the liberal democratic system of the United States. Equally, for many Chinese, Washington’s harsh condemnatory response confirmed existing suspicions about the propensity of the United States to meddle in the internal affairs of other states.49 Notwithstanding the best efforts of some in the U.S. policy community during the 1990s (including President Clinton himself) to talk up the bilateral relationship and characterize China as a “strategic partner” of the United States in the region, few were convinced by claims regarding the supposed strategic like-mindedness of the two countries. China was a regional power rapidly on the rise seeking to challenge the status quo, while the United States was the established regional hegemon seeking to preserve it.50 Moreover, continuing fallout over the Tiananmen Square suppression, tensions over Taiwan in 1995–96, and alleged Chinese espionage in the United States itself placed serious strains on the bilateral relationship and served to mask the periodically constructive dialogue between Washington and Beijing on the North

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Korean nuclear issue. In a period where many in the United States, especially those in conservative quarters, appeared to be casting around for adversaries to supplant the Soviet threat to inject focus into America’s post–cold war foreign and defense policy, Communist China seemed to be a convenient candidate to fill the role. By the end of the 1990s, it had become clear to most observers that China and the United States, although not engaged in “a new Cold War” were nevertheless “vying for strategic pre-eminence and leadership in East Asia.”51

NORTHEAST ASIA’S CONTEMPORARY SECURITY ORDER Apart from the end of the cold war, there were two additional events that had the potential to reshape Northeast Asia’s security order in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The first was the economic crisis that hit the Asia-Pacific region in 1997–98. Triggered by a series of currency collapses in Southeast Asia in the second half of 1997, several regional states confronted a crisis of investor confidence in their financial systems that in turn led to substantial capital outflows threatening hard-won economic gains of the previous two decades.52 The contagion effects of the crisis in Southeast Asia quickly spread to Northeast Asia. China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were all directly affected, with Japan and South Korea experiencing a marked contraction in their economic growth levels. South Korea alone experienced 7 percent negative growth in its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1998 after reaching 7 percent positive growth the previous year.53 While the crisis exposed serious vulnerabilities in regional economies and had the effect of slowing, and in some cases reversing, regional economic growth, its consequences for security were less clear.54 China’s decision to resist a nationalistic “beggar thy neighbor” response to the crisis by refusing to devalue its currency in the face of declining Japanese and South Korean currencies won it widespread praise in the region and beyond. This served to burnish Beijing’s image among Asian countries, with the Chinese leadership keen to juxtapose its constructive regional leadership role with what many saw as Japan’s paralytic response to the crisis and America’s opportunistic support of the harsh structural adjustment conditions attached to International Monetary Fund assistance packages for regional states.55 In retrospect, however, it is clear that many of the expansive predictions about the crisis—that it presaged Japan’s regional decline and heralded a crisis of U.S. leadership—were wide of the mark. With little institutional support, states in Northeast Asia managed the strategic consequences of the crisis fairly effectively, and there is little evidence to suggest that it had anything more than a temporary, marginal impact on regional security dynamics.56 The second major challenge to Northeast Asia’s security, and one that many observers claim symbolized the end of the post–cold war era in international

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relations, was the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and Washington’s subsequent pursuit of a “war on terrorism.” The attacks per se did not have a direct impact on Northeast Asia’s security dynamics aside, somewhat ironically, from fanning short-lived concerns about the potential for the United States retreating into isolationism. The Bush administration’s removal of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the attendant stationing of a substantial American force presence in Central Asia was largely accepted as a fait accompli by the major players in Northeast Asia, despite some misgivings on the part of China and Russia. Indeed, the two latter powers regarded 9/11 very much as a window of opportunity to improve their respective bilateral relationships with the United States.57 Both the Bush administration and the Chinese leadership deliberately sought to highlight their shared concerns over Muslim extremism in Central Asia in an endeavor to circumvent a further deterioration in their bilateral relationship flowing from discord over Taiwan and the downing of a U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft near PRC territory in April 2001.58 Yet Washington’s decision to broaden the “war on terrorism” beyond Central Asia to the Middle East elicited skepticism over U.S. claims that America’s role in Iraq and its attempts to balance Iran’s influence in the region stemmed from genuine antiterrorism objectives, not from a broader grand strategy unrelated directly to the events of September 11, 2001. Even America’s long-standing allies, Japan and especially South Korea, have been lukewarm about providing direct support for ambitious U.S. global objectives post-9/11. As Ikenberry observes: America’s East Asian security partners are in a difficult position. They are confronted with problems of commitment and entrapment. On the one hand, they must seek to keep Washington interested in the bilateral security commitment—and so they need to reaffirm and adapt their own capacities and commitments to accord with the changing American security vision. For example, both Seoul and Tokyo have made efforts to show themselves as able partners in American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. On the other hand, they also must worry about entrapment where they are led into military involvements that their own people will not support.59

The Bush administration’s increasingly muscular approach to the use of force internationally post-9/11, coupled with the tendency toward unilateralism in American foreign policy, provoked something of a backlash against the United States in Northeast Asia. This was evident not only in the active role of Russia and China denying UN authorization to the U.S.-led military invasion of Iraq in 2003, and continuing resistance to U.S. entreaties that Iran be subjected to coercive measures, including economic sanctions, by the

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UN Security Council over its nuclear program.60 It was also manifested in increasing levels of anti-American sentiment among the South Korean population that served to raise doubts about the feasibility of a continuing U.S. force presence in that country in the longer term.61 It is worth noting that the United States, with the endorsement of the government in Seoul, has been gradually reconfiguring its force presence in South Korea since the end of the cold war. This has included the planned withdrawal of one-third of all American troops stationed in South Korea at the end of 2005, the repositioning of an infantry division from immediately south of the DMZ to south of Seoul, and the relocation of the headquarters of U.S. Forces Korea out of Seoul by 2008.62 The contemporary and longer term future security dynamics of Northeast Asia will be shaped by a number of factors. These include “micro” issues such as the complexion of political leadership in each state, levels of economic growth (or contraction), and the nature of specific military acquisitions, including the prospect of further nuclear proliferation. Yet the broader regional framework within which these types of issues are managed will continue to be shaped by “macro” level factors that determine Northeast Asia’s security environment overall. These include, for example, the depth and sustainability of the U.S. strategic commitment to the region and external trade and investment flows into Northeast Asia. However, there are three broad factors that stand out as being especially critical in shaping Northeast Asia’s regional security order in the foreseeable future: events on the Korean peninsula; rivalry between Northeast Asia’s major powers; the rise of China economically, politically, and strategically within the region; and the underdeveloped nature of multilateral security institutions in Northeast Asia. The Korean Peninsula For some time, regional analysts have regarded the Korean peninsula as the most serious and intractable security challenge in Northeast Asia. The history of civil war between North and South Korea, and the fact that the two countries have not signed a peace treaty formally terminating their conflict, has meant that relations between Seoul and Pyongyang remain trapped in something of a time warp of cold war hostilities. Military confrontation between the DPRK and ROK and U.S. forces remains entrenched, with around two-thirds of North Korea’s active armed forces deployed within one hundred kilometers of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The U.S. Defense Department has estimated that Pyongyang could launch a full-scale invasion of the South within twenty-four hours of initiating preparations to do so and could maintain up to half a million artillery rounds per hour against allied targets for several hours in the early stages of any conflict.63 For its part, South Korea, assisted by its U.S. ally, has sought to counter the North’s quantitative edge by

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27

deploying a superior range of air-to-air combat and ground attack aircraft, and it maintains a significant qualitative advantage over the DPRK in new generation information warfare capabilities.64 Most now agree that irrespective of a how any war begins, South Korea would eventually emerge victorious over North Korea.65 Yet despite the massive military buildup on the northern and southern sides of the narrow DMZ, there is strong evidence that both sides remain deterred from initiating armed conflict or risking armed conflict by pushing the other side too far. The near certainty of defeat means that Pyongyang probably recognizes that war would be tantamount to inviting South Korea and the United States to institute regime change in the North. For the ROK and its American ally, the massive costs of any conventional conflict would dramatically eclipse any conceivable strategic benefits that could be gained as a result of initiating war with North Korea. As I argue in Chapter 3, there are also strong grounds to conclude that Seoul and Washington are deterred by the prospect of North Korea possibly using nuclear weapons against targets in the South and Japan. However, Northeast Asian states recognize that deterrence may not, in itself, be sufficient to prevent a deterioration of the strategic situation on the peninsula and have sought to engage Pyongyang in dialogue to encourage greater transparency with respect to its nuclear program and in its dealings with other regional actors more generally. The so-called Six-Party Talks, although aimed ostensibly at persuading the DPRK to wind back its nuclear program, are also designed to keep the Pyongyang regime engaged in a dialogue to prevent its further isolation in Northeast Asia.66 The key motivating factor for Northeast Asian countries in their approach to all issues on the Korean peninsula is the desire to preserve the status quo. This essentially means doing all they can to forestall any developments that could threaten the survival of North Korea as a unitary state. China and South Korea provide substantial economic assistance to the DPRK, while Japan and Russia have provided significant amounts of humanitarian (mainly food) aid through the United Nations.67 Only when the Pyongyang regime has undertaken actions (such as the October 2006 nuclear test) that these countries feel compelled to respond to are economic assistance and food aid supplies threatened.68 The one country often identified as having both the capacity and motive to remove the Pyongyang regime, the United States, has provided North Korea with over one billion dollars in aid since the mid1990s and has sought to reassure the North Korean leadership publicly that it has no interest in imposing regime change on Pyongyang.69 The rationale for Northeast Asian states is clear enough: they appreciate that any collapse of the DPRK either through implosion or the use of external force would have seriously adverse consequences for their strategic interests, both in the immediate and long term. For South Korea, in the short term it would mean dealing with

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an influx of possibly hundreds of thousands of refugees from the North and the diversion of prodigious economic resources to help underwrite the transition to reunification on the peninsula. China would lose a key buffer state in the event of a DPRK collapse and, like Seoul, would face the prospect of large numbers of North Korean refugees streaming into its territory across a 1,400-kilometer front. In addition to the economic challenge of assisting the transition to reunification, Beijing would need to confront the challenge of dealing with a unified Korea on its doorstep. As the largest economy in the region, Japan would be expected to contribute generously to the process of reunification, but Tokyo would have major reservations about a united Korea given the underlying popular antipathy toward Japan on the peninsula that could potentially become an even more potent rallying point for Korean nationalism both during and after any transition to reunification. Major Power Rivalry Strategic rivalry between major powers has a long tradition in Northeast Asia. As Chung Min Lee has observed, “In no other region is the prospect for longterm regional stability and prosperity so dependent on the level, or lack, of major power cooperation.”70 As noted in the first section of this chapter, during the cold war Northeast Asia was the only region outside Europe where the strategic interests of the superpowers overlapped to such a degree that each would have use armed force to defend those interests. Today, however, the balance between the region’s major powers is quite different to the balance that prevailed during the cold war. There is little doubt that the United States remains the dominant power in the region by dint of its economic presence, its unrivalled capacity to bring superior military capabilities to bear in almost all contingencies, and its unrivalled status globally. America’s position in Northeast Asia is very much a legacy of its dominant role in the region during the cold war. Yet, despite its unrivalled status, Washington is more reliant than ever on eliciting the cooperation of other states in its endeavors to realize its strategic goals in Northeast Asia.71 Nowhere is this more obvious than in America’s dealings with China on regional security issues. The Bush administration encountered decidedly mixed success in its attempts to persuade China to place pressure on Pyongyang not to proceed with its nuclear program in 2002 and 2003. While Beijing appears to have conveyed its displeasure with Pyongyang by shutting down a critical oil pipeline to the DPRK in early 2003,72 China also made it clear in the first half of 2003 that it would veto any draft resolution presented by the United States to the UN Security Council condemning North Korea for withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).73 Indeed, it appears the Six-Party Talks were a direct consequence of Chinese appeals to the United States to engage Pyongyang multilaterally after Washington

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rejected bilateral talks and North Korea announced that it had no intention of reversing its decision to withdraw from the NPT.74 While some analysts argue that this is evidence of a dangerous gulf between Washington and Beijing on key security issues analogous to the disparity in world outlook between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war,75 in reality it merely reflects the paradoxical nature of the Sino-American relationship. As Denny Roy points out, the United States and China are both partners and competitors in Northeast Asia.76 They are partners in the sense that each has a vested interest in perpetuating regional stability and avoiding bilateral disputes with the potential to spill over into their highly lucrative two-way trade and investment relationship. However, they are also competitors insofar as they have strategic aims and objectives that occasionally come into conflict (e.g., how best to handle North Korea’s nuclear program). The key point to stress is that China and the United States are not adversaries engaged in a confrontational relationship analogous to the U.S.-Soviet cold war relationship. Sino-American relations are characterized by a strategic rivalry underpinned by a shared realization that they cannot afford to let this rivalry impact adversely on the beneficial aspects of their relationship.77 There is little to confirm pessimistic interpretations that the removal of the cold war “overlay” in Northeast Asia has encouraged tensions between the regional major powers, or rendered cooperation between them more difficult. If anything, the prospects for cooperation among the major powers in Northeast Asia are more promising than ever. As noted, U.S.-Chinese rivalry is more complex and distinguished by less structural confrontational than is often assumed. Washington’s relationship with Moscow, although characterized by occasional tensions over U.S. unilateralism, military technology transfers, and Russia’s lukewarm commitment to democratic principles, remains generally positive and constructive. And, notwithstanding the variable history of relations between Moscow and Beijing, the Sino-Russian relationship has reached the apex of strategic, economic, and political intimacy, largely due to shared concerns over U.S. unilateralism and complementary interests on energy issues.78 In the case of the Chinese-Japanese relationship, often identified as having the potential to evolve into great power confrontation in East Asia, there are perhaps fewer reasons to be optimistic. Unresolved historical issues, coupled with genuine deep mutual mistrust at the popular level, pose considerable challenges for Beijing and Tokyo in managing the Sino-Japanese relationship. But even here it would be incorrect to assume that bilateral confrontation and serious tensions are necessarily inevitable. In addition to shared concerns over the need to safeguard valuable energy resources in the broader Asian region, China and Japan share one of the most interdependent relationships of any two states in the international system, with both countries acutely dependent on high levels of bilateral trade and investment for their continued economic well-being.79

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The Rise of China Short of a massive shock to the Northeast Asian regional system through war or the advent of global depression, it is difficult to see how China’s stunning rise as a great power will not continue to be a central feature of the region for the foreseeable future. China has the world’s fastest growing economy with an annual growth rate that has hovered between 7 to 9 percent of GDP since the late 1990s. This has been accompanied by an awesome expansion of trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) in the country, with China now the world’s single largest recipient of FDI.80 But the most striking dimension of China’s economic power lies in the projections of its upward trajectory in coming decades. Most analysts agree that China’s economy will probably continue to grow at its current pace for at least the next two decades and, contingent on sustained internal cohesion and continued reform, some claim its GDP could well double over the next ten years.81 Although fraught with some uncertainty, conservative projections indicate that China will surpass the United States as the largest economy in the international system (in absolute terms) early in the second half of the twenty-first century.82 If realized, this will be a truly remarkable achievement for a country that, up until the late 1970s, had one of the least developed economies in Asia. Inevitably, China’s rapid economic ascent has had significant flow-on effects in improving Beijing’s ability to modernize its conventional and nuclear force assets since the end of the cold war, as well as increasing China’s political and diplomatic clout in foreign capitals. This newfound influence has been carefully cultivated by Beijing, with considerable effort being devoted to improving China’s diplomatic reach.83 Its spectacular economic performance, while generally regarded as positive and as a unique opportunity for foreign investors, has also stirred debate about whether China will remain content to play a benign leadership role in Northeast Asia or pursue a more aggressive posture aimed at securing regional hegemony. Quite often, the choices for “managing” China’s rise are portrayed in starkly negative terms of either accommodation or confrontation. China’s stunning economic performance, it is claimed, has laid the foundation for a drive toward regional domination in Northeast Asia. Countries can either adjust to China’s inevitable endeavors to exercise hegemony in regional affairs, or they can bandwagon to contain China’s hegemonic ambitions.84 However, it is not clear that Chinese elites themselves harbor such grand long-term designs in Northeast Asia. Indeed, much of the debate over China’s rise has occurred through the rather narrow prism of whether it will challenge U.S. policy preferences in the region.85 Often overlooked is how deeply interdependent China’s bilateral relations with regional states have already become and the extent to which China itself remains acutely dependent on continued peace and stability in Northeast Asia. Along with the United States, China has become the single most important trading partner

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for Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and the trend is that it will become the dominant economic partner for all three states over the next decade.86 This is despite ongoing bilateral tensions over a number of unresolved strategic issues. Yet, it is overly simplistic to assume that China alone is gaining economic leverage over these countries that it will be able to use unilaterally for its own strategic purpose at some future point. As Nanto and Chanlett-Avery point out, “Not only are Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea becoming more dependent on China, but China is also becoming more dependent on their economies for imports and exports.”87 Moreover, China’s upward economic trajectory will remain vulnerable to external shocks and domestic turmoil, and Chinese analysts themselves emphasize the considerable challenges facing Beijing, including the difficult coordination of economic and social development and projected domestic energy shortfalls.88 Addressing both of these challenges will be made all the more difficult in the event of instability, tensions, or conflict in Northeast Asia. Thus, on any objective assessment, Beijing has compelling national interest incentives to avoid any conflict in Northeast Asia, including any armed confrontation against Taiwan. Undeveloped Multilateral Security Institutions Most analysts tend to regard well-developed multilateral security institutions as an important ingredient for regional stability in the international system. Apart from the recently instituted Six-Party Talks, Northeast Asian states have not developed a multilateral institutional framework to address regional security issues. Regional states belong to Asia-wide institutions, including the ARF and the East Asia Summit (EAS) that had its first meeting in December 2005. But these bodies deal with security issues in only a generic fashion, and do not focus directly on outstanding security issues in East Asia. Moreover, steered as they are by ASEAN group members who place a premium on preserving their authority over Asian multilateralism as a way of blunting American and Chinese influence in Southeast Asia, neither the ARF nor the EAS have the institutional capacity to go beyond ritualistic declarations of “common concern” and “identity building.”89 Achieving little substantive progress since the mid-1990s when it was set up, the ARF has failed to demonstrate its relevance to tackling the more intense security dilemmas and challenges in Northeast Asia.90 The tentative nature of security institutions in Asia is in stark contrast to the situation in Europe where there is a long tradition of countries readily ceding key elements of their sovereignty to supranational institutions, particularly the European Union (EU) and NATO. Europe’s security dynamics are deeply intertwined with regional multilateral institutions forums such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and virtually all European countries have committed themselves to

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dealing with major security challenges within the framework of existing multilateral institutions.91 Multilateral security institutions have always struggled to take root in Northeast Asia. As noted earlier in this chapter, the region’s cold war environment, with its acute emphasis on East-West zero-sum strategic logic, was never conducive to institutionalized cooperation among states on security issues. And, contrary to expectations, there was negligible support within the region for the creation of a multilateral security architecture following the end of the cold war. This was despite separate formal proposals in the early 1990s from Canada and Mongolia for the creation of regional security architecture to formalize dialogue and negotiations on key security issues between regional states and the United States and Russia.92 While the emergence of the first North Korean nuclear crisis in 1993–94 helped forge limited multilateral cooperation between key players on the peninsula, proposals for more formal, European-style security institutions met with a decidedly ambivalent response from most regional states. Although Japan and South Korea signaled a willingness to support the establishment of a formal dialogue process between all regional states, China and the United States remained wary of committing themselves to multilateral interaction on security issues that could potentially include the Taiwan Strait and the future of the American force presence in Northeast Asia.93 Consequently, aside from the irregular Six-Party Talks, Northeast Asian states have had no real engagement on regional security issues at the multilateral level. What factors explain the dearth of multilateral security institutions in Northeast Asia? At least three major factors suggest themselves. The most obvious is that the region has little practical experience with multilateralism as an instrument of diplomacy at the security, economic, or broader political level. As alluded to earlier, this is the product of a distinctive lack of collective identity among countries in Northeast Asia and a strong emphasis on exclusively bilateral contacts, particularly on security issues. By contrast, in Southeast Asia, ASEAN has played a critical role in fostering a sense of regionalism among member states and nonmember states alike, and has served to enshrine multilateral diplomacy as a conventional mode of interaction among states.94 Second, the notion of an established hierarchy among regional states retains stronger appeal in Northeast Asia than arguably any other region in the international system. Hierarchy among states has a wellestablished tradition in Asia generally, and up until the nineteenth century, China was seen as “the dominant state and the peripheral states as secondary states or ‘vassals.’” This is in sharp contrast to the Western tradition that stresses formal equality between states.95 Residual elements of this tradition have dissipated to a much greater extent in Southeast Asia than in Northeast Asia where there is greater resistance among the major powers to subjecting themselves to the uncertainties of multilateral processes on an equal footing

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with countries they deem to be “lesser” powers. Third, and finally, the principle of sovereignty remains highly prized among Northeast Asian states. Regional states tend to value traditional Westphalian notions of sovereignty more highly than their European counterparts. As a result, they have been generally more suspicious of multilateral forums with the (perceived) potential to dilute key aspects of their sovereign prerogative on important security issues. Even in Southeast Asia, where states have been more comfortable engaging in multilateral diplomacy under the rubric of ASEAN, regional institutions have been “sovereignty conforming” rather than genuinely supranational in the European mold.96 For some time, Northeast Asia’s absence of multilateral security institutions has been interpreted in a negative light in the academic literature. In large part, this has been a corollary of analysts using Europe as the benchmark for measuring progress in Northeast Asia’s regional security. The view often put forward is that Northeast Asia “lags behind” Europe in its ability to manage its security affairs due to the absence of multilateral security institutions.97 Yet, this tendency to equate the development of institutional security mechanisms with regional security is somewhat misleading. In adopting this approach, there is a risk that multilateral security institutions of the OSCE type are viewed as ends in themselves rather than a means to promoting conflict avoidance among states. It is worth pointing out that despite its lack of security institutions, with the exception of the brief Sino-Soviet border armed clash in 1969, Northeast Asia has not experienced armed conflict since the Korean War of 1950–53, while Europe was the site of large-scale civil war and interstate conflict in the Balkans for most of the post–cold war era. Moreover, treating Europe as the yardstick for gauging progress in Northeast Asia assumes that interstate relations in Asia as a whole will necessarily mirror historical and contemporary trends in Europe. As Kang observes, “Because Europe was so important for so long a period, in seeking to understand international relations, scholars have often simply deployed concepts, theories and experiences derived from the European experience to project onto and explain Asia. This approach is problematic at best.”98 In short, the assumption that Northeast Asia requires robust multilateral security institutions to manage contemporary and future security challenges is not as selfevident as some imply.

CONCLUSION This chapter has provided an overview of the primary security and strategic dynamics underlying Northeast Asia’s regional order since World War II. Two major themes emerge from the preceding analysis. First, the legacy of the cold war in Northeast Asia is enduring in the sense that many of the hallmarks of the region’s security landscape can be traced directly to East-West

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rivalry after 1945. Major power rivalry, unresolved territorial divisions on the Korean peninsula, and the region’s dearth of multilateral security institutions are all a legacy of cold war geopolitics in the region. Of all the regions in the international system, nowhere has the cold war had more of a long-lasting influence than in Northeast Asia. Second, notwithstanding differences among key regional states, and the potential for simmering major power rivalry, all states in Northeast Asia—even North Korea—appear committed to maintaining a strategic equilibrium despite the absence of multilateral security institutions and changing power balances since the end of the cold war. The fact that there has been no armed conflict in Northeast Asia since 1969 demonstrates that conflict avoidance is indeed possible in the region in the absence of well-developed multilateral security institutions. How nuclear weapons fit into the regional context outlined in this chapter provides the focus of the remainder of this book.

C

H A P T E R

2

THE FAILING STRATEGY OF NUCLEAR NONPROLIFERATION American scholar Brad Roberts has characterized the academic debate over nuclear nonproliferation as one that can essentially be boiled down to a disagreement between those “who believe we can still fight and win the nonproliferation battle, and those who argue that it’s long past time to toss in the towel and prepare more seriously for the messier world to come.”1 This is a useful distillation of the debate, but there is a serious imbalance in the representation of these two perspectives in the literature and in the policy world: by far the dominant view is that the strategy of nonproliferation remains the best approach for dealing with nuclear proliferation in international relations. With the majority of analysts in the academy and government taking a pessimistic view of nuclear proliferation, there is a general skepticism toward other alternative management strategies, including increased emphasis on deterrence, and a popular view that the nuclear nonproliferation regime, with the NPT as its centerpiece, provides the optimal means for addressing the phenomenon of nuclear proliferation internationally. The regime may not be perfect, but according to advocates of this perspective, it is the best the international community has been able to come up and is therefore worth preserving. This chapter challenges this orthodox perspective and outlines why the global nuclear nonproliferation regime provides an inadequate foundation for providing nuclear security in Northeast Asia today and into the future. I argue that policy makers, scholars, and general publics more broadly need to move beyond the unrealistic view that nuclear proliferation is something that can be prevented in international relations toward a realization that nuclear proliferation is an inevitable, if not necessarily desirable, feature of the international system that needs to be managed carefully. In particular, the increasingly

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unsustainable formal division between the nuclear haves and have-nots in international politics, along with the nonproliferation regime’s structural inability to recognize the legitimacy of new and emerging nuclear states, serves to promote misperception and unnecessary risk taking on the part of individual states. Persisting with the failing strategy of nonproliferation in these circumstances is a recipe for long-term instability and insecurity in Northeast Asia.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: PREVAILING ORTHODOXY One of the least contested claims in the international relations literature is that the contemporary nuclear nonproliferation regime based on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) should be preserved at almost any cost.2 Although proponents of this view frequently concede that the Treaty is flawed in a number of respects, they argue that no viable alternatives exist to preserve nuclear stability in the international system. Consequently, states must persist with the present set of nonproliferation arrangements because they are, in effect, the best the international community of nations has been able to come up with. This argument is based on the rationale that it is better to persevere with a flawed set of arrangements aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear capabilities throughout the international system than to have no nonproliferation regime at all. The issue of “sunk costs” is also an important consideration for supporters of the contemporary nonproliferation regime. They argue that, in addition to “opening the floodgates” to increased nuclear proliferation worldwide, jettisoning the NPT regime would squander years of painstaking effort on the part of the international community to build up a host of Treaty-based norms, nuclear safeguards, and export control groups that have played a critical role in dissuading individual states from going nuclear. Since the detonation of the first atomic device in 1945, accepted wisdom has been that the spread of nuclear weapons represents a negative development in international relations. States themselves have held strongly to this perspective (except of course when they or their closest allies have been doing the proliferating), and this orthodox perspective continues to dominate virtually every facet of academic discussion of nuclear weapons and international politics. The fact that gloomy assessments pervade almost all assessments of nuclear proliferation owes much to the long-standing and pervasive influence of the proliferation pessimist school within the Western strategic studies community. This orthodox perspective is in stark contrast to the views held by the small minority of analysts who place themselves in the “proliferation optimist” camp.3 The latter argue that the spread of nuclear weapons internationally will actually contribute to global security by making major armed conflict less likely. According to this perspective, states will be more inclined

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to exercise greater caution in their strategic policies and behavior when facing nuclear-armed opponents. Proliferation optimists believe that states will behave rationally and that they will, as a consequence, be deterred from risking the initiation of hostilities with other nuclear powers. Because of their sheer destructive power, nuclear weapons, it is argued, play an important stabilizing role in international relations largely irrespective of which countries possess them. Countries will avoid nuclear war due to the rationality of their political leadership.4 Proliferation pessimists vehemently reject the arguments of the proliferation optimists. In particular, they are convinced that the more countries possessing nuclear weapons, the greater the danger of nuclear conflict. Put another way, the probability of nuclear weapons being used increases exponentially the greater the number of countries that acquire them as part of their national arsenals.5 The arguments of the proliferation pessimist school can be summarized as follows.6 Nuclear weapons are simply too dangerous and too destabilizing for any state to have as part of its national armory because new nuclear states will struggle, technologically and doctrinally, to institute responsible “deterrence friendly” nuclear postures following acquisition. Proliferation pessimists argue that any spread of nuclear weapons— regardless of contextual or contingent factors—represents a blow to stability in international politics. Those operating within this school are less concerned about the nuclear arsenals of the established five nuclear powers, and more anxious about the capabilities and behavior of new nuclear states. They remain unconvinced that new and emerging nuclear weapon states will behave as responsibly as the established nuclear weapon states with their newly acquired strategic power, and argue that the lack of experience of freshly minted nuclear powers will increase instability and insecurity by raising the likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used either intentionally or by accident. One of the key arguments uniting all proliferation pessimists is that deterrence—defined as the ability to dissuade an adversary from using force through the credible threat of unacceptable punishment—will be highly problematic to achieve in an international environment populated by new nuclear powers. According to this interpretation, given their “strategic immaturity,” new nuclear states will struggle to formulate doctrines and hone capabilities that enable them to maintain crisis stability with other nuclear powers, including established nuclear powers. Many, if not all, of these new nuclear powers will have conventionally weaker militaries and will therefore have a greater incentive than conventionally stronger powers like the United States to employ nuclear weapons as coercive instruments earlier, rather than later, in any conflict scenario. Under these circumstances, it is claimed, there will be increased pressure from policy makers to ensure that nuclear weapons can be launched on minimum warning time. Consequently, nuclear weapons will be deployed on hair-trigger alert postures where the risks of premature or accidental

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launch is that much greater.7 Another concern expressed by proliferation pessimists relating to deterrence is that some leaders of new nuclear powers simply cannot be deterred, because they are not rational actors who will abide by the moral code accepted by the big nuclear powers—that countries should aim to do everything within their power to avoid nuclear use.8 In sum, proliferation pessimists are skeptical that new nuclear states will adhere to Glenn Snyder’s widely quoted maxim that deterrence can be maintained “by weapons which would have no rational use for defence should deterrence fail.”9 An argument closely associated with the case put forward by proliferation pessimists in the literature is that the NPT, the international safeguards system, and the various nonproliferation export control agreements that have been developed since the late 1960s have made the world a safer place than it would otherwise have been by making it harder for states to attain the requisite technological means to acquire nuclear weapons.10 Moreover, the web of treaty commitments and attendant normative pressures have dissuaded and deterred those countries otherwise attracted to the nuclear option by significantly raising the political, economic, and strategic costs of acquiring nuclear weapons. The fact that only a handful of states have openly acquired nuclear weapons since the NPT came into force in 1970 is cited as evidence that the Treaty has in fact worked. As one author has observed, “The NPT has been a positive influence. Indeed, as is often pointed out, the rather modest number of countries who possess nuclear weapons today is a far cry from what some of the pessimistic forecasts of earlier decades suggested.”11 The assumed causal linkage between the existence of the NPT over the last three and a half decades and the small number of newly declared nuclear weapons states that have emerged since 1970 is held up as a powerful tool to fend off criticism from those who would challenge the Treaty’s effectiveness and that of the nonproliferation regime more broadly. Adherents to this perspective argue that prior to the advent of the NPT (to paraphrase Hedley Bull), those countries that had the capacity to acquire nuclear weapons would have eventually acquired the will to go nuclear if faced with no formal obstacles to this natural evolutionary path taking its course.12 Supporters of the NPT have claimed that because commentators in the early to mid-1960s predicted the emergence of anywhere from between fifteen to thirty new nuclear powers in the international system during the 1970s, the fact that this did not transpire is a credit to the NPT and the various instruments of the nonproliferation regime.13 They also often refer to former President Kennedy’s widely quoted statement in 1963 that up to twenty nuclear powers could emerge in the subsequent decade unless formal multilateral steps were taken to arrest nuclear proliferation internationally.14 Since the end of the cold war, a striking point of convergence between the rhetoric of states and the writings of those in the academic community has been the argument that existing nonproliferation mechanisms are worth preserving

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because they offer the best chance to achieve a secure nuclear future. Most analysts have focused on recommendations they argue would strengthen the various “loopholes” in the NPT and thus bolster the credibility of the Treaty internationally. These include making it more difficult for countries to withdraw from the Treaty and punishing those that go down this track.15 Others maintain that those faithfully adhering to the NPT as non-nuclear weapons states should be given greater rewards and incentives, including increased security of nuclear fuel supply and infrastructure support for their domestic civil nuclear industries.16 Policy makers also continue to make these sorts of pro-NPT regime arguments publicly, in spite of mounting evidence that the regime has enjoyed mixed success at best in inhibiting proliferation pressures worldwide. Even the Bush administration, which has been widely criticized for its general skepticism toward formal arms control, and which openly recognizes that the NPT regime is flawed, has been careful to emphasize that the United States is determined to build on existing nonproliferation arrangements rather than dispense with them in search of alternative measures.17 Two key arguments underpin the view that the existing nuclear nonproliferation regime is worth preserving in spite of its various flaws. The first, and the most salient, is that the collapse of the NPT and the nonproliferation regime as a whole would subvert the “norm” of nuclear nonproliferation internationally. This hypothesis is predicated on the claim that “there is now a clear consensus in favor of international norms designed to reduce the nuclear threat and marginalize or reduce nuclear weapons completely.”18 This claim flows in large part from the core propositions of liberal regime theory that hold that principles, procedures, norms, or rules governing specific issue areas in world politics exert considerable influence over time in shaping the policy preferences of individual states and help to mitigate the worst effects of international anarchy.19 Advocates of this position maintain that like the norm of nuclear nonuse, which has become more powerful since 1945, the norm of nuclear nonacquisition has been strengthened since the advent of the NPT in 1970.20 It is argued that the norm of nonproliferation has acquired powerful currency both as a result of the NPT’s near universal membership and the Treaty’s role in spawning a host of subsidiary agreements covering nuclear safeguards and nuclear export controls.21 According to this perspective, were the Treaty and its ancillary agreements to disappear, the normative potency of nonproliferation would inevitably evaporate. This would lower the cost to states determined to acquire nuclear weapons and substantially weaken the normative barriers for those nuclear-capable states that have traditionally been dissuaded from acquiring nuclear weapons. The second key claim supporting the view that contemporary nonproliferation instruments must be preserved as a matter of priority is that while there may be weaknesses in the nonproliferation regime, it is nevertheless worth retaining because it can be further improved over time by updating

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and adapting key elements to address changing circumstances.22 Proponents of this view identify specific past instances of improvement, such as the periodic updating of export control list items by leading international nuclear suppliers after revelations concerning a series of illicit nuclear transfers during the 1970s and 1980s, and the strengthening of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards in the wake of discoveries surrounding Iraq’s nuclear program following the 1991 Gulf War.23 They also argue that the NPT itself can be amended by Treaty parties to address new challenges, including opaque proliferation of the type that North Korea engaged in for much of the 1990s and that Iran is widely suspected of currently pursuing.24 For advocates of this position, criticism of the NPT is misplaced. In sum, unless critics of the Treaty can come up with a better set of alternative arrangements, it makes no sense to dispense with an agreement that, at the very least, provides an existing template for international endeavors to prevent nuclear proliferation in the twenty-first century.

THE NPT

IN

CRISIS

Since the NPT came into force in 1970, observers have occasionally argued that the nuclear nonproliferation regime is confronting a looming crisis.25 Indeed, it is probably fair to say that commentary on the NPT has tended to swing between guarded optimism about its long-term future and deep pessimism about its prospects for remaining intact. The primary driver of pessimistic assessments about the NPT’s long-term future has been the belief that the core bargain underlying the Treaty is unsustainable over the longer term. Central to the NPT’s legitimacy as an instrument of nonproliferation is the structural compact it contains between the declared nuclear weapons states—Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States—and the remaining non–nuclear weapons states. When the Treaty was negotiated in the second half of the 1960s, parties agreed that in return for the commitment of non-nuclear states refraining from acquiring nuclear weapons, the nuclear weapon states would commit themselves to undertake a process of nuclear disarmament (under Article VI of the Treaty). This would, over time, open the door to concluding “a treaty on general and complete disarmament.” In the meantime, all nuclear weapons states would exercise restraint in their force levels and in their respective strategic doctrines. Another pivotal bargain was that, as a quid pro quo for forswearing nuclear weapons, non–nuclear weapon states (particularly those in the developing world) would be able to partake in “the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy” (Article IV). Often overlooked by supporters of the nonproliferation provisions of the NPT is that the Treaty tacitly endorses states building up substantial civil nuclear programs to a point

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where the distinction between peaceful and military-related nuclear activities is difficult to discern, even when individual states are cooperating fully with the IAEA in implementing safeguards agreements. Distinguishing between peaceful and military programs becomes virtually impossible if a state is not complying faithfully with all of its safeguards obligations. Significantly, activities that can be used to develop a weapons program, including uranium enrichment and the manufacture of reactor-grade plutonium, were not prohibited under the Treaty because these activities remain justifiable as critical steps toward attaining an advanced domestic nuclear industry, a right that Article IV of the NPT enshrines for non–nuclear weapon state members. There remained some controversy during the cold war about whether all parties were delivering their side of these various Treaty bargains. This was evidenced at successive NPT review conferences between 1975 and 1990 that were, more often than not, characterized by spirited debate between nonnuclear states and the nuclear powers over the implementation of the Treaty in practice. Typically, the nuclear powers insisted they were doing all they could to deliver progress on disarmament given the imperative of nuclear force modernization during the cold war. Many non-nuclear states, however, criticized the nuclear powers for their lack of progress toward disarmament. They also protested that they were not being rewarded sufficiently for abjuring the nuclear option by being cut out of international nuclear markets or subject to excessive scrutiny over their use of nuclear energy by one or more of the nuclear powers. Yet while the key bargains underpinning the NPT were the subject of vigorous debate, the Treaty itself actually survived the cold war in relatively sound shape. Despite cold war tensions, all parties have reaffirmed their commitment to the NPT’s objectives at successive five-year review conferences, and there had been no withdrawals from the Treaty. As William Walker has argued, this can be explained in large part by a broader perception among the majority of countries that the international nuclear order, though characterized by glaring asymmetries and structural discrimination, was nevertheless based on a degree of mutual obligation and reciprocity that conferred an important semblance of legitimacy on the global nonproliferation regime: It rested heavily upon the notion that the possession of nuclear weapons by the five acknowledged powers was a temporary trust and a trust that could be extended to no other nation-state. By the same token, the political settlement that underpinned the nuclear order implied that only one of its pillars, the system of abstinence, possessed true and lasting legitimacy. All states should work together, over time, to dissolve the system of deterrence—to create an international order in which nuclear weapons would no longer be present. This implied that any future transformation in power structure could not entail, or be precipitated by, the nuclear

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arming of emergent powers: the nuclear empowerment of aspiring states that had followed the Second World War was a “once and for all” phenomenon.26

Whether this was ever a realistic set of aims that states genuinely regarded as attainable, or merely a political fig leaf to mask the power asymmetries inherent in the cold war nuclear order, is an open question. Whatever the case, it is increasingly clear that the legitimacy of this order has not been sustained since the end of the cold war and that the NPT and the nonproliferation regime more broadly confronts an acute legitimacy crisis. The depth of this legitimacy crisis can be appreciated by briefly considering the outcome of the most recent NPT review conference in 2005 that exposed serious deficiencies in the existing nonproliferation regime. Between May 2 and May 27, 2005, representatives from more than one hundred and fifty states party to the most significant multilateral nuclear treaty in the world gathered in New York to undertake a regular five-year review of the NPT. Historically, NPT review conferences have sought to explore ways in which the operation of the Treaty can be improved and whether there is scope for enhanced cooperation between parties on nonproliferation issues, particularly in the area of nuclear safeguards. Consensus has not always been possible, and parties to the Treaty have not always been able to reach agreement on a final document at the end of review conferences— they were, for instance, unable to reach agreement in 1980 and 1990. However, the proceedings of the 2005 NPT review conference were distinguished by an especially striking level of tension and sharp disagreement among NPT member states. There was deep rancor between some states concerning a host of related international developments (including the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the basis of incorrect claims about weapons of mass destruction), resentment from some states over what they regarded as unfair treatment under the Treaty, and barely concealed despair on the part of the Treaty’s strongest supporters over its very future. Perhaps not surprisingly against this backdrop, the conference ended in failure with the conference president unable to issue a final declaration reflecting parties’ endorsement of principles to guide international nonproliferation efforts up until the next review conference in 2010.27 Stripped of diplomatic nuance, states belonging to a thirty-five-year-old Treaty were unable to agree on the very principles to guide implementation of the Treaty. Surveying the postconference wreckage, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan predicted that the failure of NPT members to reach a final declaration was “bound to weaken the Treaty.”28 The outstanding feature of the 2005 NPT review conference was the further entrenchment of deep-seated tensions between Treaty members. As noted, tension and enmity has for some time been a feature of NPT review conferences and member states have, in the past, struggled to reach consensus on final

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conference declarations. Dating back to the first review conference in 1975, disagreements between Treaty members have centered almost exclusively on the gulf separating the nuclear haves and have-nots as defined under the NPT.29 Predictably, all five nuclear powers have each maintained (with an impressive degree of unity) that the most important components of the Treaty are those committing non-nuclear weapon states to refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons. Equally predictable is the preoccupation of most non-nuclear weapon states with enforcing those provisions mandating the full exploitation of nuclear energy and progress toward nuclear disarmament by the nuclear weapons states. One of the more bizarre outcomes in the history of NPT conferences—and one that exemplifies the inherent inconsistencies of the Treaty—was the failure of members at the 1995 review and extension conference to agree on the principles to guide implementation of the Treaty, despite agreement being reached on extending the Treaty indefinitely without amendments.30 Apparently, agreement on making a Treaty permanent was not dependent on all parties agreeing on whether it had been implemented properly! Since the 2000 NPT review conference, where the five nuclear weapons states agreed to “thirteen practical steps towards disarmament” to supplement their existing disarmament commitment under the Treaty, ill feeling and distrust had been building between much of “the West and the Rest” over fundamental boilerplate issues relating to how the Treaty operates.31 This was very much in evidence throughout the various conflict-ridden preparatory committee meetings leading into the 2005 review conference.32 On the one side remain those Western states, led by the United States, and including the United Kingdom and Australia, who argue that the Treaty must include stronger preventative mechanisms to stop non-nuclear parties effectively becoming threshold nuclear states while at the same time remaining members of the NPT. In particular, they argue that the Treaty’s permissive provisions under Article IV for civil nuclear development must consistently be treated as subordinate to the NPT’s core nonproliferation provisions contained in Article I and Article II. This group of countries also wants any withdrawal from the Treaty to be referred to the UN Security Council. They point out that North Korea’s withdrawal from the NPT in January 2003 was preceded by a concerted and successful attempt by Pyongyang to acquire a nuclear weapons capability, despite its non-nuclear status under the Treaty. They claim that if other potential offenders are to be deterred from using North Korea’s “breakout” strategy as a template, the NPT must embrace more assertive measures against members who would seek to undermine its credibility and effectiveness as a nonproliferation instrument.33 On the other side of the argument are those countries, many of whom form part of the traditional Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) group of states, who maintain that the Western states’ proposals to improve the Treaty are

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little more than a U.S.-led ruse to reinforce discrimination against non-Western powers in the areas of nuclear supply and self sufficiency, and divert attention from America’s failure to observe the spirit and letter of the NPT by not supporting global arms control in other areas. They point to the U.S. refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1999, the Bush administration’s missile defense–inspired withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, Washington’s decision to reemphasize the role of nuclear weapons in American military doctrine as reflected in the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, and the Bush administration’s ambitious program to substantially upgrade the qualitative strength of U.S. nuclear forces.34 Much of this sentiment has been exacerbated by the view that the Bush administration has downgraded in importance American multilateral commitments in most areas of foreign policy. Overlaying all of this is a backlash among NAM members in particular against what they see as unbridled U.S. unilateralism since the 9/11 attacks, with American-led military action against Iraq acting as a potent lightning rod for this discontent.35 As the failure of the 2005 NPT review conference illustrates, the difference in views between these two camps is profound. This is despite the formation in 1998 of the “New Agenda Coalition” whose stated aim was to bridge the divide between nuclear weapons states and the non–nuclear weapons states.36 The United States and allies such as the United Kingdom are frustrated over the ease with which individual member states can undertake covert weapons-related research and development while at the same time remaining a non–nuclear weapon state under the NPT, with all of the political legitimacy and relative impunity this confers in large sections of the international community. These same countries are justified in the view that Iran has, at best, skirted the permissible legal bounds of its NPT obligations and, at worst, treated the NPT with contempt by failing to declare all of its nuclear sites to the IAEA prior to 2003, despite having had a bilateral safeguards agreement with the Agency since 1974.37 Equally, however, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Washington has something of a diplomatic vendetta against Iran that can be traced to that country’s 1978–79 Islamic revolution and the subsequent 1979–81 hostage crisis. Iran has used this argument to some effect in deflecting international criticism, while garnering popular international support from countries in the Middle East and elsewhere by questioning Washington’s unwillingness to place pressure on its longtime ally Israel to accede to the NPT. Moreover, the United States has done little to counter the impression internationally that it regards any form of arms control as an encumbrance. Even close allies such as Australia have expressed frustration over Washington’s refusal to seriously consider an agreement that would cut off the global production of fissile material.38 A fissile material cutoff is an initiative most analysts agree would considerably lessen the prospects of weapons-grade

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material being passed to terrorist groups.39 But most significant of all is that at every NPT conference between 1975 and 2000, U.S. officials pulled out all stops in an attempt to broker a final declaration. Seasoned observers have identified pointed American indifference to negotiating a final declaration at the 2005 review conference consistent with its negative posture at the UN General Assembly Summit in September the same year when U.S. diplomats deliberately stymied attempts to insert a section in the final Summit document on arms control and disarmament.40 This has occurred in a context where Bush administration officials have made it clear that they do not regard the United States as being bound by the “Clinton era” commitment to the “thirteen steps” agreed to at the 2000 review conference.41 Almost all nonproliferation analysts, irrespective of their political persuasion, note that committed and active American leadership is indeed central to maintaining the nuclear nonproliferation regime. During the 1990s, when the international community began to wrestle with a rapidly changing global nuclear climate, concerned observers were able to fall back on the assumption that the nonproliferation regime would continue to be underwritten by U.S. political leadership and strategic weight being brought to bear before potential crises had a chance to rear their head.42 Yet, in light of recent American behavior, U.S. leadership in the area of nuclear nonproliferation is something that can no longer be taken for granted. The Bush administration’s controversial decision to conclude a large-scale bilateral deal with India in March 2006 to provide advanced U.S. reactor technology and other nuclear assistance to Delhi—despite India’s firm refusal to accede to the NPT—indicates that the United States is not particularly concerned about weakening the authority of the NPT if considerations about the Treaty conflict directly with broader strategic objectives, in this case fostering a strategic partnership with India aimed in part at checking China’s influence in Asia.43 In concluding such an agreement with a non-NPT member state, critics point out that the United States has effectively diluted the coherence of the nonproliferation regime in three critical respects.44 First, the deal undermines the NPT by signalling to other states that Washington is willing to reward non-NPT members that it judges as having—to quote Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—“a good record in terms of proliferation to third countries.”45 That is, because India has not exported nuclear technologies or nuclear equipment to other countries, it should be rewarded and its refusal to sign the NPT overlooked. Second, the agreement seriously compromises decades of painstaking effort by key nuclear export control groups to tighten preconditions for nuclear supply by legitimizing nuclear exports to an NPT nonmember state that has refused to be subject to either full-scope safeguards or the IAEA Additional Protocol.46 And third, critics point out that the United States risks triggering widespread doubts among other states about Washington’s own commitment to the NPT regime, with the potential effect

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that these states may reassess their own investment in the nonproliferation regime accordingly. The bottom line is that a United States increasingly detached from multilateral nonproliferation processes spells trouble for the future of the nonproliferation project internationally.

STRUCTURAL DEFICIENCIES

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Since the demise of the cold war in the late 1980s, nuclear proliferation pressures across the international system have remained buoyant, rather than dissipated. This is significant for two reasons. The first is that nuclear weapons were a product of cold war security dynamics and proliferation trends between 1945 and 1990 were usually the product of strategic calculations about the nature of East-West confrontation. The second reason why persistent proliferation pressures are significant is that most observers in the immediate aftermath of the cold war predicted that the currency of nuclear weapons as strategic commodities in international relations would decline. Allied with the first point, observers argued that without the acute dilemmas posed by the cold war, states would have even fewer incentives to seek nuclear weapons and that proliferation pressures would diminish as a result.47 More importantly, however, existing nonproliferation mechanisms have also signally failed to stem the diffusion of latent nuclear capabilities across the international system. Even countries that have traditionally been the most ardent supporters of the NPT recognize this fact. In a revealing observation at the 2005 NPT Review Conference, Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, noted that “we face a very different world than at the NPT’s entry into force. At that time, few countries had the capacity to build nuclear weapons. Today, some estimates suggest 35 to 40 countries could do so.”48 Furthermore, when this failure to stem proliferation pressures has become apparent, the international community has been unable, and in some cases unwilling, to address flaws in the nonproliferation regime as well as the broader consequences of these flaws. The case of North Korea is particularly noteworthy in this respect. After a diplomatic confrontation with Washington in the second half of 2002 over alleged weapons-related activities violating existing treaty obligations, in December that year North Korea announced that it was ending its commitment to the 1994 Agreed Framework. At the same time, it declared it would resume operations at its key nuclear facilities frozen under the 1994 agreement. Later that month, Pyongyang ejected all IAEA inspectors from North Korean territory and followed this up in January 2003 with a declaration that it was withdrawing from the NPT with immediate effect.49 Despite having been a member of the NPT since 1985 and although reiterating a commitment nine years later to cease all weapons-related activities under the Agreed Framework with the United States, conservative estimates are that North

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Korea acquired sufficient fissile material during the 1990s to manufacture anywhere from between two to six nuclear warheads. The DPRK’s October 2006 nuclear test confirms that Pyongyang has sufficient weapons-grade material to fuel an explosion and have enough left over to continue developing its nuclear weapons program.50 Over time, North Korea’s nuclear warheads will probably be fitted to delivery systems capable of striking targets in South Korea, Japan, and possibly the United States.51 Yet, despite the enormous blow to the integrity of the NPT and the nuclear nonproliferation regime more generally resulting from North Korea’s actions, the subsequent international response has been remarkably insipid. When the United States presented a draft resolution to other UN Security Council members in the first half of 2003 condemning Pyongyang for withdrawing from the NPT, China signaled that it would not hesitate to use its veto to block any draft that was tabled.52 Not until July 2006, three and a half years after the DPRK’s withdrawal from the NPT, did the Security Council formally “deplore” North Korea’s exit from the Treaty and then only in response to its testing of several missiles earlier that month.53 For its part, the Bush administration has been unwilling to use military coercion to enforce Pyongyang’s nonproliferation commitments, despite using this very rationale for action against Iraq two months after North Korea’s withdrawal from the NPT.54 The United States and China, as the two great powers in Northeast Asia, have sought to contain the North Korean nuclear issue by continuing to cosponsor a series of multilateral talks (the so-called Six-Party Talks) with the purported aim of persuading Pyongyang to wind back its nuclear program. Both countries have emphasized that these talks represent the only way forward, even in the face of North Korea’s 2006 nuclear test.55 In truth, the talks’ cosponsors are more likely to be pursuing the much more modest aim of keeping Pyongyang engaged in at least some form of dialogue on its nuclear program, no matter how unrealistic the goal of North Korean nuclear disarmament remains. In addition to North Korea, NPT member state Iran has emerged as a major proliferation concern since 2003. The discovery by the IAEA in 2003 that Iran had failed to declare all of its nuclear sites as required under its safeguards agreement with the Agency, along with Tehran’s public statements since that it has begun to enrich uranium, and the large-scale nature of its domestic nuclear program all suggest that Iran may have already decided to pursue North Korea’s NPT breakout strategy as something of a model. Some reports have indicated that Tehran is even receiving advice from North Korean military authorities on how best to protect its nuclear assets against military strikes.56 If the 2005 NPT review conference is any guide, the international community as a whole (as distinct from individual countries like the United States) will continue to react to Iran’s nuclear transgressions in a similar manner to those of North Korea. While the permanent five supported a

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Security Council resolution in July 2006 (Resolution 1696) condemning Iran for refusing to cease its uranium enrichment activities,57 there is little prospect that the UN Security Council will reach agreement on how to respond to Iran if, as seems likely, it continues to refuse to cease its activities.58 The failure of the five nuclear weapon states to agree to formally condemn North Korea’s withdrawal from the NPT in 2003 has inevitably undermined the potential for a truly united international response to Iran’s lack of transparency that, in turn, further subverts the credibility and effectiveness of the NPT as an instrument of nonproliferation. North Korea and Iran may be the most high-profile cases that have exposed serious structural weaknesses in the NPT regime, but other countries have either reached or crossed the threshold to possessing nuclear weapons. Israel, though never having been a member of the NPT, is widely assumed to possess a large-scale nuclear weapons arsenal, and there is little evidence that any of the five “legitimate” nuclear weapons states—including its superpower ally, the United States—have ever sought to exert any meaningful nonproliferation pressure on Tel Aviv, either before it crossed the threshold to nuclear possession in the late 1960s, or since. Notwithstanding its high-profile role as an NPT member of “high standing,” Japan is a virtual nuclear power with massive stocks of reactor-grade plutonium on its territory that could be used to manufacture nuclear warheads. It also has the scientific and technological infrastructure to quickly assemble a nuclear weapons force should the government in Tokyo decide to do so.59 Significantly, Japan has also demonstrated a highly advanced space launch vehicle capability that provides it with the future option of acquiring one of the most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile forces in the world.60 As Ariel Levite points out, since ratifying the NPT in 1976, Japan has acquired the wherewithal to weaponize a nuclear deterrent capability, and it now possesses a “standby nuclear capability that stops just short of actual weapons production—allowing Japan to remain within months of acquiring nuclear weapons.”61 In addition to concerns over the established cases of Israel and Japan, suspicions persist about the nuclear capabilities and intentions of several other states.62 As if this were not sufficiently disconcerting from the perspective of nonproliferation advocates, the nuclear export control groups set up during the cold war period have failed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons–related technology and material and have proven ill-equipped to deal with the increasingly complex transnational nature of illicit global nuclear commerce. This was illustrated most dramatically by revelations over the global reach of the A. Q. Khan network, named after the nationally revered long-time head of Pakistan’s nuclear establishment who headed the network. According to investigations carried out by a range of government agencies and nongovernment sources, the network was actively involved in coordinating, over a period of almost two decades, the delivery of a range of nuclear- and missile-related

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material and equipment across several states, including Pakistan, Iran, Libya, North Korea, China, Egypt, and Malaysia.63 This demonstrates that the focus of traditional supply side groups such as the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG)—which have been primarily concerned with tightening controls over exports by advanced first-tier nuclear suppliers—has been seriously misplaced. As the A. Q. Khan network illustrates, for all intents and purposes illicit nuclear trade has become a second-tier supplier phenomenon. It is the new nuclear powers outside the nonproliferation regime (with Pakistan and North Korea looming especially large) that have increasingly been the source of illicit nuclear transactions since the end of the cold war.64 This raises particular concerns about the potential access nonstate actors, especially terrorist groups, may gain to fissile material from insecure nuclear sites worldwide, or through direct transfers from states such as North Korea and Iran.65 In a revealing initiative that betrayed a serious lack of faith in the NPTsponsored export control process, in May 2003 the United States and a number of other countries agreed to cooperate in exchanging intelligence and physically intercepting illicit nuclear traffic on the high seas and at seaports and airports. Dubbed the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), it would, according to senior U.S. officials, “create a web of counter-proliferation partnerships through which proliferators will have difficulty in carrying out their trade in WMD and missile-related technology.”66 An ambitious enterprise, the PSI is a “coalition of the willing” arrangement that does not have the imprimatur of the UN Security Council. Its creation in May 2003 was essentially a vote of no-confidence in the capacity of existing NPT supplier networks to plug existing gaps in global export arrangements. Proposed initially by the United States as a direct response to fears that North Korea might be seeking to transfer fissile material beyond its borders, the PSI enjoys the backing of less than half of all NPT member states.67 Supporters of the PSI have pointed to the role it plays in supporting UN Security Council Resolution 1540 (passed in 2004), which urges all states to improve physical security over WMD related materials on their national territory and work toward universalizing export control standards.68 While one observer has claimed that the PSI “builds on decades of multilateral efforts to stymie proliferation,”69 in reality the PSI was largely a corollary of views in Washington and among several close U.S. allies that NPT export control groups remain ill-equipped to address the second-tier supplier challenge. However, it is noteworthy that some NPT members have been extremely wary about the U.S.-led PSI, and that actual and potential nuclear suppliers including China and India have so far refused to join. Moreover, the PSI has yet to gain the legitimizing imprimatur of the UN Security Council through appropriate resolutions, and some still believe its proposed interdiction function lacks a sufficient foundation in international law.70

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While traditional supply side controls have struggled to contain proliferation worldwide, it is important to note that the NPT itself was never intended to compel states to exercise proliferation restraint, much less act as a nonproliferation panacea.71 When the Treaty was concluded in 1970, it was on the clear understanding that most member states were opting “for a sort of provisional virginity making their nuclear abstention dependent on the non-occurrence of events that would force them to reconsider.”72 At the time, as now, there was no shortage of countries that had the technological wherewithal to acquire nuclear weapons. Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Sweden, and West Germany were all touted as possible nuclear weapons powers during the 1960s.73 The fact that these countries did not go nuclear after acceding to the NPT had less to do with any legal or normative constraints the Treaty imposed and more to do with hard-headed strategic calculations concerning the perceived credibility of extended security guarantees, the projected financial and political costs of going nuclear, and fears of triggering a matching nuclear response from regional peer competitors.74 As a number of states have demonstrated since 1945, if nuclear weapons are deemed necessary by policy makers to achieve national strategic objectives, national elites are more than willing to incur widespread international condemnation and risk inviting the use of blunter instruments by the international community, including economic sanctions. The point to stress is that the NPT, and the nonproliferation regime more generally, was never meant to provide a guarantee to the international community that member states would not acquire nuclear weapons. At best, multilateral nonproliferation instruments could only ever make the quest for nuclear weapons more problematic—and then only for those states that decided to faithfully observe their formal NPT commitments. The assumption that states outside the NPT, or those that refused to fully observe their Treaty commitments, would be subject to a form of de facto sanctioning by being cast outside the international mainstream has never really reflected the reality of the situation. Since the NPT came into force in 1970, the five permanent members of the Security Council have never let nonproliferation considerations cloud their strategic calculations when dealing with states outside the NPT. All five great powers have, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, engaged and/or supported India, Israel, and Pakistan, each of which has acquired a nuclear arsenal, and all three have made it very clear they have no intention of acceding to the NPT. The U.S.-India nuclear deal struck in 2006 further illuminates the degree of strategic expediency shaping the nonproliferation policies of the major powers. The simple truth is that for states such as India, Israel, and Pakistan, who decided not to join the Treaty, the NPT has provided no impediment whatsoever to their acquisition of nuclear weapons and the modernization of their respective nuclear force programs over time. Moreover, the idea of the NPT as a permanent obstacle to nuclear proliferation has always been a questionable assumption grounded more in wishful

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thinking than reality, in spite of the Treaty’s indefinite extension in 1995. Article X of the NPT allows countries to withdraw on a mere three months’ notice in the event they cite “extraordinary events” that “jeopardize [their] supreme interests.” The permissive nature of this withdrawal clause at the Treaty’s inception was, of course, no accident. Mirroring the negotiation of other international treaties, parties negotiating the NPT insisted that an escape clause be inserted into the Treaty. Without this, it is highly unlikely that the NPT would ever have gained the necessary number of signatories for it to come into force in 1970. Very few countries then or now are willing to provide an ironclad guarantee that they will not acquire nuclear weapons in perpetuity. Most governments worldwide simply do not like the idea of locking themselves forever into legal commitments that commit them not to acquire a particular class of weapon. Unless and until this long-standing and widely held view changes, achieving “irreversible” nuclear nonproliferation will remain a chimera.75 The most fervent proponents of nuclear nonproliferation have a tendency to treat the preservation of the NPT as an end in itself, as if the Treaty embodies a widely accepted baseline for how international nuclear relations should function. This may have been the case during the later cold war period, but it can no longer be sustained as a serious justification for retaining the Treaty today. The preservation of the NPT and the nonproliferation regime more broadly has always depended on achieving a reasonable global consensus that nonproliferation is a realistic goal worthy of certain sacrifices in foreign policy, not merely something that can be paid easy lip service on the international diplomatic circuit. As I have argued, this consensus over nonproliferation has broken down. The chances of it being rebuilt are extremely slim given the proliferation water that has already flowed under the NPT bridge since the end of the cold war. As one long-standing observer of global nuclear politics has remarked, since the end of the cold war, “the correlation between nuclear weapons and political influence has become increasingly apparent” and, in the area of nonproliferation diplomacy, “double standards and bad faith have been the rule rather than the exception.”76 The integrity of the NPT, and thus the coherence of the nonproliferation regime as a whole, has been fatally damaged by several specific developments since the early 1990s. The first, and the most important, has been the ongoing refusal of member states to implement key Articles of the NPT after its thirty-five years in operation. Not only is this evident with respect to the central nonproliferation provisions of the Treaty (North Korea, Iran), but also with the clear aversion of all five declared nuclear powers to embark on anything remotely resembling a process of negotiated disarmament as per Article VI of the NPT. The second development has been the lack of meaningful costs for India and Pakistan testing nuclear weapons in 1998. Indeed, as already noted, both countries have been vigorously courted by the major

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powers, particularly the United States, which has made it clear that it supports Pakistan as a “frontline” state in the “war on terror” and is moving forward to engage India as an indispensable “strategic partner” in balancing China’s influence in Asia. The third development that has seriously weakened the nonproliferation regime is the unwillingness of the international community—again, the Permanent Five UN Security Council members in particular—to unite quickly to formally condemn North Korea’s breakout from the NPT in 2003. Against the backdrop of buoyant proliferation pressures worldwide, the renewed emphasis on nuclear weapons in the strategic doctrines of all five nuclear weapon states under the NPT, and the continued fraying and possible collapse of the NPT regime over the next decade, greater attention needs to shift toward how best to manage nuclear proliferation as opposed to preventing it. This is no minor undertaking. It requires a major shift in mindset among policy makers, nonofficial security specialists, and general publics atlarge. It requires a frank admission that the global nonproliferation architecture that has been built up around the NPT over the last three and a half decades is simply not up to the task of preventing the spread of nuclear capabilities worldwide. Most important of all, it requires an acknowledgment on the part of interested stakeholders that, for as long as state sovereignty remains the dominant ordering principle in the international system, no nonproliferation system is capable of preventing states from going nuclear or acquiring the requisite capabilities to go down that path.77 Increasingly, and somewhat revealingly, the best defense that champions of the NPT can muster for retaining the Treaty is that it is worth hanging onto because there are no serious alternatives to stemming proliferation worldwide. Yet, as Michael Wesley observes, “the stakes are too high with nuclear weapons to rely on conventional risk analyses . . . it is dangerous to rely on a regime whose shortcomings are unlikely ever to be remedied.”78 Moreover, incorrectly maintaining that the Treaty and its associated safeguards and export controls can act as a viable stopgap against nuclear proliferation into the twenty-first century, when it has failed to do so since the end of the cold war, is an unhelpful diversion from thinking about how to integrate new nuclear powers such as India and Pakistan, and emerging nuclear powers such as North Korea, into the international nuclear community. The argument that the regime can be improved by closing key “loopholes” in the NPT such as its withdrawal provision may be true. But, as I have argued, assuming that agreement can be reached among NPT parties on such a controversial measure—when parties cannot not even agree to a declaration on how to implement the Treaty at the 2005 Review Conference—really does stretch credulity. In continuing to adhere to the anachronistic definition of a nuclear weapon state as one that has tested a nuclear device prior to 1967, the NPT

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denies the legitimacy of new and emerging nuclear states. This contributes to something of a “siege” mentality among policy makers in these states that in turn is accentuated when they receive mixed messages from the major powers about the relationship between strategic priorities and nonproliferation priorities. It also runs the risk that some states outside the NPT may become isolated from the international mainstream. Isolation leads to insularity that can reinforce opaqueness, misperception, and unnecessary risk taking. This fosters an environment where the dangers of miscalculation can flourish. This is clearly not an acceptable way forward for fostering nuclear stability in the twenty-first century. The logic of this general argument is especially compelling in relation to the situation in Northeast Asia, which potentially will experience the most acute nuclear proliferation pressures of any region in the international system in the first half of the twenty-first century.

CONCLUSION One of the central arguments of this book is that the time has come to move beyond the nonproliferation regime and explore viable alternative avenues for managing nuclear proliferation in Northeast Asia. For some time, it has been clear that the expectation that all states outside of a select few will continue to forgo the most powerful weapon on the face of the planet is simply not feasible as a long-term strategy for managing nuclear weapons in general, and nuclear proliferation in particular. I have argued that the nuclear nonproliferation regime is in a state of terminal disrepair and that a new policy agenda is required if international nuclear stability is to be maintained in the years ahead. Rather than remaining fixated on preventing nuclear proliferation, those in government and in the academic world should begin devoting greater attention to examining how proliferation might be managed when it occurs in the early decades of the twenty-first century. For the purpose of this book, acknowledging that the nonproliferation regime is rapidly outliving its usefulness in a world where the legitimacy of a formal two-tier nuclear international system has clearly broken down is an important first step toward exploring alternative management strategies with respect to nuclear proliferation in Northeast Asia. The following two chapters examine case studies that test how this might work in practice.

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TWO CASE STUDIES

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CAN A NUCLEAR-ARMED NORTH KOREA BE MANAGED? For regional governments in Northeast Asia, a nuclear-armed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) represents a major policy challenge. How states adapt and respond to this challenge will critically shape the regional security environment in Northeast Asia for years, possibly decades, to come. The orthodox view of North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is that it represents a major threat to strategic stability in Northeast Asia. Some analysts tend to assume that the regime in Pyongyang is irrational and therefore incapable of the responsible behavior required of a nuclear power. Those who attribute more deliberate motives to the Kim Jong-il regime argue that it is motivated by a calculated endeavor to leverage North Korea’s nuclear arsenal in an attempt to throw its weight around in Northeast Asia and in its relationship with Washington especially. The one point that almost all observers agree on is that North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons represents a seriously negative and destabilizing development for Northeast Asia’s security. In this chapter I challenge this perspective and argue that it is derived from an overly pessimistic response to nuclear proliferation at the generic level and a misreading of the main factors driving North Korea’s nuclear program. More specifically, this perspective takes insufficient account of North Korea’s motives for going nuclear and overlooks the inherently defensive objectives that underpin the DPRK’s national strategy in the early part of the twenty-first century. In short, the idea that a nuclear-armed North Korea is determined to foment regional instability and challenge the strategic status quo in Northeast Asia is simply not borne out by a closer reading of Pyongyang’s motives and worldview. On the contrary, the behavior and statements of the regime suggest that the DPRK is likely to be predisposed to

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accepting the logic of deterrence in its relationship with the United States. For as long as Washington maintains an active and robust posture of strategic deterrence on the Korean peninsula, the Kim Jong-il regime in Pyongyang will continue to be dissuaded from using nuclear weapons against other regional states. The key to managing North Korea as a nuclear weapon state will be engaging Pyongyang in continuing dialogue while at the same time communicating clearly to the regime the severe costs attached to nuclear adventurism, such as the export of fissile material beyond the DPRK’s borders. In the longer term, this may well have the beneficial effect of promoting an environment that is conducive to formal arms control and nuclear security more generally.

NORTH KOREA’S NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES North Korea has long coveted nuclear weapons. Since the 1950s it has invested a significant portion of its scarce national resources in pursuing the acquisition of a nuclear weapons force. As Alexandre Mansourov argues, the primary factors motivating the DPRK regime’s original decision to proceed with a nuclear program were, in all likelihood, threefold.1 The first was the United States’ use of atomic weapons against Japan in 1945. Stationed with Soviet Red Army forces in Manchuria, North Korea’s founding leader, Kim Il-sung, witnessed firsthand the decisive impact of atomic weapons in eliciting Japan’s unconditional surrender. The second motivating factor was a corollary of North Korea’s experiences during the Korean War. Massive U.S. conventional bombardment of DPRK territory, coupled with Washington’s careful deliberation over whether to use nuclear weapons to break the military deadlock after 1950, served to reinforce the point that North Korea required the most powerful weapons to deter the world’s most powerful nation. Finally, the belief among North Korea’s policy elites that the Soviet Union bowed to American pressure during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis apparently cast serious doubts on their faith in the broader credibility of Soviet nuclear guarantees. While none of these factors alone provided the impetus for Pyongyang’s decision to seek a nuclear capability, together they coalesced to furnish a compelling strategic logic for taking the nuclear path. Soviet training of DPRK nuclear scientists began shortly after the end of the Korean War, and during the 1960s and 1970s Moscow supplied North Korea with advanced nuclear reactor technology. This included help with the construction in 1965 of an eight megawatt (MW) research reactor located near the town of Yongbyon, ninety kilometers north of Pyongyang. Responding to pressure from Moscow, in 1977 North Korea agreed to place this research reactor under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards.2 In the late 1970s North Korea began construction of a second, five MW reactor based near Yongbyon, which commenced operating in 1987.

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North Korea’s overall nuclear program expanded at a rapid rate during the 1980s with the development of facilities for the fabrication and conversion of uranium, as well as the reprocessing of plutonium. The facilities slated for construction in 1984 were a fifty MW reactor at Yongbyon and a two hundred MW reactor at Taechon. It is believed that the DPRK began work sometime during the 1980s on a plutonium reprocessing facility at Yongbyon.3 North Korea became a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985. However, Pyongyang refused to ratify a bilateral safeguards agreement with the IAEA until 1992, with the regime citing “legal” reasons for the delay. By this time, there were widespread suspicions that Pyongyang had systematically flouted its nonproliferation commitments under the NPT by removing spent fuel rods from the Yongbyon reactor and reprocessing them into weapons-grade plutonium.4 These suspicions were apparently confirmed during a series of visits by senior IAEA officials in 1992 and 1993, including a visit by the then IAEA Director-General, Hans Blix. The Agency found significant discrepancies between North Korea’s declaration that its nuclear facilities were for exclusively peaceful purposes and the apparent weapons-oriented configuration of the DPRK’s “civil” nuclear program. The IAEA inspection visits strengthened the credibility of earlier allegations that North Korean authorities had unloaded a significant amount of spent fuel from the five MW reactor at Yongbyon during an observed shutdown of the facility in 1989.5 In January 1993 North Korean authorities refused the IAEA entry to two undeclared nuclear-waste facilities adjacent to the Yongbyon reactor suspected of holding fissile material.6 With international pressure building, Pyongyang announced its intention to withdraw from the NPT shortly thereafter. Following a protracted diplomatic process, which included Washington agreeing to conduct bilateral talks with Pyongyang, this decision was reversed. It was around this time that the United States produced a National Intelligence Estimate—the authoritative assessment of all U.S. intelligence agencies—that described the chances of North Korea already possessing a nuclear bomb as “better than even.”7 While tensions declined somewhat during the remainder of 1993, they did not recede entirely, and the first half of 1994 witnessed a major crisis over North Korea’s nuclear activities. During the crisis, North Korean authorities consistently sought to foil IAEA attempts to track nuclear material inside the DPRK, and Pyongyang claimed on several occasions that it was not bound by the NPT, despite North Korea’s formal membership of the Treaty. Against the background of continued wrangling with the United States and the IAEA over its alleged noncompliance with the NPT, North Korea began removing nuclear fuel from the Yongbyon reactor in May 1994, precipitating a major standoff with the United States. With the Clinton administration laying the groundwork at the UN Security Council for the imposition of sanctions against the DPRK, and its close consideration

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of plans for possible military action against key nuclear installations in North Korea, a serious confrontation between Washington and Pyongyang seemed inevitable.8 The deadlock was eventually broken following a high-profile visit to Pyongyang by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter who extracted a commitment from Kim Il-sung to freeze the North’s nuclear program in return for renewed negotiations with Washington. The crisis was resolved with the conclusion of the Agreed Framework in October 1994, which committed North Korea to freezing its declared nuclear program.9 In addition, the Agreed Framework included a commitment by Pyongyang to dismantle its graphitemoderated “proliferation prone” reactors and reaffirm its commitment to the NPT and IAEA inspections on North Korean territory. For its part, the United States agreed to provide the DPRK with replacement light water “proliferation resistant” reactors, transfer sufficient heavy fuel oil to compensate Pyongyang for the energy shortfall caused by winding down its graphitemoderated reactors, and explore upgrading the bilateral relationship along with the provision of security assurances against the threat or use of nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. Nevertheless, serious concerns remained about the unaccounted-for weapons-grade material that had been extracted from the Yongbyon reactor.10 This concern was heightened by uncertainty over the amount of spent fuel North Korea had managed to unload from the same reactor in 1989, which Pyongyang had pointedly refused to specify. Moreover, serious concerns remained over precisely how much nuclear fuel the North Koreans had been able to unload from the Yongbyon reactor in May 1994. In mid-1994 the IAEA Director-General reported to the UN Security Council that he was unable to verify the total amount of weapons-grade material North Korea had been able to unload from the Yongbyon reactor. Nor was he able to confirm whether it had been diverted to a dedicated weapons program.11 However, most credible estimates have since suggested that the amount contained sufficient plutonium to produce several nuclear weapons.12 Estimates cited in unclassified assessments by U.S., Japanese, Russian, and South Korean intelligence agencies vary slightly, but converge on the general assumption that the DPRK unloaded enough plutonium in 1989 alone to manufacture anywhere from between two to six nuclear bombs.13 There is general agreement in the published assessments of various intelligence agencies and among independent strategic observers that all operations at each of North Korea’s known nuclear facilities were frozen under the Agreed Framework between 1994 and 2002. Most analysts also agree that, after a short lull following the demise of the Agreed Framework in late 2002, operations recommenced in 2003 (at the reprocessing plant and the completed reactor at Yongbyon) and in 2005 (on completing construction of the larger reactors at Yongbyon and Taechon). In the mid-1990s, it was estimated

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that once operational, these larger reactors at Yongbyon and Taechon would be capable of producing enough spent fuel for around two hundred kilograms of plutonium per year—sufficient to produce around forty crude nuclear devices per year.14 With the Agreed Framework providing an apparent cap on North Korea’s declared nuclear program, during the second half of the 1990s attention turned more squarely toward the DPRK’s evolving missile capability. Pyongyang’s missile program has developed hand-in-glove with its nuclear weapons program. As Pinkston has argued, it is likely that there is a strong overlap between various bureaucratic constituencies within the DPRK—the armed forces and scientific community for instance—that favor nuclear acquisition and at the same time are the key stakeholders in North Korea’s missile development program.15 Possessing an antiquated air force with negligible air-to-ground attack capabilities, and a brown water navy bereft of any serious long-range strike platforms, the North Korean regime has few options but to prioritize its missile program as the only credible means of delivering nuclear weapons at a theater and (potentially) intercontinental range.16 North Korea is known to have acquired a considerable number of shortrange ballistic missiles (SRBMs) during the 1980s and to have undertaken limited testing of medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs). Given the welldocumented acute economic constraints confronting the DPRK, coupled with the regime’s observation of a moratorium on missile testing between 1999 and 2006, it is likely that the maximum range of North Korea’s SRBM and MRBM forces has remained fairly static since the late 1990s. Joseph Bermudez estimates that the maximum range of its SRBM forces (comprised of SCUD/Hwasong variants) is approximately six hundred kilometers, while its MRBM forces (comprising Nodong variants) have a maximum reach of around 2,500 kilometers.17 Both of these systems appear designed to provide North Korea with a strike capability against the Republic of Korea (ROK) and major cities and U.S. bases in Japan. The launch in 1998 of the threestage Taepodong rocket confirmed North Korea’s intention, if not its capacity, to acquire an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of striking targets further afield. The fact that the third stage of the rocket did not exit the earth’s atmosphere (thus rendering the overall test a failure) did not stop some observers from erroneously claiming that North Korea had in fact demonstrated an ICBM capability.18 The failure of an attempted ICBM test in July 2006 indicates that developing a long-range missile capability still remains a major challenge for North Korea.19 Of more concern to some has been North Korea’s large-scale missile export program, which is believed to have reaped Pyongyang several hundred million dollars since the mid-1980s. The DPRK is known to have undertaken covert sales of complete missile systems, components, and related technology to Egypt, Iran, Libya, Pakistan, and Syria.20 North Korean support

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was decisive in allowing Pakistan and Iran to develop their respective medium-range Ghauri and Shehab missiles (both flight tested in 1998) that were modeled closely on the Nodong missile specifications.21 As one of only a handful of meaningful exports from the DPRK, missile-related equipment remains a critical source of hard currency for the cash-strapped regime. Not only does missile-related trade account for a reported 40 percent of North Korea’s entire foreign exchange earnings, it also allows Pyongyang to reinvest the profits in its nuclear weapons program.22 Moreover, there is some evidence that Pyongyang has on more than one occasion engaged in a form of barter exchange, trading missiles for other military technologies. In addition to hard currency, North Korea has also reportedly gained access to information on nuclear warhead design and testing data from Pakistan in return for missile exports.23 North Korea’s move to jettison its long-standing opaque approach to its nuclear ambitions and capabilities began in the second half of 2002. Reports emerged in October that year that in bilateral discussions in Pyongyang with their U.S. interlocutors, North Korean officials had acknowledged the existence of an active clandestine uranium enrichment and plutonium program after being presented with evidence gathered by American intelligence assets.24 This admission was swiftly condemned by the Bush administration, which had already made its views of the North Korean regime well-known, with the president in January 2002 having characterized the DPRK (along with Iraq and Iran) as part of “an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”25 Washington noted that Pyongyang’s nuclear activities constituted a “serious breach” of the 1994 Agreed Framework and, along with South Korea and Japan, the United States responded by suspending all further heavy fuel oil deliveries to the DPRK, a critical quid pro quo for Pyongyang freezing its nuclear activity under the Agreed Framework.26 In December 2002 North Korea announced that it was ending its commitment to the Agreed Framework and that it would resume operations at all of its Yongbyon facilities and recommence construction work at the Taechon facility site.27 Both Washington and Pyongyang alleged that the other side had failed to implement their respective commitments under the Agreed Framework. In truth, implementation by both sides remained patchy over the eight-year lifespan of the agreement. And neither the United States nor the DPRK were willing to try and salvage the Agreed Framework once it became clear the very premise of the pact—freezing North Korea’s nuclear program—was no longer sustainable. By the end of 2002 Pyongyang had taken the dramatic step of announcing an end to all nuclear inspections on DPRK territory and ejecting all IAEA inspectors from North Korea. It followed this up in January 2003 by declaring North Korea’s “automatic and immediate” withdrawal from the NPT.28 With this declaration, the DPRK became the first state ever to terminate its membership of the NPT.29

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These announcements were followed by statements in the DPRK’s official news media that North Korea was actively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.30 Following a visit to the DPRK in early 2004, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Siegfried Hecker confirmed in congressional testimony that North Korean authorities had in fact removed eight thousand spent fuel rods from the Yongbyon reactor where they had been under IAEA safeguards until late 2002.31 If Pyongyang’s subsequent claims that it has completed reprocessing these spent fuel rods are accurate, the United States has already estimated that North Korea will be in a position to access enough plutonium for several nuclear bombs within a few months of completion.32 In February 2005 North Korea claimed for the first time that it had acquired an operational nuclear capability.33 On October 3, 2006, North Korea’s official news agency announced that the country intended to carry out a nuclear test to substantiate this claim. In issuing the statement, KCNA declared that North Korea “will never use nuclear weapons first and strictly prohibit any threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear transfer.”34 Six days later, North Korea conducted its inaugural nuclear test that dramatically confirmed its entry into the elite group of states possessing nuclear weapons.35 The test provided immediate clarity of North Korea’s nuclear capability and represented the culmination of its earlier decision in 2002 to discard its long-standing opaque nuclear strategy.

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NORTH KOREA

The emergence of any new nuclear power in the international system presents a range of difficult policy challenges for states. One of the most pressing challenges is how to respond to a country that declares it possesses a nuclear weapons capability.36 Two key factors shape how new entrants into the nuclear club are treated by other countries in the international system. The first is the manner in which a state acquires nuclear weapons. If a country decides to test a nuclear device—with the expectation that it will be detected by the international community—the likelihood of widespread condemnation is high. This is the case even for those countries that have made a point of not becoming members of the NPT. When they each undertook several underground tests in 1998, India and Pakistan formally conveyed their nuclear status to the world. While neither country had ever been party to the NPT, both were condemned by the UN Security Council and targeted with diplomatic and economic sanctions by a number of states.37 Similarly, the DPRK’s October 2006 nuclear test attracted strong formal condemnation by the Security Council and triggered the imposition of sanctions by a host of countries.38 By contrast, Israel has chosen not to carry out a nuclear test in preference to adopting an opaque nuclear strategy based on the principle of neither confirming nor denying its capabilities.39 While many of its neighbors have condemned Israel

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for its alleged nuclear capability, it has not been the subject of general international condemnation. The second factor is the perceived nature of the state doing the proliferating. Very few observers exhibited serious concern when France acquired nuclear weapons in 1960. As a long-standing democracy and member of the Western alliance, France was regarded as a responsible possessor of nuclear weapons.40 By contrast, when China detonated its first nuclear device four years later, there was considerable angst over how this “rogue” Communist power would brandish nuclear weapons in Asia in pursuit of its “revolutionary” political agenda.41 What about the case of an underdeveloped and isolated country like North Korea, which has withdrawn from the NPT and proceeded to test a nuclear device in the face of international opposition? Should international policy makers condemn outright its acquisition of nuclear weapons as posing a threat to global nonproliferation? Or should they seek to provide practical assistance to ensure the technical proficiency of command and control mechanisms coordinating the new weapons inventory? Peter Feaver and Emerson Niou neatly sum up the policy dilemma: When the non-proliferation regime fails it presents . . . a thorny policy problem. The purist response, continuing to enforce the regime in the hope of reversing the proliferation decision, increases the likelihood that successful proliferators will have unsafe nuclear arsenals. Destroying the new arsenals with a military strike as a particularly dedicated purist might prefer to do, however, may be impractical . . . Assisting the new proliferators, as a pragmatist recommends, may encourage the very proliferation the [non-proliferation] regime is meant to stop in the first place.42

Dealing with a determined proliferator that over time has proven largely impervious to international attempts at coercion, persuasion, and carefully targeted incentives raises the question of whether it is even feasible to aim for nuclear “reversal,” entailing as it does the unequivocal renunciation of nuclear weapons subject to verification by international inspectors. While the international community has had some notable successes in convincing individual states to step back from the brink of acquisition, only one country (South Africa in 1990) has unilaterally decided to terminate its nuclear weapon program after having crossed the threshold to acquisition.43 Observers generally agree that there are three main drivers underlying a state’s decision to acquire nuclear weapons.44 The first, and usually the most significant, is insecurity and threat perception. This is when national decision makers believe that nuclear weapons will contribute to deterring actual and/or potential adversaries from threatening core national security interests. From the perspective of states with relatively weaker conventional military capabilities, nuclear weapons may be seen as strategically desirable to balance

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the superior capabilities of an adversary. The second proliferation driver is prestige. This is when national elites regard a nuclear weapons force as increasing their country’s claim to a greater say in regional or global affairs. This derives from the belief that the more destructive the military capability a state has at its disposal, the more respect it will command in the international system. The third factor driving a state’s decision to go nuclear is the influence of key vested interests at the domestic level: national policy makers may be pushed toward acquiring nuclear weapons by sectoral interests that stand to benefit as a result. These sectors may include the scientific community that could have a stake in developing the primary and subsidiary weapons systems, a branch of the armed forces that will retain operational control over the nuclear force, or corporations that may profit commercially from the acquisition process. The challenge of convincing a state that acquiring nuclear weapons is not in its interests remains formidable, even if only one of these three variables is at play. But when all three intersect to reinforce one another over a sustained period of time, nonproliferation and nuclear reversal become essentially unattainable. This is why the idea that North Korea can be persuaded to give up its nuclear weapons voluntarily is so dubious. In its pronouncements since early 2003, the Bush administration has insisted that a fundamental precondition for Washington entering into direct bilateral dialogue with Pyongyang is that North Korea commit itself to “complete, verifiable, and irreversible disarmament” of its entire nuclear program.45 This position has been reiterated at the Six-Party Talks by U.S. representatives who have made it clear that any agreement to negotiate directly with Pyongyang will remain contingent on the latter accepting unconditionally the so-called “CVID” formula as the basis for progress.46 For their part, the North Koreans have rejected the American position, accusing the Bush administration of using the “CVID” formula as a deliberate obstacle to progress.47 Michael Mazarr has observed that in the late 1980s the DPRK “learned how useful an ambiguous nuclear capability could be in getting attention, wringing security concessions out of Seoul and Washington, and acquiring pledges of economic assistance and expanded diplomatic relations.”48 In a brave new world where it has jettisoned its opaque strategy in favor of openly declaring a nuclear weapons capability, by undertaking an explosive test North Korea is less likely than in previous years to consider scrapping its nuclear program. Apart from the primary deterrent role of nuclear weapons (discussed in more detail below), from North Korea’s perspective there are a host of additional benefits that flow from possessing this capability. Nuclear weapons provide the DPRK with a highly convertible strategic currency that raises its diplomatic leverage, both regionally and internationally. There can be little doubt that without its nuclear program, an economically weak and politically isolated North Korea would command little attention internationally

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and not be in a position to force the major powers in Northeast Asia to invest time and energy in addressing its security concerns via the Six-Party Talks. It is even less likely that these countries would feel the need to offer Pyongyang a broad range of economic and political inducements, along with threats, for it to simply exercise restraint. Those who maintain that North Korea can be induced to bargain away its nuclear force in return for increased diplomatic recognition, security assurances, or enhanced economic assistance overlook the fact that time and time again the DPRK has demonstrated that it remains resolutely committed to holding on to its nuclear capability.49 The regime’s decision to proceed with a nuclear test, despite considerable pressure from its regional neighbors— including a hard-line statement from the U.S. envoy to the Six-Party Talks that North Korea “can have a future or it can have [nuclear] weapons. It cannot have both”—indicates just how committed it is to retaining its nuclear program.50 Pyongyang’s behavior since the end of the cold war confirms that it does not see nuclear weapons as a capability that can be traded off for diplomatic rewards or security assurances that can, ultimately, be withdrawn at any time. In short, the regime does not regard nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip. Moreover, the North Korean regime has already demonstrated persistent contempt for its international nonproliferation obligations. As a member of the NPT between 1985 and 2002, Pyongyang consistently resisted its legal obligations to open all of its nuclear facilities to IAEA inspectors in favor of keeping its weapons option alive. Given that North Korea was unwilling to abide by its legal obligations under a UN-sponsored nonproliferation treaty, there are few grounds to assume that it would be willing to accept the kind of highly intrusive inspections necessary to verify compliance with a broader, more ambitious, disarmament agreement of the type that the United States is insisting on. That North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons poses a threat to security and stability is widely assumed by most governments to be self-evident. The United States, which is the leader of a coalition of regional states intent on persuading Pyongyang to renounce its nuclear program, has been particularly vociferous in warning of the strategic risks of a nuclear-armed North Korea. A previous Bush administration chief negotiator with North Korea, former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs James Kelly has observed that “the North’s nuclear programs threaten its neighbours and the integrity of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime.”51 Japan has essentially echoed this view, and while not as forthright in its public statements, South Korea has highlighted the longer term dangers of a fully fledged DPRK nuclear capability.52 Even China, the source of most of North

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Korea’s external economic and political support, has adopted a critical public position on the issue.53 For some time behind closed doors Beijing is said to have been highly critical of Pyongyang’s nuclear policy, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry reportedly characterizing it as “dangerous adventurism.”54 There can be little doubt that Chinese policy makers remain concerned about the effect a North Korean nuclear weapons capability might have in spurring Japan to reconsider its nuclear options. A cursory glance at the existing scholarly literature on North Korea and nuclear weapons reveals a remarkably similar picture: the majority of commentators believe that Pyongyang’s acquisition of nuclear weapons represents a destabilizing development with serious implications for Northeast Asian security. One of the key reasons cited in support of this view is that the DPRK is an archetypal “rogue” state intent on undermining established norms and institutions in the international system.55 According to this perspective, Kim Jong-il and other key members of the regime are inclined to pursue impulsive, unpredictable, and irrational strategic activities that inhibit the capacity of the international community, especially the United States, to forge a strategic modus vivendi with Pyongyang. The radical end of this spectrum of thought is exemplified by the view that the regime is “evil” and intent on “destabilizing world order.” One author has even argued that the totalitarian domestic policies of the regime exhibit “an indifference to death that calls into question the applicability of the concept at the heart of nuclear deterrence, mutual assured destruction.”56 Even among those who maintain that it is possible to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons capability, the DPRK is portrayed as “a hostile and threatening state” whose possession of weapons of mass destruction constitutes a serious danger to regional stability and security.57 Robert Ayson and Brendan Taylor argue: One option is simply to do very little and to learn to live with a nuclear North Korea. But this would leave open the prospect of North Korea continuing to use its nuclear capabilities, in tandem with its massive conventional force, for purposes of extortion and blackmail. It would afford a regime in desperate need of hard currency the option of exporting nuclear technologies and components to “rogue” states and terrorists worldwide. The “do nothing” approach could result in the onset of a regional nuclear arms race were the DPRK to accelerate the pace of its nuclear weapons program.58

Overall, for most observers, “the dangers inherent in leaving nuclear weapons in the hands of the unpredictable regime in North Korea can hardly be exaggerated.”59

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NORTH KOREA’S NATIONAL STRATEGY MOTIVES FOR GOING NUCLEAR

AND ITS

The proposition that North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons represents an adverse development for security and stability in Northeast Asia is one that is rarely, if ever, seriously scrutinized in the literature. As outlined in the previous section of this chapter, the orthodox view unifying scholars and policy makers alike is that the dangers of a nuclear-armed DPRK are largely self-evident. Any suggestion therefore that the advent of a nuclear-armed North Korea is either not necessarily as dire a prospect as presumed and may in fact be managed without provoking unresolvable regional security tensions is rejected by simply never being discussed. Moreover, the idea that Pyongyang may actually be inclined to behave as a responsible nuclear power in Northeast Asia by exercising restraint in its approach to nuclear weapons— including not threatening other states with nuclear attack and not exporting fissile material beyond its borders—has found few, if any, adherents in the academic literature. In this section, I want to build a case in favor of the position that a nuclear-armed North Korea can indeed be managed without undermining security in Northeast Asia. Moreover, the prospect of living with a nuclear DPRK is not as disconcerting as most analysts assume. In support of this argument, I examine two critically interrelated variables often overlooked in discussion of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program: the DPRK’s national strategy and its motives for going nuclear. Understanding the core motives underlying Pyongyang’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is crucial because it goes to the heart of whether North Korea, as a new nuclear state, can be deterred from using nuclear weapons. As Daniel Pinkston and Philip Saunders observe, “A lack of effort to understand the worldview and motivations of North Korean leaders is likely to produce a sub-optimal policy at best, and may produce an inadvertent war at worst.”60 In particular, there is a danger that policy makers in the United States and elsewhere will reflexively revert to “default mode” in their approach to the DPRK by seeing what they expect to see in North Korea’s behavior: i.e., roguish conduct inspired by a desire to destabilize regional order, rather than roguish conduct driven by an exaggerated, but genuine, sense of insecurity.61 Endeavoring to grasp the fundamental motivations of the North Korean regime is an essential prerequisite in ensuring appropriate and proportional policy responses to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons capability. This includes determining the extent to which deterrence is likely to be a feasible option in dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea. Unfortunately, there is not much evidence to date that suggests countries have been all that mindful of the mainsprings of North Korean behavior with respect to nuclear weapons. Discerning North Korea’s motives is by no means a straightforward task. By any objective assessment, North Korea remains one of the most insular

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societies in the world. Movements in and out of the country are rigorously circumscribed, the population remains closed off from any meaningful interaction with the outside world, and the North Korean people are subject to one of the most intense processes of state-driven ideological indoctrination witnessed throughout history. All of this is overseen by an extremely wellorganized domestic surveillance and secret police network with deep roots among the general population.62 Yet, it would be inaccurate to conclude that support for the regime among the North Korean population is simply manufactured for the purpose of international consumption. As a number of Western visitors have observed, there appears to be a genuinely strong sense of nationalistic cohesion among ordinary North Koreans that is periodically reinforced by the view that outside powers are intent on undermining the DPRK’s sovereignty.63 The Kim Jong-il regime is undoubtedly repressive, but (rightly or wrongly) it does enjoy what appears to be some authentic domestic support from many North Koreans against what they regard as a hostile external environment. North Korea’s relative opaqueness has left analysts with little alternative but to employ a high degree of inference in drawing conclusions about the sources of Pyongyang’s behavior. As one leading DPRK watcher has noted, a result of this has been that the often “widely divergent views of outside analysts give North Korean [policy makers] the advantage of seeming to be unpredictable, inscrutable, or irrational, even if they maintain a consistent strategy.”64 Indeed, it is likely that the DPRK’s legendary “hermit kingdom” reputation has been deliberately burnished by North Korean officials to provide increased room for maneuver in the diplomatic realm. Although the opacity of the regime raises barriers to identifying in detail the motives and doctrinal assumptions underpinning the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program, it is increasingly clear that the latter is primarily a manifestation of genuine threat perception and a quest for greater national security. This is not to dismiss the influence of internal variables driving the North’s nuclear program, such as the role of the DPRK military that enjoys pride of place in the bureaucratic pecking order and that will almost certainly retain a large portion of the day-to-day operational oversight of the nuclear force in accordance with the regime’s “Military First” policy.65 However, it is the regime’s perceptions of North Korea’s external environment, and the threats it encompasses, that are central to understanding the motives underpinning the DPRK’s drive for nuclear weapons. As reflected in the behavior of the regime, its official statements, the testimony of defectors, and the views of those who have studied the diplomatic modus operandi of the DPRK closely, the regime views the outside world as unremittingly threatening and hostile. International relations is seen as a bleak, unforgiving struggle for power where brute force and coercion are the lingua franca of diplomacy.66 From the regime’s perspective, material power

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is the single most important currency in world politics. In particular, military capabilities lie at the heart of the capacity of small states to resist the coercion of larger powers. Following his much publicized defection in 1997, the most senior-ranking official to have fled North Korea then or since, Hwang Jang-yop, observed on a number of occasions that the Pyongyang regime places a premium on demonstrating “strength” in its approach to external relations and has a tendency to equate willingness to compromise with vulnerability and weakness.67 The North Korean regime is perhaps the last government in the world that accepts as literally true the Hobbesian dictum that politics is characterized by a perpetual state of war, “a warre [sic] of every man against every man.”68 Extrapolating from this Hobbesian worldview, there can be little doubt that the Pyongyang regime regards nuclear weapons—proven to be the most powerful and influential military instrument in human history—as central to safeguarding the sovereignty of the North Korean state, and thus the survival of the regime itself, in a profoundly anarchic world system. North Korea’s Hobbesian view of the world has led some to claim that the DPRK regime holds expansionist designs on the Korean peninsula and in Northeast Asia more generally. This claim is predicated on the assumption that the Kim Jong-il regime is dissatisfied with the prevailing status quo and intent on radical change. Homer Hodge has argued that Korean reunification through the use of force remains the dominant goal in North Korea’s grand strategy, and “despite severe economic decline . . . Pyongyang continues to perceive an offensive military strategy as a viable option for ensuring regime survival and realizing reunification on North Korean terms.”69 Similarly, Madden argues that the Korean peninsula is “a region under siege by a brutal dictator. Only when the United States—and indeed the international community—recognizes that North Korea represents a clear and present danger to regional peace and prosperity will meaningful solutions be found.”70 One leading North Korea expert has gone as far to draw an analogy between endeavors to engage Pyongyang diplomatically and unsuccessful attempts to appease Nazi Germany during the 1930s.71 However, the argument that North Korea is an expansionary power in Northeast Asia is unconvincing. It is far more likely that national survival and the closely associated objective of regime preservation remain the main determinants of the DPRK’s national strategy. While reunification of the Korean peninsula on North Korea’s terms was a staple of DPRK official pronouncements for decades after the end of the Korean War, official statements no longer refer to this as a realistic aim, let alone one that constitutes the guiding objective of national strategy. As outlined in Chapter 1, since the early 1990s a dramatic deterioration in the DPRK’s strategic circumstances, its marked economic decline, and its deep isolation from the international community of nations has forced the Pyongyang regime into what amounts to a highly defensive national posture. Dependent on substantial amounts of

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external aid to feed its own people, less certain of support from its major power ally, China, and confronting a United States that is itself less wedded to the international status quo than it was a decade ago, North Korea has retreated further into its strategic shell. It is no coincidence that North Korea’s concerted attempt to acquire an operational nuclear weapons capability has coincided with its rapidly declining fortunes since the end of the cold war. Nuclear weapons are seen by the regime as a core capability that offsets North Korea’s declining strategic fortunes, deters external threats to the DPRK’s sovereignty, and provides it with a modicum of self reliance in a dangerous world. The singular influence of the United States in shaping Pyongyang’s strategic calculations regarding nuclear weapons should not be underestimated. While apprehension about a militarily resurgent Japan undoubtedly continues to exert an influence in shaping the regime’s strategic outlook, as does South Korea’s impressive conventional military force modernization, it is the military capabilities and ascribed intentions of the United States that loom largest. This has been a long-standing hallmark of North Korean threat assessments and can be traced directly to the large-scale “foreign” American military presence on the Korean peninsula following the 1953 Korean War armistice. For most of the post-1953 period—between 1958 and 1992—this presence included the stationing of a large number of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea. Their deployment was guided by a U.S. strategy that emphasized the “equalizing” role nuclear weapons would play in blunting a North Korean conventional invasion of South Korea.72 One of the central, but frequently overlooked, reasons why North Korea sees the United States as its prime adversary, rather than South Korea or Japan, is that in the event of a war on the peninsula, the four-star American general presiding over Combined Forces Command would automatically gain overall operational control over all allied forces south of the 38th parallel, including South Korean forces. As Selig Harrison points out, this operational formality is one of the main reasons why North Korea regards the United States as its chief adversary.73 The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the United States as the sole remaining global superpower after the end of the cold war merely served to reinforce the view in Pyongyang that America poses the single greatest threat to its security. As a consequence, the regime regards the United States as its main point of contact on Korean peninsula security issues. This has been reflected in North Korea’s negotiating strategy with respect to its nuclear program where it has sought (with mixed success) to effectively quarantine South Korea from any meaningful discussions. The 1994 negotiations over the Agreed Framework were instructive in this regard, with Pyongyang insisting successfully that bilateral discussions with Washington constitute the framework for negotiations.74 While Pyongyang has been

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unable to replicate this strategy since 2000, it has maintained the position that it values bilateral dialogue and negotiations with Washington far more highly than the multilateral Six-Party Talks. The significance to Pyongyang of the Bush administration’s steadfast refusal to countenance formal bilateral talks with the DPRK can only be fully appreciated if seen in this light.75 At the operational military level, nuclear weapons are likely to be seen by Pyongyang as serving a number of interrelated purposes. The most significant is to deter and, if necessary, defeat any U.S.-led military action against the DPRK. This has been a recurring theme in North Korean pronouncements since its withdrawal from the NPT in early 2003. Pyongyang has stated on several occasions that it regards ironclad security assurances from the United States as a fundamental precondition for substantive negotiations on its nuclear program.76 The defensive logic underlying North Korea’s nuclear program was spelt out in an official statement issued by the Korean Central News Agency in June 2003: The DPRK has no intention to have a nuclear deterrent force without any reason, quite contrary to Washington’s noisy propaganda. The DPRK is willing to clear up the US concern as regards the nuclear issue if it drops its hostile policy towards Pyongyang and addresses its concern. But if the US keeps threatening the DPRK with nukes instead of abandoning its hostile policy toward Pyongyang, the DPRK will have no option but to build up a nuclear deterrent force.77

Although DPRK conventional forces remain numerically formidable, and while approximately two-thirds of these forces are deployed within a one hundred kilometer radius north of the DMZ, they remain qualitatively inferior to U.S. and South Korean forces by a substantial margin. This disparity has accelerated markedly since the end of the cold war concomitant with the radical contraction of the North Korean economy. The overwhelming consensus is that the DPRK has simply been unable to compete with significant improvements in American and South Korean conventional war-fighting capabilities. This is especially evident in the hugely expensive area of information warfare technologies that have given the United States and its allies a decisive force multiplier edge in conventional conflicts during the 1990s in the Middle East and the Balkans and in the 2003 conflict against Iraq.78 For Pyongyang, nuclear weapons furnish an essential “equalizing” capability against a conventionally superior adversary.79 Carried on short-range SCUD and medium-range Nodong missiles, nuclear warheads could potentially wreak substantial damage against major population centers and U.S. bases in South Korea as well as Japan. Such scenarios are aimed at raising the costs of any American-led invasion to the point where the United States judges them as eclipsing any possible

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benefits that could be gained as a consequence. It should be emphasised that the virtue of this classic deterrence logic, and thus the central rationale for acquiring nuclear weapons from Pyongyang’s perspective, has only been reinforced since the advent of the Bush administration in January 2001. It is highly likely that the administration’s public characterization of North Korea as an “evil” state, its decision to sanctify preemption in U.S. strategic doctrine, and its pointed identification of the DPRK as a target for nuclear strikes in a military contingency on the peninsula have merely strengthened the hand of those within the Kim Jong-il regime who believe nuclear weapons are necessary to protect North Korea’s security and sovereignty.80 Indeed, in its public statements the regime has signaled that the crucial lesson to be drawn from American-led military action against Iraq in 2003 is that the latter was invaded because it did not have nuclear weapons.81

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NUCLEAR-ARMED DPRK BE MANAGED?

Rather than continuing to focus on the increasingly meager “carrot and stick” policy options for “rolling back” North Korea’s nuclear program, attention needs to shift toward how best to manage North Korea’s nuclear weapons capability as a strategic fact of life. The well-worn debate between those who advocate “tough” measures to force Pyongyang to disarm and those who propose “incentives” to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear capability ignores the compelling evidence that points to Pyongyang’s determination to hold on to its emerging nuclear stockpile. Having run the gauntlet of international opprobrium, increased isolation, and the ongoing specter of U.S. preemptive military action, it is highly unlikely that Pyongyang will decide to capitulate to external pressure in the foreseeable future. While of course possible, this latter scenario is extremely remote. There can be little doubt that the North Korean regime is aware that a united international front against its nuclear program will remain a pipe dream for as long as the major powers have competing strategic and geopolitical interests in Northeast Asia. The Six-Party Talks—having achieved nothing in the way of substantive outcomes—have undoubtedly been seen in Pyongyang as a useful way to accentuate the existing divisions between the procontainment position of the United States and Japan on the one side, and the proengagement stance of China, South Korea, and Russia on the other.82 A closer assessment of the DPRK’s evolving national strategy and its motives for going nuclear suggests that, rather than representing an aggressive endeavor to coerce regional neighbors, North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons owes more to its deep-seated strategic isolation. One theme, above all, emerges from the analysis of the preceding section of this chapter: North Korea’s national strategy and its motives for acquiring nuclear weapons are essentially defensive in nature. Regime preservation and national survival are

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the paramount goals of the DPRK. These objectives are status quo–oriented. They are, by definition, incompatible with the high-risk strategy of using nuclear weapons against regional neighbors and the United States. There is no evidence to conclude that North Korean elites are irrational and willing to take decisions inimical to their broader goal of regime survival. For as long as Washington continues to extend its nuclear umbrella to allies in Northeast Asia, the Pyongyang regime will appreciate that any use of nuclear weapons on its part would precipitate war with the United States and its allies and inevitably lead to its rapid demise.83 Notwithstanding the likelihood that the United States will continue gradually withdrawing major ground force elements from South Korea and Japan, Washington has made it clear that it intends to maintain the presence of its air and naval strike platforms in the Asia-Pacific, many of which are configured with nuclear-capable systems.84 While the United States no longer deploys tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, and although the U.S. Navy has removed nuclear weapons from its surface fleet, American submarines traversing the Pacific Ocean are armed with a nuclear cruise missile capability and B-52s stationed in Guam in the Pacific remain nuclear capable.85 These theater force elements could be supplemented by nuclear-capable systems on the continental United States, including the B-2 bomber force and America’s large ICBM arsenal. Against this background, the chances of North Korea being deterred from using (or even seriously brandishing) nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia are greater than many within the policy and academic community have conceded. Despite previous statements by the Bush administration alleging that the Pyongyang regime is “evil” and “unbalanced” in its behavior, senior U.S. officials, including the Secretary of State, have signaled their belief that North Korea will remain deterred at the nuclear level for as long as the United States maintains a credible strategic presence in Northeast Asia.86 There are three additional conditions that strengthen the prospects for a stable system of nuclear deterrence between North Korea and the United States. The first, and the most noteworthy, is the existing template of conventional deterrence on the Korean peninsula. Despite ominous predictions following the Korean War armistice of 1953, there has been no armed conflict on the peninsula for more than half a century. As David Kang points out, the reason for this is disarmingly straightforward: “The peninsula has been stable for fifty years because deterrence has been clear and unambiguous.”87 Even during the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which many observers credited Pyongyang with having a very good chance of success in reunifying the peninsula by force, North Korea remained deterred from attacking the South. While there can be little doubt that the U.S. nuclear deterrent was a factor, it is also likely that the regime in Pyongyang judged the massive costs of any invasion (illuminated brutally between 1950–53) as nullifying any potential gains. If anything, this deterrence logic has probably been strengthened in

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the eyes of the DPRK leadership over the last decade or so in the context of the relative decline of North Korea’s conventional force capabilities. Given that North Korea has been deterred consistently at the conventional level since 1953, there are few grounds for assuming that Pyongyang would behave any differently at the nuclear level. The point to stress is that conventional deterrence provides a fairly reliable measure of how North Korea would behave at the nuclear level. At both levels, the regime must realize that any breakdown in deterrence would in all likelihood lead to war, defeat, and, ultimately, its extinction. The second condition is that the United States itself appears to be deterred from striking nuclear targets in North Korea. This is despite the Bush administration’s promulgation of the doctrine of preemption in 2002 and the belief in some quarters of the American policy community that North Korea’s nuclear capability could eventually pose a tangible threat to the United States mainland if married with an operational ICBM capability. Of course, it is plausible that a future U.S. administration may well decide to reverse this position and attempt to nullify Pyongyang’s nuclear capability through the use of force. But even those who see this as increasingly likely in the context of growing support within the United States for regime change in North Korea estimate that the chances of “such an attack being ordered in the next few years is perhaps something between 10 percent and 30 percent.”88 Washington’s evident reluctance to carry out preventive strikes against nuclear targets in North Korea, despite North Korea’s withdrawal from the NPT and its decision to carry out a nuclear test, stems from two reasons. The first is that military strikes, no matter how carefully tailored to reassure the regime in Pyongyang that they did not represent the first phase of a full-scale invasion, would almost certainly trigger large-scale North Korean retaliation against South Korea. In the unlikely event that the regime believed U.S. reassurances, it would probably not accept them. Faced with the prospect of its highly prized nuclear inventory being neutralized, North Korea’s senior elites would seek to extract a heavy price. The DPRK’s massive artillery and rocket forces within short range of Seoul would make this a relatively straightforward option. The second reason why the United States remains deterred from undertaking strike missions inside the DPRK is a realization that American air assets and special operations forces may not be able to capture or destroy North Korea’s nuclear capabilities before Pyongyang has an opportunity to use them against a range of possible targets in South Korea and Japan. In these circumstances, American action would have the effect of exposing its regional allies to the very threat it had sought to negate. The third condition that bolsters the prospects for deterrence on the Korean peninsula is that regional countries have had some time to get used to the idea (if not the reality) of a nuclear-armed North Korea. For Japan and South Korea, the prospect of dealing with a nuclear DPRK may not be

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particularly appealing, but nor is it a bolt from the blue. States in Northeast Asia have been aware for some time that North Korea has been seeking (and gradually acquiring) nuclear weapons and have no doubt factored the scenario of a nuclear-armed DPRK into their strategic planning. A nuclear domino effect in Northeast Asia has been identified in some quarters as a corollary of Pyongyang going nuclear, but such an outcome is by no means preordained. For South Korea, a nuclear-armed DPRK does not pose a new threat as such: for decades Seoul has faced the prospect of massive destruction and loss of life on ROK territory due to North Korea’s ability to unleash its prodigious conventional firepower against major South Korean cities. It is hard to see any persuasive rationale for South Korea to follow in the North’s nuclear footsteps in a context where Seoul seems less concerned about confronting the DPRK militarily and more intent on preserving the status quo on the peninsula.89 In the case of Japan, which remains a threshold nuclear state, for much of the cold war successive governments in Tokyo were persuaded of the credibility of U.S. guarantees that the latter would use nuclear weapons to defend Japan’s territorial sovereignty against the large-scale Soviet nuclear inventory.90 There is no obvious reason why Japan would review the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence guarantees against a comparatively small arsenal as that possessed by North Korea. In the wake of North Korea’s nuclear test, senior Japanese officials publicly ruled out responding with a nuclear weapons program of their own following the reaffirmation of U.S. security guarantees.91 It is important not to overstate the role deterrence can play in preventing war. And it is equally important not to overextend analogies between the restraining effects of deterrence in the superpower bilateral relationship and the potential for dealing with new nuclear states in the contemporary era. “The exaggerated claims for deterrence as a general theory,” as Freedman points out, have offered “an easy target for academics to cut it down to size.”92 As history shows, deterrence can fail. There is, of course, no guarantee that Pyongyang will conform to a regime of deterrence on the Korean peninsula. However, as I have argued, the prospects look more promising than many within the international policy and academic communities have up until now been willing to concede. From the U.S. standpoint, and that of both of its allies in Northeast Asia, reinforcing a deterrence relationship with North Korea carries risks and is fraught with uncertainty. But it is worth stressing that the successful operation of deterrence is itself predicated on a degree of uncertainty. To paraphrase one of America’s leading postwar nuclear strategists, Thomas Schelling, a credible nuclear deterrent posture is based largely on the manipulation of risk and conveying to an adversary a “threat that leaves something to chance.”93 Somewhat ironically, if deterrence is to prevent war, risk and uncertainty are fundamental prerequisites. Put simply, if the United States and its

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allies could be certain that North Korea did not intend to use nuclear weapons, there would be no need to institutionalize deterrence on the Korean peninsula. Any strategy to deter North Korea from using nuclear weapons must be expanded to incorporate active measures to dissuade the Pyongyang regime from exporting fissile material or other nuclear-related goods. In a world where the DPRK has acquired nuclear weapons, preventing the export of its nuclear capability must constitute the new “red line” for the United States and its allies. In framing the initial U.S. response to Pyongyang’s October 2006 test, President Bush himself noted that “any transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable of the consequences of such action.”94 American leadership is pivotal to achieving a relatively stable deterrent relationship with the DPRK, one in which its leaders appreciate that with a new nuclear capability comes new responsibilities. This broadening of deterrence needs to encompass the blunt-edged option of war against North Korea with a view to ending the Pyongyang regime if its refuses to adhere to these responsibilities. Of course, this policy approach is not ideal, but it is preferable to preemptive military action or “persisting in vainly trying to bribe Pyongyang” as it moves ahead in developing its nuclear weapons program.95 Short of war or the transfer of fissile material beyond the DPRK’s borders, the worst possible outcome of North Korea going nuclear would be the further isolation of the regime in Pyongyang. This is why the view that North Korea should “remain isolated and unable to participate in the dynamism of Northeast Asia” as punishment for not disavowing nuclear weapons makes little sense.96 Part of the reason why Pyongyang took the decision to accelerate its nuclear program in the early 1990s was its increasing sense of detachment from the international community and a growing sense of strategic vulnerability in the post–cold war era. If nuclear deterrence is to succeed on the Korean peninsula, Pyongyang needs to be actively and consistently engaged at the political level, and greater effort needs to be expended by Washington in particular to understand the regime’s strategic outlook. Deterrence may be all about threatening unacceptable punishment to prevent specific actions, but for it to have any chance of succeeding, lines of communication must be nurtured in order to circumvent the ever-present trap of misperception. If, as a by-product of opening these channels of communication, war is avoided and at some future point agreement is reached between Pyongyang and Washington to cooperate in areas such as fissile material security and limited arms control, then the investment of time and energy in deterring North Korea will have more than paid off.

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CONCLUSION This chapter has provided a detailed analysis of the prospects for managing a nuclear-armed North Korea. The central argument framing the chapter has been that the deleterious effects of North Korea’s nuclear program have been exaggerated by many observers largely because insufficient attention has been paid to the overwhelmingly defensive aims and motives driving the DPRK’s national strategy more broadly, and its nuclear aspirations in particular. I have also argued that the existing template of conventional deterrence on the Korean peninsula, which has now held for over half a century, provides strong encouragement that North Korea can be deterred from using nuclear weapons for as long as the United States continues to extend its nuclear umbrella to South Korea and Japan. North Korea can be deterred from using nuclear weapons for as long as the United States continues to extend its nuclear umbrella to Japan and South Korea. Instead of continuing to pursue a nonproliferation strategy that aims to persuade Pyongyang to terminate its nuclear program—the probability of which is extremely negligible—regional policy makers and those outside government need to focus on ways to manage North Korea as a nuclear state in Northeast Asia. The risk in persisting with a failing strategy of nonproliferation is that will promote a false sense of hope that North Korea will denuclearize and that Pyongyang can somehow be persuaded to delink its nuclear weapons ambitions from its overall national security doctrine. Such false hope would undermine the possibility of working toward a more secure nuclear future in Northeast Asia by putting off what should now be regarded as increasingly inevitable: engaging North Korea in a dialogue based on the reality that it is a nuclear weapons state.

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H A P T E R

4

CHINA AND JAPAN: IS NUCLEAR COEXISTENCE POSSIBLE? Great power rivalry between China and Japan in Northeast Asia is a prospect that typically provokes concern among policy practitioners and scholars alike. The visceral atmospherics of historical disputes, stark differences in their approach to domestic governance, and the simple fact that China and Japan are the two strongest indigenous states in Northeast Asia mean that coexistence between Beijing and Tokyo needs to be managed carefully by both sides. Whether we like it or not, nuclear weapons are an everpresent feature of the Chinese-Japanese relationship. China is a declared nuclear weapons state with a well-developed force structure designed to undertake a variety of strike missions. Since detonating its first nuclear device in 1964, China has endeavored to improve the integrity, coherence, and range of its nuclear weapons force with a view to bolstering its deterrent value against the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union/Russia. Japan, while not a declared nuclear power, has the most advanced threshold capability of any state in the international system. There is general consensus that if a political decision were taken in Tokyo to acquire an operational nuclear force, such an objective could probably be achieved inside one year. As I argue in this chapter, the chances of Japan acquiring nuclear weapons in the first half of the twenty-first century are greater than is often assumed. Against this background, the popular view among observers is that any decision by Japan to acquire nuclear weapons would have major adverse consequences for the bilateral relationship with China, and for Northeast Asia as a whole. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, if Japan does decide to go nuclear in the next decade or two, short of direct military action to neutralize Japan’s nuclear infrastructure, China would have little choice but to learn to live with a nuclear-armed rival in Northeast Asia. Given their

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lucrative economic relationship and increasingly overlapping concerns over strategic energy supplies, China and Japan both have considerable incentives to avoid serious tensions and conflict. There would be some uncomfortable adjustments by all regional states following any Japanese acquisition of nuclear weapons, but it is by no means clear-cut that the latter would trigger serious proliferation pressures in South Korea or Taiwan, as some analysts assume. For as long as the United States continues to pursue a stabilizing role in Northeast Asia, and for as long as Seoul and Taipei do not feel that their sovereignty is likely to be directly threatened by Japan, there are few grounds to assume that regional policy elites will feel compelled to review their nonnuclear status in light of any shift in Japan’s nuclear status.

THE DYNAMICS

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SINO-JAPANESE RELATIONS

The history of relations between China and Japan can be traced to the early part of the seventh century, at the time of the emerging T’ang dynasty in China and moves within Japan to create a unified state. During this time, the dynamics of the relationship were largely one way, with the Japanese adapting their early state system to many of China’s political and legal practices, the most salient of which was the centralized bureaucratic state. Over time, Japan came to embrace a range of codes and rules that mirrored key features of China’s social, political, and legal order.1 Inhabiting territory in close proximity to China, Japanese elites traveled regularly across the sea to acquaint themselves with Chinese culture, language, and philosophy. Key elements of each were repatriated to Japan and adapted to fit the local scene. As one author has noted, for a remarkably long time the Sino-Japanese relationship was essentially one-sided: “Until modern times the Chinese rarely troubled themselves about Japan; the Japanese, however, were preoccupied with China from the beginning of their recorded history until the opening to the West [in the nineteenth century].”2 Before the advent of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, no other country was more influential in shaping Japan’s evolution than China. One of the common themes permeating relations between Japan and China prior to the second half of the nineteenth century was that when the two countries confronted potential conflict over territorial issues, both were able to find ways of resolving their differences. In 1871, China and Japan concluded a friendship treaty in which both recognized the other as its equal.3 However, by the early 1890s the accelerated expansion of industrialization in Japan, the creeping militarization of Japanese political life, and rising bilateral tensions over Korea and Taiwan (then Formosa) led to a sharp deterioration in relations. This culminated in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95 in which Japan decisively defeated Chinese forces and imposed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the terms of which gave Japan control over key

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Chinese territories, including Taiwan, which Japan occupied until 1945. The Treaty also paved the way for Japan’s invasion and occupation of the Korean peninsula.4 By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan was emerging as a homegrown colonial power in Northeast Asia and its relationship with China was very much framed according to Japan’s increasingly transparent imperial aims in the region. In the first half of the twentieth century, Sino-Japanese relations were characterized by successive attempts on Japan’s part to extend its influence into China through force, large-scale resistance by China to Japanese imperialism, and radical domestic change in both countries occasioned by Japan’s unconditional surrender to the allies in 1945 and the victory of Communist forces in China in 1949. A crucial difference between the two countries in this period was their respective degree of domestic political cohesion. For some time, China had experienced massive internal fragmentation due to widespread impoverishment, frequent defeat in wars, and a government unwilling to undertake serious reform. The collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 triggered the onset of four decades of civil war between nationalist and Communist forces in China that was overlaid by ongoing provincial conflicts between various political factions.5 Japan, by contrast, was characterized by political stability after a brief period of instability in the 1920s. Strong central control, enforced by an increasingly nationalistic coalition between the zaibatsu business combines and the military, led to spectacular industrial development. In the wake of World War I, Japan was the only Asian state that had an economic output anywhere near that of the major global economies in Europe and North America.6 It was against this background that Japan initiated the second Sino-Japanese War by invading eastern parts of China in 1931, and established a Japanese puppet state in Manchuria (Manchukuo) in 1932. Japan’s invasion and occupation of several major cities in China beginning in 1937 led to a number of documented atrocities against local populations that left an indelible imprint on Chinese attitudes toward Japan. The worst of these occurred at Nanjing where the Japanese Imperial Army undertook a largescale campaign of destruction in the city, resulting in anywhere from two to three hundred thousand deaths.7 However, Japan was never able to control all of China despite committing more military forces to that theater than any other during World War II. Chinese nationalist and Communist resistance compounded the strategic overstretch experienced by Japan following the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. By the time the United States dropped its atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Japan had not made any serious territorial inroads in China since 1940.8 The immediate postwar period in Sino-Japanese relations was characterized by recovery, reconstruction, and revolution. As the chief occupying power in a conquered Japan, the United States largely determined the constitutional,

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economic, and foreign policy parameters of Japan’s national strategy during this period.9 The creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in December 1949 had the effect of transforming China from a divided collection of provinces into a highly centralized state. In terms of foreign policy, China and Japan adopted very different paths in the postwar period. Japan developed a dependent security alliance relationship with its erstwhile occupier, while China built an alliance with the Soviet Union in the wake of the Communist victory in 1949. From the beginning, however, China had a very clear appreciation that there were divergences in strategic interests with Moscow. As the subsequent Sino-Soviet split showed, ideologically and pragmatically, nonalignment with East and West was a more natural fit with China’s independent national strategy under Mao Tse-tung.10 Between 1945 and 1955 there was no formal diplomatic contact between Japan and China. Both countries remained preoccupied with reordering their respective domestic systems and bedding down key postwar reforms. There remained, moreover, deep resentment in China over the excesses of Japanese imperialism and emerging tensions over Japan’s security alliance with the United States. Interestingly, however, it was the Chinese side that requested improved diplomatic relations in meetings with their Japanese counterparts at the landmark Bandung Conference in 1955.11 Yet despite evidence of a pragmatic desire on both sides to develop a sustainable bilateral relationship, a number of events during the 1950s and 1960s conspired to undermine real progress. Suspicion on the part of China over what it saw as Japan’s revanchist designs over Taiwan, China’s obsessive introspection during the Cultural Revolution, and tensions over deepening American military involvement in Indochina all served to color an already tense bilateral relationship. The one bright spot on the horizon during the 1960s was a small but burgeoning trade relationship between Tokyo and Beijing, notwithstanding their chilly political relations. While China’s economy very much remained in the underdeveloped category, Japan’s remarkable postwar economic growth meant that it was regarded in Northeast Asia as the regional exemplar of the developmental state.12 The first milestone in the postwar bilateral relationship occurred in 1972 when, in the wake of China’s rapprochement with the United States, China and Japan agreed to normalize diplomatic relations. In the joint communiqué signed in September that year, Tokyo and Beijing committed themselves to “put an end to the abnormal state of affairs between the two countries.” In exchange for renouncing its demand for war reparations from Japan, China secured the latter’s commitment to a “One China” policy (with Japan abandoning all formal ties with Taiwan), as well as a formal acknowledgement by Japan of “the serious damage it caused to the Chinese people through war.”13 Although the normalization of relations could not paper over different strategic aims in Tokyo and Beijing, it did demonstrate that

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both sides had a sufficiently strong political and economic motivation to develop positive relations with the other. In 1979, one year after the conclusion of the bilateral Treaty of Peace and Friendship (an agreement directed largely at the Soviet Union), Japan became the single largest donor of Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) to China, with a public commitment to underwrite China’s Five Year Plan between 1979 and 1984.14 By the late cold war period, Japan and China were committed to the longterm improvement of their bilateral relationship, albeit for different reasons. Then, as now, elites in both countries understood that there would probably never be any natural affinity or genuine affection between their people and that their primary task would be to navigate the relationship around a host of recurring obstacles. These obstacles remain partly a legacy of the “history” issue in Sino-Japanese relations. But they also stem from the fact that both countries remain suspicious of the other’s long-term strategic intentions. In a very important sense, closer Sino-Japanese relations during the 1980s were made easier by the fact that China had already moved closer to the United States diplomatically and strategically during the 1970s. The 1972 NixonMao meeting was followed by the normalization of U.S.-Chinese diplomatic relations in 1978 and an increasingly open dialogue between Washington and Beijing about the importance of containing Soviet global influence, particularly in Asia following America’s defeat in Indochina in 1975.15 The advent of the “second cold war” between the United States and the USSR in late 1979 only strengthened the perceived logic of U.S.-Chinese cooperation against the Soviet Union. The end of the cold war had an important impact on relations between Japan and China.16 East-West confrontation had provided a focus for both countries that made it easier for governments in Tokyo and Beijing to neutralize grassroots nationalist impulses stemming from the pre-1945 period of the bilateral relationship.17 The removal of the Soviet threat and the emergence of the United States as the sole global superpower triggered a reassessment of strategic thinking in Beijing and Tokyo. For Japan, the post–cold war order raised substantial strategic challenges. The most significant of these was the changing nature of its security alliance with the United States. During the cold war, Washington had been content to allow Japan to play a supportive, largely behind the scenes, role in the day-to-day strategic management of the alliance. Japan provided the real estate for American bases and the funds to support the maintenance of the U.S. force presence. But actual combat operations remained Washington’s responsibility. Two events were critical in challenging this long-standing division of labor within the alliance. The first was Japan’s refusal to provide “boots on the ground” to the U.S.led military effort against Iraq in 1991. While Japan provided $13 billion to the war effort (by far the largest financial contribution of any single state), its failure to send Self Defense Force (SDF) personnel to the Middle East theater

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of operations was widely condemned. This condemnation had a galvanizing impact on Japanese policy makers.18 The second, less noted, event was the 1993–94 North Korean nuclear crisis, when the United States began substantially reinforcing its deterrence garrison in South Korea and preparing for war against the DPRK following Pyongyang’s announcement that it was withdrawing from its global nonproliferation commitments. Despite repeated urgent requests from Washington for help with a range of specific military tasks, the Japanese government’s response was glacial and grudging as it worked through “constitutional issues.”19 The Clinton administration’s exasperation with this response introduced renewed tension into the bilateral alliance relationship. The decision by Japan to revise key laws allowing the SDF’s deployment outside the home islands after the 1991 Gulf War and its agreement to renegotiate the U.S.-Japanese Defense Guidelines in 1996 to permit Japanese support for U.S.-led combat operations “in areas surrounding Japan” were a corollary of these two events.20 The revision of the Defense Guidelines—coming hot on the heels of the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crisis— was also aimed at eliminating the legal barriers to Japan supporting the United States in any conflict with China over Taiwan. Agreement by Japan to participate in missile defense research and development in the wake of North Korea’s 1998 Taepodong missile test provoked further concern in Beijing that the United States and Japan were crafting a joint containment strategy against China.21 China’s response to these changes in the U.S.-Japanese alliance and, by association, Japan’s strategic policy, was highly charged and included accusations that the alliance was being used as “cover” for Japanese remilitarization.22 Beijing’s over-reaction to the rather modest changes to the Defense Guidelines betrayed a strong sense of insecurity about its strategic position in the new international environment. U.S.-Soviet strategic confrontation during the cold war had provided China with reassurance that both superpowers would remain largely preoccupied with containing each other’s influence. This meant that China could plan with some certainty that the global and regional influence of the United States and the Soviet Union would indeed be balanced by the other. From China’s perspective, the bottom line of American unipolarity was that the United States would be more willing to meddle in issues of major strategic concern to China, particularly Taiwan. That Japan appeared all too willing to play a more active role in U.S.-led military operations in East Asia further complicated the picture for Chinese strategic planners.23 This view has been accentuated in the post-9/11 environment with the apparent willingness of the new generation leadership in Japan to use American requests for support for “coalition of the willing” operations in the Middle East and elsewhere as a pretext to further relax longstanding legal restrictions on SDF deployments abroad.24

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On the surface at least, the contemporary bilateral relationship between China and Japan is characterized by a degree of mistrust underpinned by discord resulting from unresolved historical issues. This was exemplified by the nationwide anti-Japanese protests in China in the first half of 2005 where authorities struggled to reign in nationalists intent on violently targeting Japanese diplomatic missions and businesses.25 It is also clear that a source of tension in the bilateral relationship relates to more hardheaded suspicions about the longer term role and intentions of the other in Asia. Indeed, the large scale anti-Japanese demonstrations in 2005 owed just as much to Japan’s high-profile bid to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as to the ongoing controversy in China regarding visits by cabinet ministers to the Yasukuni shrine and the publication of several college textbooks denying Japan’s brutal imperial past.26 The government in Beijing has a proven record of “leveraging public indignation to extract concessions from Tokyo,” and some in China’s ruling elite see history as a blunt instrument to be used on occasions where Japan seeks international and regional recognition in accordance with its economic and military capabilities.27 However, with generational change among Japan’s senior political leadership, China’s strategy has failed to hit the “guilt button.” If anything, it appears to have backfired by reinforcing an increasingly defiant, nationalist attitude among Japan’s governing elites.28 Indicating a shift away from Japan’s traditional posture of not voicing concern publicly about China, in late 2004 the Japanese government issued a statement accompanying the National Defense Program Guidelines that, aside from North Korea, China remained the only potential threat to Japan’s national security.29

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES AND MOTIVES: ACTUAL, RESIDUAL, AND POTENTIAL One of the salient undercurrents of the bilateral relationship between Japan and China is the role of nuclear weapons in shaping the security perceptions of both countries. On the one hand, both states have been the object of nuclear intimidation; China from the United States and the Soviet Union at key junctures during the cold war, and Japan by direct attack with nuclear weapons in August 1945 and its place on the Soviet nuclear target list for much of the cold war. China has been a declared nuclear power since 1964. Japan, for its part, has a quiet but long-standing interest in acquiring nuclear weapons. During World War II, the imperial government sanctioned research and development on atomic weapons, but serious progress was hamstrung by a lack of resources and scientific expertise.30 It was not until China’s successful test of a uranium device in October 1964 that pressures began to build among Japan’s governing elites in favor of acquiring nuclear weapons. In a series of meetings with American officials in the wake of the

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Chinese test, Japanese policy makers signaled they were sympathetic to matching China’s newfound capability. Around the same time, U.S. intelligence assessments concluded that Japan was capable of building a large-scale operational nuclear force within one decade of making a decision to do so.31 Proliferation pressures subsequently subsided with private reassurances from Washington about the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence guarantees and declining concerns in Tokyo about Chinese “irrationality.” The Japanese government is known to have undertaken two internal studies— the first in 1968–70 and the second in 1995—explicitly assessing the costs and benefits of Japan acquiring nuclear weapons. While both of these studies were classified, they reportedly concluded that the benefits of Japan going nuclear (including greater independence from the United States) were not sufficient to justify the acquisition of nuclear weapons. Yet the fact that the studies occurred at all in a country with a supposedly profound “nuclear allergy” indicates that successive Japanese governments have approached nuclear weapons in pragmatic, cost-benefit, terms.32 This has been very much despite the enshrinement of the so-called Three Non-Nuclear Principles in Diet legislation in 1971.33 Japan’s latent nuclear capability and its apparent shift to a more assertive strategic posture since the end of the cold war, in tandem with greater emphasis on power projection capabilities for the SDF, is naturally of concern to Beijing.34 China’s rush to loudly condemn public statements within Japan canvassing the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons confirms apprehension among Chinese policy makers regarding Japan’s potential future role as a nuclear power in Northeast Asia. A key theme in Chinese antinuclear pronouncements directed at Japan is that the latter cannot be trusted with the “ultimate weapon” given its history of imperialist expansion in Asia. Although there may be some genuine feeling in these sentiments, it is likely that Beijing’s concerns are driven more by an appreciation that a Japanese nuclear force would grant Japan increased strategic leverage in its relationship with China and possibly give it a more credible claim to great power status in Northeast Asia. As I argue in the last section of this chapter, these particular concerns are justified given Japan’s well-established, if presently latent, nuclear weapons potential. Since the 1960s China has sought to integrate its nuclear capability into military force structure and doctrine. Prior to its inaugural nuclear test, China had devoted considerable resources to acquiring atomic weapons. Following the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s, and Moscow’s attendant withdrawal of all technical support for the Chinese nuclear program, China accelerated its program and achieved some impressive milestones in the 1960s (atomic test in 1964, first nuclear-armed missile in 1966, initial hydrogen bomb test in 1967).35 Over the last four decades, China’s nuclear forces have evolved from being a fairly small inventory, with extremely limited coverage,

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into a triad of forces encompassing land-based missiles, strategic bombers, and a small submarine-based capability. In terms of actual numbers, estimates put the figure anywhere from between 100 to 400 deployed warheads, and China is often credited with being the world’s third largest nuclear weapons power. It can now strike most parts of the globe with nuclear weapons, including most of the United States.36 Yet China was effectively unable to strike the United States until 1980, when it successfully flight-tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Until quite recently, doubts persisted over the credibility of China’s second-strike capability, with its limited land-based ICBM force susceptible to U.S. preemptive strikes and its underdeveloped nuclear ballistic missile firing submarine (SSBN) force unable to provide reasonable assurance of executing retaliatory strikes against the United States in the event of an American first strike.37 In response, Chinese policy makers have attached increased priority to building up China’s road mobile land-based ICBM capability and are reportedly working on equipping these missiles with multiple warheads.38 In addition, China is seeking to bolster its sea-based deterrent. According to some sources, this includes plans to expand to sixteen the number of missiles carried aboard single SSBNs.39 However, China’s claims about its ability to deliver on future nuclear modernization must be open to question in a context of competing budgetary claims for conventional weapons systems, and in the broader equation of providing sufficient “butter” as well as “guns” for China’s population as the dividend of rapid economic growth. New nuclear weapons systems are expensive, and unless the central government is seen to be maintaining its commitment to improving public goods during a time of exponential economic growth, it may leave itself vulnerable to internal political pressures. China’s nuclear weapons capability is relatively well known. Less acknowledged is Japan’s capacity to manufacture an advanced nuclear weapons force. Japan is a threshold nuclear weapons power; that is, it possesses all of the technical capabilities, know-how, and materials to manufacture nuclear weapons should policy makers decide to do so. Japanese policy makers themselves have been reluctant to acknowledge this publicly, with the standard position being that Japan’s massive stocks of reactor-grade plutonium are unsuited to manufacturing nuclear weapons and that Japan’s nuclear scientific and technical establishment is committed to exploiting the atom for exclusively peaceful purposes. However, this position is at odds with periodic statements from serving and former members of government in Japan. These statements have emphasized that despite its non-nuclear policy, Japan has the wherewithal to acquire nuclear weapons if it decides to divert its energies from civilian to military development.40 This official dissonance is mirrored in the writings of some nongovernment analysts who routinely dismiss the suggestion that Japan is in a position to acquire nuclear weapons but who

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carefully qualify their remarks by conceding that Japan could, technologically, go nuclear if it chose to do so.41 Japan has by far the largest stocks of reactor-grade plutonium of any nonnuclear weapons state and remains the only non-nuclear power to operate uranium enrichment and reprocessing plants “all of which are technically capable of producing fissile materials for nuclear weapons.”42 In addition, Japan currently has the third largest holdings of plutonium in the world, surpassed only by the United States and Russia.43 These holdings are far in excess of any plutonium that could conceivably be utilized for civilian purposes within Japan and have provoked suspicion that Japan is hoarding plutonium to retain a weapons capability. The determination of successive governments to persevere with fast-breeder reactor technology that produces more plutonium in spent reactor fuel than it consumes, in spite of longstanding doubts about the technology’s commercial viability, appears to confirm that Japan sees its domestic nuclear program through a military, as well as a civilian, prism. The Japanese government has also approved the construction of a major reprocessing plant at Rokkasho that is scheduled to begin operating in 2012. Once operational, it is estimated that the plant will be capable of reprocessing 800 tonnes of spent fuel per year from Japan’s ten nuclear electric utilities, making it easier for Japan to produce weapons-grade plutonium in the longer term.44 Those, including the Japanese government, who discount the argument that Japan is pursuing a hedging strategy designed to keep its nuclear weapons option open point out that reactor-grade plutonium contains around one-third less plutonium 239 (Pu-239) than weapons-grade plutonium and claim that it is therefore unsuited for use in nuclear weapons.45 Yet, as several studies have shown, reactor-grade plutonium, while not ideal, can in fact be used to manufacture crude nuclear explosives.46 For a highly advanced industrial state like Japan, the technical obstacles to producing nuclear weapons derived from reactor-grade plutonium would be much lower than for a developing country like North Korea. Given Japan’s existing and projected future stockpiles of plutonium, and in light of the fact that it takes only 30 percent more reactor-grade plutonium than weapons-grade plutonium to fashion a nuclear device (most estimates are that a basic fission weapon can be devised using between 5 to 6 percent of weapons-grade plutonium), if a political decision was taken, Japan would certainly be able to go nuclear within a relatively short space of time, possibly within a matter of months. Yet building a nuclear device is only part of the picture. If Japan were to develop an operational nuclear weapons capability, it would need to acquire the necessary delivery systems to launch nuclear payloads against designated targets. Moreover, for Japan to attain a credible second-strike capability, it would need to acquire weapons-bearing platforms invulnerable to a disarming first strike by any aggressor. The delivery system of choice for nuclear-armed

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states remains ballistic missiles, and Japan has one of the most advanced commercial space launch programs in the world that uses several types of rockets that could provide the basis for a future ballistic missile force. The successful testing of the H2A space launch vehicle (SLV) provides Japan with a heavy lift, solid fueled rocket that could easily launch a large nuclear payload over intercontinental ranges.47 While Japan could build nuclear-capable ballistic missile systems based on its advanced SLV capabilities, there is less certainty about whether it could develop an assured second-strike capability to deter its adversaries. Alan Dupont has argued that “since it has no second strike capability in the form of strategic bombers or ballistic missile submarines,” in the event it acquired nuclear weapons “Japan would be forced to operate on an inherently destabilizing hair trigger alert, requiring the SDF to launch on warning or risk losing its nuclear weapons to an adversary’s first strike.”48 However, this assumes that Japan does not currently have the ability to rapidly reconfigure its force structure to exploit its already advanced submarine technology base. Although Japan has not procured SSBNs, it has one of the most technologically advanced submarine capabilities of any country in the world, a fact that Chinese military planners have recognized.49 It already has the most modern submarine fleet in all of Asia, and given the country’s nuclear scientific expertise, coupled with its proven naval engineering expertise, there can be no doubt that Japan would be able to acquire an SSBN capability if a decision was made to do so.50 That Japan has the technological capacity to become an advanced nuclear weapons state within a fairly short period of time can hardly be contested. What is open to debate is whether Japan will actually opt to go nuclear in the future. There is a tendency in much of the literature for analysts to discount the possibility that Japan will acquire nuclear weapons by pointing to its current lack of apparent intent to go down that path. Mike Mochizuki notes that “the mainstream view [in Japan] is that nuclearization will on balance undermine rather than promote Japan’s security interests . . . the possibility of Japan breaking out militarily by acquiring offensive capabilities and nuclear weapons and by adopting a doctrine of pre-emption is slim.”51 In a similar vein, Thompson and Self argue that “it is clear that Japan is not currently preparing to develop a nuclear deterrent. What it may do in the future is hard to know . . . but because of the gaps Japan has scrupulously maintained with regard to technical and policy aspects of nuclear arms, we need not fear a nuclear breakout in Japan.”52 These arguments are closely linked to the claim that the “nuclear allergy” is so profoundly ingrained among the Japanese public because of Japan’s searing experience as the sole target of nuclear weapons that this has created a powerful normative aversion to acquiring nuclear weapons under any circumstances. As one Japanese analyst has noted, “If the international community fully understood the feeling of the Japanese

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people towards the nuclear issue, no one would expect the possibility of Japan acquiring nuclear weapons as long as Japanese democracy functions.”53 Yet, the likelihood that Japan will acquire a nuclear weapons capability in the next ten to fifteen years is greater than many analysts are willing to concede. Three main reasons can be put forward to support this contention. The first is that Japan’s alliance with the United States will continue to evolve over time.54 The U.S.-Japanese security alliance would not necessarily have to formally dissolve for Japan to go nuclear. Since 9/11, the United States has gradually become more tolerant of nuclear proliferation among “non-rogue” states, and it is quite conceivable that Washington would tolerate (if not welcome) a nuclear-armed Japan within the framework of the alliance. As U.S.Chinese economic interdependence deepens, it is likely that there will be growing Japanese doubts over Washington’s willingness to use force against China in the event of a Taiwan Strait conflict. This could lead to further doubts about whether the American nuclear umbrella would actually apply in the event that China sought to confront Japan with military force over one of their several territorial disputes in Northeast Asia, including the potentially flammable dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. In such circumstances, the strategic logic of acquiring a minimum nuclear deterrent could look very attractive for a future Japanese government. The second reason why the likelihood of Japan acquiring nuclear weapons is greater than many admit is the rise of a new generation of Japanese political leaders who tend to be more openly nationalistic in outlook than their predecessors and more inclined to regard strategic rivalry with China as the major long-term challenge facing Japan.55 With no memories or direct experience of Japan’s wartime history, and increasingly unconstrained by any sense of moral guilt or responsibility over Japan’s imperial past, baby boom politicians (including Junichiro Koizumi’s successor as prime minister, Shinzo Abe) have fewer inhibitions contemplating a more assertive, or “normal” strategic policy for Japan, including a nuclear capability.56 Moreover, given the gradual demise of once powerful left-wing parties since the end of the cold war, this generation is less constrained politically to challenge established views on strategic issues. Over time, with the rise of post–baby boom Generation X and Generation Y politicians, the effects of this generational change will only be reinforced. The third reason why a nuclear-armed Japan is more likely than many believe is that Japanese leaders are politically well placed to justify the acquisition of nuclear weapons by arguing (correctly) that the non-nuclear status of Japan was never intended to be permanent and that nuclear weapons are not prohibited under the constitution. This would certainly be facilitated by the gradual demise of the NPT, the only international agreement under which Japan has committed itself not to acquire nuclear weapons. The concept of a “defensive nuclear force” is not new in Japanese strategic thought

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and has been articulated on several occasions by senior Japanese officials dating back to the 1950s.57 Most recently, in 2003, then Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary (and current Prime Minister) Shinzo Abe observed that the Japanese constitution “permits Japan’s possession of nuclear weapons with a range limited to that minimally necessary for self defense.”58 Given that the “defensive nuclear force” rationale has been floated publicly on a number of occasions, a future Japanese government would be able to portray nuclear acquisition to a domestic audience as a less than revolutionary shift in Japanese strategic doctrine. While Japan’s foreign minister publicly ruled out acquiring nuclear weapons in response to North Korea’s October 2006 nuclear test, Pyongyang’s actions have nevertheless further stirred debate among Japanese political elites about the pros and cons of going nuclear.59 The political case for acquiring nuclear weapons would be strengthened significantly in the event of a Chinese-Taiwanese conflict or a major drawdown of U.S. forces stationed in the Asia-Pacific, both of which are feasible within the next one to two decades.

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The interrelationship between doctrine and strategy critically shapes how a nuclear-armed state endeavors to command, structure, and use its nuclear forces as an instrument of national policy. Doctrine, put simply, constitutes a broad set of principles that provide generic guidance for the application of military force. While it is authoritative, doctrine is also, by definition, nonspecific. This means that for doctrine to be implemented, a strategy is required to translate generic guidance into detailed policy. A country’s nuclear doctrine may promulgate deterrence as the overriding objective, but there are any number of potential strategies for achieving this doctrinal aim. For instance, during the cold war, the United States maintained a nuclear doctrine that accorded pride of place to achieving deterrence, but its nuclear strategy frequently encompassed a range of diverse (and occasionally contradictory) policies, including flexible response, massive retaliation, assured destruction, countervalue targeting, counterforce targeting, launch on warning, and deliberate ambiguity regarding the circumstances in which it would use nuclear weapons. American nuclear doctrine remained fairly constant throughout the cold war, but U.S. nuclear strategy was adapted to fit perceived changing circumstances.60 Most analysts agree that the key factors that motivated China to begin the process of acquiring nuclear weapons in the mid-1950s stemmed from the new Communist regime’s sense of insecurity and vulnerability in a world dominated by bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Notwithstanding his blithe dismissal of the atomic bomb as a “paper tiger,” Mao Tse-tung quickly came to appreciate the increased strategic latitude

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that nuclear weapons would give to China.61 Chinese strategists appear to have been especially impressed by the effectiveness of thinly veiled nuclear threats by the United States to force parties to the negotiating table during the Korean War. Mao himself observed in 1956 that “if we are not to be bullied in the present-day world, we cannot do without the bomb.”62 Moreover, despite being the beneficiary of significant nuclear-related aid and support from Moscow, from the outset China regarded a nuclear capability as a potentially useful future strategic tool in dealing with its Soviet socialist comrades to the north. This view acquired a special urgency following the bitter split between Moscow and Beijing in 1959–60.63 Today, most Chinese strategists and policy makers probably agree that nuclear weapons possession confers valuable prestige and status on China and furnishes the leadership in Beijing with a global military presence they do not yet have with their conventional forces.64 Like Japan, at the rhetorical level China remains committed to the objective of disarmament as an ultimate objective in world politics. However, like Japan, there is little prospect that China will constrain its nuclear options in active pursuit of this goal. As noted above, since the end of the cold war, China has embarked on a nuclear force modernization program that places primary emphasis on improving its second-strike capabilities. Despite their declared commitment to nonproliferation, arms control, and eventual disarmament, Chinese leaders have been careful to stress that they will resist any American-led attempts to use these principles to limit China’s nuclear options.65 While a strong supporter of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)—an arms control initiative that Washington has pointedly refused to support—Beijing has steadfastly rejected out of hand suggestions that it support a multilateral arms control and disarmament process among the five nuclear weapons states under the NPT.66 Since detonating its first nuclear device in 1964, China has adhered to a declared doctrine of minimum deterrence.67 In contrast to the more ambitious nuclear doctrines of the superpowers, during the cold war China’s generic guidance for its nuclear forces aimed to achieve fairly modest goals. Chief among them was communicating to adversaries that China retained the capability to strike a small number of cities in response to any first strike on its own territory. Yet, as noted above, China did not attain a genuine secondstrike capability until the early to mid-1980s. While it was able to strike various targets in parts of the Soviet Union, all of Japan, and some U.S. bases in Asia during the 1970s, it was not until 1983 that the PLA deployed an ICBM (the DF-5A) that could reliably hit the west coast of the United States with a nuclear payload.68 Having had a very rudimentary command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) infrastructure for the previous one and a half decades, in 1979 the leadership identified improving this dimension of China’s nuclear forces as a priority. Since that time, China has reportedly made major inroads into substantially upgrading its digital communications

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systems and hardening underground command posts and warhead and missile storage sites across the country.69 With the exception of the Soviet Union’s no-first-use pledge in 1982 (subsequently revoked by the Russian government in 1993), and occasional highly conditional commitments not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states, the United States, the Soviet Union/Russia, France, and Britain have all chosen not to articulate the circumstances in which they would use their nuclear weapons. Each nuclear power has argued that to do so would dilute the effectiveness of deterrence by reducing uncertainty in the eyes of their adversaries and would-be adversaries. By contrast, China has consistently reaffirmed (first enunciated in 1964) that it will not be the first state to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. This no-first-use pledge has been reinforced by numerous statements underscoring China’s limited nuclear strike capabilities and its broader doctrine of minimum deterrence.70 Beijing has been particularly keen to compare China’s nuclear doctrine, based explicitly on retaliation, with the more ambiguous doctrines of the other four nuclear powers under the NPT.71 It should be emphasized, however, that China’s declared commitment to the doctrine of minimum deterrence was most forthright during the timeframe when its nuclear forces were most vulnerable to decapitating first strikes from the United States and the Soviet Union.72 Since the end of the cold war, there have been indications that China’s nuclear doctrine and its nuclear strategy more generally have been undergoing something of a review. A number of analysts have pointed out that Chinese doctrinal pronouncements have evidenced a shift away from the rhetoric of minimum deterrence toward “limited deterrence.”73 Unlike minimum deterrence, which is limited to retaliation against nuclear strikes already carried out against Chinese national assets through the targeting of cities, the doctrine of limited deterrence sanctions a nuclear strategy where “nuclear weapons play a critical role in the deterrence of both conventional and nuclear wars as well as in escalation control (intrawar deterrence) if deterrence fails.”74 Limited deterrence envisions a wider role for nuclear weapons as an instrument of war-fighting and accords greater priority to counterforce targeting (e.g., missile silos, warhead storage facilities) than does minimum deterrence, which stresses the countervalue targeting of population centers. There are even some indications that China may be modifying its no-first-use policy by applying it exclusively to non-nuclear powers.75 In theory, this would allow China to justify the initiation of nuclear strikes against any nuclear-armed state in the international system, not just those recognized as nuclear weapons states under the NPT. It is difficult to gauge the precise reasons for this apparent shift in China’s nuclear doctrine, assuming it has indeed occurred. One explanation could be the increasing concern felt in some quarters of China’s policy establishment

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about the consequences of American intervention in a conflict with Taiwan. Signs that Beijing is at least thinking about nuclear war-fighting options may be intended to further buttress China’s strategy of deterring any U.S. involvement in a cross-Strait scenario. Another reason may be that China aims to flex its nuclear muscles in the face of a concentrated missile defense buildup by the United States and Japan in Northeast Asia.76 Whatever the reason, it is premature to conclude that China has radically departed from the way it has traditionally viewed the role of nuclear weapons in its national strategy. Chinese nuclear doctrine does envisage waging nuclear war if deterrence fails and China is attacked first. But, as David Shambaugh observes, “the lack of foreign interaction with China’s nuclear strategists and nuclear weapons establishment, and the general lack of Chinese transparency on such matters, often leads to guesswork, inference, and worse-case assumptions by foreign observers.”77 Even if China is slowly moving away from its traditional doctrine of minimum deterrence, it is merely bringing its nuclear doctrine and strategy more into line with that of the other declared nuclear powers. In light of China’s modest second-strike capability, it is likely that Beijing still bases its doctrine on the belief “that even a very small, unsophisticated force will deter nuclear attacks by larger, more sophisticated nuclear forces.”78 As a non-nuclear weapons state, Japan does not have an operational nuclear doctrine or set of strategies to coordinate a nuclear force. Therefore the question of how a nuclear-armed Japan would manage and coordinate a nuclear inventory can only be based on deduction. Yet, for some time, there have been indications of an emerging Japanese nuclear doctrine. Most fundamentally, Japan’s decision over time to maintain and strengthen its latent nuclear weapons capability represents a strategy of nuclear hedging. As Ariel Levite observes: Nuclear hedging refers to a national strategy of maintaining, or at least appearing to maintain, a viable option for the relatively rapid acquisition of nuclear weapons, based on an indigenous technical capacity to produce them within a relatively short time frame ranging from several weeks to a few years. In its most advanced form, nuclear hedging involves nuclear fuel cycle facilities capable of producing fissionable materials by way of uranium enrichment and/or plutonium separation, as well as the scientific and engineering expertise both to support them and to package their final product into a nuclear explosive charge.79

Japan’s nuclear hedging strategy appears intended as a subtle warning to other regional states, particularly China, not to push Tokyo to a point where it has no choice but to operationalize its nuclear capability. There is a high probability that Japan would decisively win any conventional or nuclear arms race with China. In the context of China’s exponential economic growth, it

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is easy to overlook how technologically advanced Japan’s economy remains in relative terms and just how hamstrung China would be in competing militarily with a major world economic power that already possesses a highly advanced military-industrial base. Indeed, China would be unable to maintain sustained levels of economic growth if it chose to engage in any kind of arms race with Japan.80 This harsh reality appears to be appreciated in Beijing where avoiding arms racing at the conventional or nuclear level has been a key imperative in China’s national strategy since the end of the cold war, when the folly of Soviet attempts to keep up with American technological superiority was exposed. One of the striking features of Japan’s geography is its lack of strategic depth. As a relatively compact island nation, the distance between Japan’s “outer coastal defenses” and its major cities and core industrial areas is only slight. Consequently, Japan’s defense strategy places a premium on the early warning and timely interception of threats to Japanese territory, along with threats to critical maritime trade routes. Japan has devoted particular emphasis to boosting its advanced early warning capabilities since the end of the cold war, with the acquisition of around forty Airborne Warning and Control System platforms (second only to the United States in numbers), and the successful launching of independent satellites in 2003 and two more planned for 2007 capable of monitoring activities in China and North Korea.81 Mirroring the priority placed on early warning and the rapid interception of threats, Japan’s defense posture reflects a layered, concentric circles doctrine. Maritime defense is designated as the “first line” of defense, air defense as the second line, and ground-force capabilities as the last line of defense. The Maritime Self Defense Force (MSDF) and Air Self Defense Force (ASDF) both maintain capabilities and adhere to doctrines that sanction long-range strike missions to neutralize threats well beyond Japan’s home islands.82 Some have cited Japan’s geostrategic situation as weakening the case in favor of it acquiring nuclear weapons. The concentration of Japan’s population centers in several major cities, combined with the relative proximity of major urban areas across the three main islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, and Kyushu mean that any nuclear strike on Japanese territory would probably have a catastrophic impact on Japan’s long-term ability to recover. This was a primary judgment contained in an internal government study conducted in the late 1960s that juxtaposed the probability of high casualties in Japan resulting from a series of nuclear strikes, with those in China, a country with a significantly larger land mass and sparser population centers.83 It was also the conclusion of a private advisory group in a 2004 report commissioned by Japan’s cabinet office: “In a small country like Japan where population and industry are highly concentrated, the notion of combating nuclear weapons with nuclear weapons makes little sense. By relying on a ballistic missile defense system, Japan can complement America’s nuclear deterrent.”84

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However, Japan’s lack of strategic depth actually lends weight to the logic of it acquiring nuclear weapons to deter any future attempts at intimidation or blackmail by threatening its highly concentrated cities and industrial areas with nuclear attack. Japan will continue to maintain Northeast Asia’s most qualitatively advanced conventional force for some time to come, but it nevertheless faces two nuclear-armed regional rivals, China and North Korea. With this in mind, Japan could have a strong incentive to bolster its future deterrent capabilities. There are some interest