By George C. Wilson

National Journal

It was a memorable Washington moment.  It came right after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee finished grilling President George W. Bush’s man in Iraq, Paul Bremer, last week.  A 20-something woman walked from the spectator seats in the cavernous hearing room of the Hart Senate Office Building to the dais to lay her concerns about Iraq on Bremer’s chief griller, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, the committee’s ranking Democrat.  Biden listened attentively to the young woman for several minutes as the room emptied.  He then took her aback by skipping right over Iraq and telling her that she and others in her generation had something more menacing to worry about — the accelerating nuclear arms race in the Far East.

The 60-year-old Biden told me later that he could not help feeling gloomy as he looked at the trusting woman and realized that his generation of leaders was bequeathing to her a world more dangerous than the one they grew up in.  They had only one nuclear gun pointed at them, the Soviet Union’s, during the Cold War.  In addition, it wasn’t always on hair trigger.  But as things stand right now, the usually buoyant Biden said sadly, that young lady and others in her generation soon will be looking down the barrel of half a dozen nuclear guns, many on hair trigger, because President Bush has not found a way to stop North Korea from starting a nuclear arms race in the Far East.

“Things are unraveling on the Korean Peninsula,” Biden said in explaining his pessimism in a lengthy interview.  The North Koreans are proceeding with their manufacture of nuclear bombs (see GSN, Oct. 2).  “If they haven’t already reprocessed those 8,000 spent fuel rods” taken out of storage in January at their nuclear facility at Yongbyon to make plutonium for bombs, “they’re on the verge of doing it.”  This will set off a chain reaction, he warned, compelling Japan to field its own nuclear weapons “within two years.  Then South Korea will become a nuclear power” (see GSN, Aug. 11).  China, confronted on its eastern front with a nuclear North Korea, a nuclear Japan, and possibly a nuclear Taiwan, “will go ballistic, literally and figuratively.”

The Chinese, Biden continued, are going to conclude that they’re really in a very different neighborhood than they were before.  “They’re going to say, ‘We only had to look south at India before in worrying about nukes.  That’s why we helped Pakistan with its nuclear program.  So India is not our greatest concern right now.  But now we have to vastly increase our nuclear capability.’”

China has less than two dozen nukes now, mainly aimed at U.S. cities, and these weapons are designed mainly to deter an American attack.  “They are really for defensive purposes,” Biden said.  But if China’s old enemy Japan goes nuclear, as it surely will if North Korea continues on its present course, China will feel compelled to develop and deploy hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nuclear weapons to deter Japan and the other new nuclear powers in the neighborhood, Biden contended.  Nor can Indonesia be expected to sit out the nuclear race in the Far East as the action-reaction phenomenon takes hold.

The senator’s gloom cannot simply be dismissed as “the-sky-is-falling” rhetoric from a liberal whose party is out of power.  Biden has spent most of his adult life trying to keep nuclear scorpions around the world from striking each other.  He has held forth not only in open Senate hearings and debates but also in private meetings with presidents and diplomats around the world.  Besides, others who have been down the road of confrontation with Pyongyang share his worries about North Korea triggering an arms race and potentially a nuclear war.  Most notable among them is former Defense Secretary William Perry, who readied the military for all-out war with North Korea in 1994 even while helping the Clinton administration to craft an accord with Pyongyang designed to freeze the country’s nuclear advance.

“If it keeps on its present course,” Perry wrote in the Washington Post on July 23, “North Korea will probably have six to eight nuclear weapons by the end of the year; will possibly have conducted a nuclear test; and may have begun deployment of some of these weapons targeted against Japan and South Korea.  By next year, it could be in serial production of nuclear weapons, building perhaps five to 10 per year.  Given North Korea’s desperate economic condition, we should expect it to sell some of the products of its nuclear program, just as it did with its missile program (see GSN, April 25).  If that happens, a nuclear bomb could end up in an American city.  The administration has suggested that it would interdict such transfers.  But a nuclear bomb can be made with a sphere of plutonium the size of a soccer ball,” wrote Perry.  “It is wishful thinking to believe we could prevent a package of that size from being smuggled out of North Korea.”

So how do we stop this locomotive that has gotten up so much steam?

Biden and Perry see no acceptable alternative to Bush’s conducting serious and direct negotiations with North Korea.  Diplomatic officials say that the ones to date, conducted with Pyongyang under the umbrella of multilateral talks with China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, have been less than halfhearted (see GSN, Sept. 2).  One diplomat in the know said that Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs John Kelly, Bush’s negotiator in the multination talks, brought nothing to the table for North Korea in the most recent round.  Kelly also infuriated the North Koreans by refusing to host a dinner for them, as they had done for us, the diplomat added.

Biden said despairingly that the neoconservatives around Bush, notably Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are viscerally opposed to duplicating anything former President Bill Clinton did, such as negotiating a pact with North Korea.  They consider negotiations with rogue leaders such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Il a sign of weakness, the senator said.

“My instinct,” said Biden, “is that the ‘hate-Clinton’ attitude is 75 percent of the reason the Bush administration is not negotiating seriously with North Korea, and 25 percent is [the belief] that you cannot negotiate with this guy and if you’re strong enough and tough enough, he’ll yield.”  Secretary of State Colin Powell realizes that the United States, no matter how strong it is, cannot just stiff-arm countries, Biden said.  Powell periodically talks Bush into negotiating, as he did with North Korea, but Cheney keeps pulling him back.  “Like with a horse, Powell is always able to lead Bush to the water.  But just as he is about to put his head down, Cheney up in the saddle says, ‘Un-uh,’ and yanks up the reins before Bush can drink the water.  That’s my image of how it goes,” Biden said.

Everybody knows, Biden said, that the only way the United States can get North Korea to halt its nuclear march is to, “at a minimum, assure the North Koreans that we will not remove [Kim Jong Il’s regime] from power.  But what would that do to the neocons in the administration?  They would have to swallow 20 years of their tripe that they would never do that.”

According to author Bob Woodward in Bush at War, the president said, “I loathe Kim Jong Il.  I’ve got a visceral reaction to this guy because he is starving his people.  And I have seen intelligence on these prison camps — they’re huge — that he uses to break up families and to torture people.  I am appalled.  ... It is visceral.  Maybe it’s my religion, but I feel passionate about this.”

This moralist mind-set at the top of the American government, Biden said, is why he feels gloomier about the prospect of avoiding nuclear war, particularly in the Far East, than at any time since he came to Congress three decades ago.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey and retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney are among the conservatives who share Biden’s sense of alarm about North Korea’s touching off a nuclear arms race.  But they disagree that Washington can negotiate an agreement that Pyongyang will honor.  “We see no alternative but for China to use its substantial economic leverage, derived from North Korea’s dependence on it for fuel and food, to press hard and immediately for a change in regime,” they wrote in the August 4 Wall Street Journal.  “Kim Jong Il’s regime has shown that agreements signed with it, by anyone, mean nothing.”

If China fails to effect regime change, the United States should be prepared to do it through a war featuring “massive air power,” Woolsey and McInerney said.  They contend that precision bombs could destroy the thousands of North Korean artillery tubes, many in caves, before the guns could kill thousands of South Korean civilians.  Biden and others, however, do not share that belief.  The neocons of this view “are the same guys who would have been telling [President] Eisenhower that he had to use a nuclear weapon against China” to win the Korean War, Biden scoffed.  “Can you imagine the Cold War ending the way it did if these guys were in charge?”

Biden was arguing his liberal ideology.  But Perry was not arguing ideology when he studied, at Clinton’s request, what to do about North Korea’s emerging nuclear arsenal in the 1990s.  Perry’s background and interests were first and foremost technical, not political.  As Pentagon research chief under President Carter from 1977 to 1981, Perry championed the initial development of the precision weapons that we so rely on today.  He told me back then that he could not get military leaders to see their advantages, to trust them.  He sounded as discouraged about this mind-set on the technical front as Biden does now on the diplomatic front.

More than a decade later, Perry, as defense secretary, analyzed whether precision munitions and other weaponry could derail North Korea’s nuclear program at a cost the world would accept, not condemn.  In contrast to the antiseptic war outlined by Woolsey and McInerney, Perry concluded that a war with North Korea — precision weapons notwithstanding — would be unacceptably bloody, especially for the South Koreans.  He recommended negotiations instead.  He is recommending them again today, with the very same Pyongyang government that later double-crossed him by eventually starting a separate nuclear program to enrich uranium.  Perry is holding his nose and saying, “The only reason for considering negotiations with North Korea is that the other alternatives are so terrible.”

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