Korean conundrum

North Korea’s latest nuclear test last week was greeted with a predictable mixture of scepticism and consternation. The seemingly contradictory responses often emanated from the same sources. On the one hand, serious doubts have been expressed about Pyongyang’s claim to have successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb, potentially far more devastating than a garden-variety atomic device and purportedly small enough to serve as a missile warhead.

At the same time, there have been the usual diatribes about the devastating capacity of this particular “rogue state” to wreck the regional status quo.

Neither response is entirely illogical. Whatever the North Koreans might have detonated, it wasn’t an ordinary firecracker. The explosion registered at a level of 5.1 on the Richter scale. Some experts opined that the nature of the device would be determined once the vapours it generated wafted across the border within a couple of days. What about satellite surveillance though? The US is supposedly capable of keeping its eyes on the planet, and North Korea must be a particular area of interest.

North Korea, over the decades, has relied on backing from Beijing and Moscow, but without hosting any permanent Chinese or Soviet bases, even during the Cold War. Last week, China and Russia joined the other members of the UN Security Council in condemning Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test.

China has lately tended to be seen as the North  regime’s only significant ally, but the authorities in Beijing are believed to have been miffed about the absence of a forewarning — even though Kim Jong Un did boast of his nation’s hydrogen-bomb capability a month or so before the underground test, which is said to have more or less coincided with the leader’s 33rd birthday (which he appears to have shared with the late David Bowie, not to mention Elvis Presley).

It is easy to argue, of course, that North Korea would have been considerably better off devoting its energies to other forms of advancement. Once upon a time its economic progress was deemed superior to that of its estranged neighbour — and it’s equally easy to forget that South Korea endured decades of exceptionally repressive military rule before acquiring democracy by degrees.

This is not to suggest, though, that its counterpart in the North is in any way defensible. The latter’s succession of Kims has provided an inexhaustible source of mockery, but their rule has obviously been no laughing matter for most North Koreans, not least those who have borne the brunt of ideological suspicion or, on a much broader scale, the country’s periodic famines.

It may seem fatuous, on the face of it, for Pyongyang to pretend that it needs a nuclear deterrent to protect itself against imperialist aggression. It is hardly the first country, though, to have relied on the deterrence argument, and its determination to build an arsenal may well have been reinforced by the fate of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi after they relinquished their nuclear projects.

Some analysts have suggested that Kim Jong Un’s actions are partly dictated by a desire to push the US towards the kind of negotiations without preconditions it undertook in the case of Iran and Cuba. It is hardly a secret that North has long yearned for one-on-one discussions with the US, as an equal.

A case can readily be made for not feeding the Kim dynasty’s delusions of grandeur. On the other hand, it may be unwise to squander any opportunity, however tiny, to resolve the stand-off with genuinely unconditional talks where everything — including the US military presence in South Korea and Japan — is on the table.

Not only does Barack Obama have little to lose by going down this track, but he may find Kim Jong Un more amenable to reason than many of equally bizarre-minded opponents on gun control.

By arrangement with Dawn