FZ: What’s the response from the South Korean government to the possibility of a preemptive strike against North Korea?

BC: I don’t think any responsible public official in the current administration of President Roh Moo Hyun has said that they would support an attack on Yongbyon. It wasn’t very well known at the time but back in 1994 Bill Clinton nearly carried out a preemptive strike against the North Korean nuclear facilities. Jimmy Carter flew to Pyongyong and intervened. He talked with Kim Il Sung and obtained a freeze on their nuclear facility, which was codified in the “October Framework Agreement” that kept North Korea’s plutonium facilities frozen for eight years.

At that point Kim Young Sam was president of South Korea and relations were very bad with the North. Kim Young Sam might well have supported a preemptive strike but what he’s said in retrospect, although Americans officials deny this, is that he wasn’t even consulted about it.

It raises an issue which Bush’s preemptive doctrine has raised in spades for Roh Moo Hyun: How could South Korea allow the United States to attack North Korea when South Korea would bear the brunt of the retaliation from the North? American officials including Rumsfeld and Cheney have said that this is too important of a question for us to give some sort of veto power to Seoul, and South Korea’s fear is that a war might develop without their assent. Adding to this problem is that when Rumsfeld moved 9,000 combat troops out of Korea to Iraq there were only bare levels of consultation with the South. Koreans have lived with our troops in their country since 1945 but always with the assumption that they were there to defend against North Korea.

When Rumsfeld began moving those troops around a kind of Pandora’s box of possibilities opened up and scared the hell out of Korean leaders. There are other flash points in East Asia, such as Taiwan. If China were to get into a war and the U.S. defended Taiwan, would the 30,000 troops in South Korea be used to fight there? In that case South Korea would be open to Chinese attacks to keep those troops from going to Taiwan.

In 2001 South Korean President Kim Dae Jung finally had Washington and Seoul moving in tandem with other allies to engage North Korea; to keep the nuclear facility at Yongbyon frozen and to indirectly buy out their medium and long-range missiles. I show my students the front page of the New York Times from October 2000 in which North Korea’s top general, who also runs the conglomerate that makes and sells North Korean missiles, came to visit Clinton. Even well informed people forget about the progress that was being made during that time because all of that diplomacy came to a stop when the 2000 election got held up on hanging chads. After Bush was declared winner by the Supreme Court, his people told Clinton that they didn’t want to go through with that deal and wouldn’t honor it and so on.

South Korean leaders were very happy about the policies of the late 1990s and when Bush stuck North Korea in the Axis of Evil it caused a deep estrangement—more so with Roh Moo Hyun than with Kim Dae Jung, who was president until 2002. Kim Dae Jung has always been a very pro-American person and believes deeply in this country’s democracy. Roh Moo Hyun, the current president, who was a protégé of Kim’s, had never been to the United States before he became president. He doesn’t speak any English. He’s much more of a native Korean and hasn’t liked what Bush has been doing one bit.

FZ: If North Korea were to use their nuclear weapons not as a negotiating tactic but in an actual attack, do you believe that South Korea would be the primary target? There’s a long history of animosity between Korea and Japan and conversely a long history of national unity between the two Koreas, which makes me wonder if Japan might be a more likely target.

BC: If a war were to break out and the South Korean army fought on the side of the United States, North Korea would have to hit South Korea. But you’re right that one of the most interesting secrets these days would be to know what North Korea’s targeting regimens are because for almost a decade now there has been a reconciliation between the North and South. Tens of thousands of South Koreans have been to the North and learned that they are cousins rather than evil people. This reconciliation comes at a time when Japan’s relations with both Koreas are at a real nadir.

North Korea and Japan have never had good relations and because Kim Jong Il admitted to abducting several Japanese citizens they’re now at an all time low. North Korea has over 100 medium range missiles that could hit every point in Japan. The missiles are mobile or hidden and very hard to take out. If a war were to develop, if there was a preemptive attack against North Korea it’s quite possible that North Korea would extend the war to Japan and spare as much as it could the South Korean civilian population in hopes that it would side with the North.

Anyone who imagines that a new Korean war would be anything but a complete disaster doesn’t know the situation. North Korea can inflict utter devastation on its neighbors even if it loses the war, which it would. Our war plans say that we need half a million troops in the Korean theater to defeat North Korea and even then it would take six months. North Korea has 15,000 national security and military facilities; it’s one of the most dug-in garrison states in world history with a tremendous capacity to demolish the northern region.

Just about every Democrat and many Republicans understand now that there is no military option on the Korean peninsula. Conversely, the North Koreans know that if they were to attack somebody—South Korea, Japan or the United States—that we would utterly destroy them. In 1995 Colin Powell said that if North Korea used one of its weapons of mass destruction we would turn it into a charcoal briquette. I don’t know how you can get any more blunt than that, but that’s exactly what would happen. North Korea has a return address and therefore if it were to use one of its nuclear weapons it would be the end of North Korea and the loss of millions of lives. The most important point about this nuclear program is that it can only be ended through negotiation.