Creative Attacks on Missile Defense

Thursday’s New York Times offered a remarkable piece by Selig S. Harrison regarding the attitude of North Korea. During a recent trip to Pyongyang, Harrison received the following assurance from Ri Chan Bok, whom Harrison calls “a leading general”:

“At this stage, I don’t know anybody who believes that we need nuclear weapons, but everybody is thinking in that direction in view of the hostile attitude and hostile policies of the Bush administration.”

Let’s talk about stages. For example, the three-stage Taepo Dong-2 missile. When given only a light payload, this device is capable of a range up to 10,000 kilometers, making it a threat to the entire northwestern United States. The development of this missile was already in “late stages” according to the Rumsfeld Commission report, issued in July 1998. A month earlier, North Korea issued a declaration that it would “continue developing, testing and deploying missiles…. If the United States really wants to prevent our missile export, it should lift the economic embargo as early as possible and make a compensation for the losses to be caused by our missile export…. Our missile export is aimed at obtaining foreign money we need at present.”

Put more bluntly, give me your lunch money and I won’t break your nose. The purpose of North Korea’s pursuit of missile and WMD technology is and has been extortion, plain and simple. Moreover, the development of this technology for that purpose was going on before George W. Bush was even governor of Texas, to say nothing of president of the United States.

Harrison goes on to observe, “Precisely because North Korea is a small, impoverished country, it is intensely proud and nationalistic. Kim Jong Il is ready for an opening to the United States and South Korea, but he cannot afford the appearance of bowing to superpower pressure.”

The sense in which the North Korean leader cannot afford this appearance is uncertain. It is not as if he was a democratically elected prime minister who must survive votes of confidence or impending elections. He is a totalitarian dictator who can “afford” to create the impression that he would rather build missiles than feed his starving constituents.

But these fictions are necessary to Harrison’s attack on missile defense in particular and the Bush administration generally. The policy lesson: never let even the facts, let alone the truth, get in the way of good polemics.

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