Max Atkinson

North Korea peace deal with US only likely if both step back

THAT North Korea remains one of the most brutal regimes to have emerged from World War II was highlighted by the tragic stories of US student Otto Warmbier and the murder of the Korean dictator’s half-brother.

There was also the report by the 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry into North Korea. In the words of commission chairman Michael Kirby, a distinguished Australian former High Court judge, the regime’s methods were “strikingly similar” to the crimes of Nazi Germany. He likened jails to concentration camps in which millions of Jews, gypsies and political prisoners were exterminated.

But these facts do not justify a war likely to kill thousands of innocents. We should have learnt this lesson from the Iraq War, when a US-led coalition invaded another brutal regime in a war that cost up to a million Iraqi lives, but was not justified by an independent, forensic examination of claims by President G.W. Bush, later found to rest on fabricated evidence, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

The US blames the current crisis on the regime’s commitment to a nuclear defence capability, and the media is focused on the missile tests and Kim Jong-un’s intransigence. Little attention is given to the proposal by China, Russia, Germany and others for a UN-supervised peace in which the North would end these tests and phase out its nuclear weapons in exchange for the US ending its military exercises and phasing out trade sanctions.

To understand the North’s position we need to go back to 1958, when the US first installed nuclear missiles in South Korea in breach of the Armistice Agreement. They were secret until 1974, when US Army Chief General Abrams testified to Congress that the US had deployed a “tactical nuclear weapon”, the Lance missile, in readiness for a limited nuclear war. It was not, he explained, to defend the South from the North, but for regional defence. This was the containment strategy initiated by US diplomat George F. Kennan in 1946.

That left the North with a problem, since both the Soviets and Chinese refused to provide it with a nuclear defence and it could not rely on their support if attacked. That this was on the cards is confirmed by US files released years later and publicised by Chicago University Professor Bruce Cumings, an expert on the Cold War in Asia who sought a more balanced account of US post-war history in the region. They reveal ongoing concern that Syngman Rhee, the autocratic South Korean president, would reignite the war to force the US to unify the nation under his rule.

Missiles were withdrawn in 1991, after the US and USSR signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in July to reduce nukes by a third. The US has, however, said since that it regards South Korea under its “nuclear umbrella”.

It is unclear how much this