International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation

Bulletin 19 - Missile Defense and North-East Asia

Peace in East Asia and the Korean Peninsula

The Nature of Insecurity in East Asia after September 11

Samsung Lee

History shows that it is normal to live a world of abnormality. It is true more than ever at this moment. We are witnessing an intensifying vicious circle between the terror in the name of resistance and another kind of terror in the name of justice and security. It is inflicting immediate ramifications on the prospect of peace in East Asia. The United States is being more successful in gaining political legitimacy for a military high-tech buildup, including missile defense. This is true despite our sense that September 11th vindicated the terrible truth that the most serious and immediate threat to the security of the American people does not lie in the long-range missiles from the so-called 'states of concern'.

Over the years, American leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike, have been busy with convincing the American people that the best defense against missiles and nukes of the other nations is more investment in more complex weapon systems. This military scientism is again being mobilized to make the Americans believe that the best defense against terror also should be found in more investment in more high-tech weapons. The obvious material wealth of the nation seems to allow its infinite indulgence in such military scientism. The Bush Administration's ambitious plans for missile defense, including space-based laser weapons, are being blessed, along with high-tech war against terrorism, every minute politicians conclude their calls for resolute fight against terrorism with "God Bless America."

Changed priorities after September 11

The new version of the Cold War era dichotomy dividing the nations of the world into two separate camps - the states for terror and the states against terror, this time - appears, on the surface, to give a chance for realignment among the nations, including China and North Korea. It is supposed this gives them a chance to be on more friendly terms with the United States. Actually the two countries tried to take the opportunity by quickly expressing condemnation of terrorism, and in the case of North Korea, by officially announcing that it is ready to sign the international convention on the prevention of financing international terrorism.

On the other hand, however, the US-led global anti-terror campaign is already changing priorities in the policies of nations in East Asia in the direction that narrows the room for multilateral diplomacy to inch toward an arms control regime in the region. On the Korean Peninsula, the increased alert state of the South Korean armed forces and the strengthening of the US Air Force stationed in the Republik of Korea (ROK) contributed to straining the inter-Korean relations. The symbolism of the first post-war intervention by the Japanese military units in a war zone, which is being justified and accepted by the international society in its almost blind blessing of the global alliance against terrorism, alerts North Korea and China. And, more importantly, this reinforcement of the US-Japanese alliance for the anti-terror campaign strengthens the political support for Japan's cooperation with the US in their effort to build missile defenses. Moreover, there is a strong and increasing fear on the Korean Peninsula about the possibility of the American expansion of the military anti-terror campaign into other nations, North Korea as well as Iraq, despite the North Korean pledge to join the anti-terror convention.

Most disturbing is the fact that, especially since the apparently successful US air campaign against Afghanistan, military might and shere physical force are gaining, in peoples' mind, more respect and legitimacy as effective instruments to control threats to American security. American confidence in the utility of high-tech military investment, which had been waning with the opening of the Post-Cold War world, was restored by the impressive variety show of smart bombs in the Gulf War. In the war against Yugoslavia, it was reconfirmed as the essential framework of the American vision for 21st century security. Now, against the backdrop of the almost apocalyptic tragedy in New York, American psychological dependence on high-tech weapons is being elevated to the place of a national religion.

High-tech military scientism

What was broken and lost in the debris of the World Trade Center was the image of an unbreakable linkage between the great American power and the guaranteed individual security of American citizens. The apparent success of the high-tech war in Afghanistan is again restoring the sense of the linkage between the military might of the American state and the security of the individual members of the republic. The minimization of casualties among American soldiers, which seems to be insured by the high-tech nature of the war, plays a crucial role in that psychological rehabilitation. One of the sad but very important truths that are lost and concealed here is that the high-tech military scientism, which consumes tremendous amounts of American tax-payers' money every year, could not protect the citizens, and, in fact, was a part of the problems in American foreign and military policies that may have contributed to the tragic development.

High-tech war and high-tech military investment become religious creed at least in the collective psyche of the American general public. With the help of the total mobilization of the international media and the global alliance network, the American national creed reinforces the elements of military scientism in other parts of the world, including East Asia and the Korean Peninsula.

The high-tech military scientism, coupled with the turn-of-the-century zeal for the information technology industry, helps further marginalize political and diplomatic imagination as the means to move toward common security for all the peoples of the region in East Asia, too. Military science is embraced instinctively as the panacea for curing insecurity of a profoundly political nature. It reigns as the reason of the new century. Every immature technology is exploited to produce precarious and dangerously complex military weapons, plundering precious resources of mankind. The paradigm of thinking that dominated the superpower rivalry during the Cold War era remains intact. Therefore it is not surprising a new Cold War system emerges with a different set of Cold War terminology.

This development ever more consolidates the historical division of East Asia between the Asiatic mainland and the US-Japan high-tech military alliance. It also reactivates the system of high alert and tension on the Korean peninsula. Diplomacy is being rapidly replaced by threat of force. The inter-Korean ministerial meeting last month broke down after South Korea refused to yield to the North Korean demand that Seoul cancel a military alert called after the United States began bombing Afghanistan on October 7. It was in this context that South Korea test-fired a missile that has traveled 62 miles, well below the 187-mile limit set by the multilateral Missile Technology Control Regime that South Korea joined in March this year (2001), after years of negotiations with the United States. We are told, however, that defense analysts believe this test-fired missile has the capability of landing almost anywhere in North Korea. It was the first test-fire of a missile by South Korea after a restriction on the country's testing to a range of no more than 110 miles was removed in 2000 through long negotiations with the United States.

South Korean defense officials justify the missile test by reminding of the North Korean exports of short-range missiles and its alarming capability of firing a long-range missile in August 1998. They say they need to match the missile threat from North Korea. It is also important to note that South Korean defense officials often imply that the nation needs hightech weapon systems to match the intensifying modernization of the Japanese military power, including the neighbor's growing capability in missiles and other high-tech weapon systems. This justification is gaining natural support very easily among the South Korean general public scarred by history. This is likely to be the case also in North Korea. A considerable part of the development of missile capabilities in North Korea will be justified not only by the presence of the threat from the South and the US but also by the growing threat of the Japanese militarization. This awareness is almost a metaphysical entity in the psyche of the North Koreans in general, in a society of a particularly politicized historical consciousness.

US influence on Korean policy

Overall, however, the greatest determinant of the current situation on and around the Korean Peninsula is the American posture toward this part of the world. North Korea agreed in 1999 to suspend tests of its long-range missiles and has extended that moratorium through August 2003. Testimonies by the Clinton Administration officials reveal that North Korea was ready to compromise with the United States about limiting its missile development programs in late 2000. The NK-US relations could have had a chance of normalization if the US had been ready to implement the promises made in the Geneva Agreement of October 1994. In the Agreed Framework of 1994, the US agreed to lift its diplomatic and economic sanctions against North Korea on the condition that North Korea keeps the freeze of its nuclear programs. The long-range missile test by the North Koreans in August 1998 was done after many years of broken promises and new threats of military pressure on the part of the United States. This imbalance in the implementation of the agreement had been aggravated, especially since the change of America's internal politics by the Republican Revolution in the Congressional election of November 1994, which took place less than a month after the signing of the Geneva Agreed Framework.

American governments denied chance to serious diplomacy in dealing with the missile issue on the Korean Peninsula and were subjected to the incessant temptation to resort to the threat of preponderant high-tech military power as the means to impose American priorities. I believe this history is the major reason for lost opportunities to produce peaceful framework for security and missile control on the Korean Peninsula. The Bush Administration, in particular, is suspected of being unwilling to make a serious diplomatic effort to solve the missile issue in order to sustain a situation that may justify its own cherished missile defense plans. This American posture is worsening the situation by encouraging the conservative political forces in South Korea that have vested interests in controlling the society and politics of the nation by mobilizing anti-North political agendas. This continues to narrow the options available to President Kim Dae Jung and his 'sunshine policy'.

An alternative security vision

In my view, this is the basic structural context in which our ideas for missile control have to operate on and around the Korean Peninsula. One of the first conceptual tasks we need to undertake is to clarify the strategic relationship among the three following elements of the American missile defense, the missile control in American terms, and the strengthening of the US-Japan high-tech military alliance. America's strategy is to integrate the three projects in a deliberately confusing way in order to promote all of them simultaneously. It is a strategy sure to intensify a closed system of high-tech arms race in East Asia. At the heart of this American strategy is the deliberate promotion of the idea of impossibility, in the context of East Asian international order, of a multilateral framework to effectively deal with the hazard of missile proliferation. American officials invariably mention the historical tradition of distrust among nations of the region, while the US is among the major contributors in perpetuating the system of the region-wide division and distrust.

Our alternative vision can only start with a deconstruction of this self-serving circuit of logic, a closed circuit of self-fulfilling prophecy that ensures the US-centered synchronization of missile defense, American-style missile control, and military alliance system. We have two essential tasks to be done in East Asia to deconstruct the US style of synchronization. First, the currently professed non-nuclear nations of the region - the two Koreas and Japan - should try to build a system of confidence building in both the permanent denuclearization of the tripartite relations (nuclear weapons free zone) and the minimization of missile threats (missile control.) Secondly, China and Japan should be able to show some degree of maturity that may suggest they are capable of controlling and restraining the nuclear and high-tech arms race in the region.

The nations of East Asia should be able to show the political will and the capability of autonomous diplomatic interactions that are required to initiate such changes and create a different kind of synchronization of the three elements in the international order of the region. Otherwise, we can never expect any real alternative to the current combination of arms race and power politics of military alliance in which missile defense and military alliance are justified and reinforced as the realistic way of controlling missile threat problems.

The need for diplomatic imagination

Japan and South Korea should move gradually away from the state of psychological dependency on their alliance with the United States and should show that they are capable of exercising diplomatic initiatives to create a missile control system that does not involve missile defense and indulgence in high-tech military scientism. China also should prove it has some independent mind and vision and driving force, and that it is not simply the other face of the same coin in the symbiotic system of arms races. Only when these efforts are made by the nations of the region themselves, can the gigantic and innovative American arms race machinery and its high-tech military scientism ever be controlled.

After all, the whole issue of the structure of insecurity fundamentally comes down to the question of two facets of the same problem. On the one hand, we have the ever-expanding high-tech military machine and an almost unstoppable driving force for an arms race. This is the American 'national security state,' which is reestablishing itself in a redefined version in a new context. The other facet of the mechanism, however, is the conspicuous lack of an energizing dynamism of the inter-East Asian efforts for political and diplomatic initiatives.

China's place in this structure is unique. It is facing a strategic superior, the United States, while it is perceived as another gigantic strategic player by its weaker non-nuclear neighbors, including Japan and the two Koreas. China's own definition of its role in the region should be based on recognition of this fundamental duality and its implications. This realization of that duality of its strategic place in East Asia can lead China to more creative options that may have been ignored in the past.

Basically, China has two options. It can play a power politics game with its strategic superior, the US, mobilizing maximum tactical military imagination of a destructive nature just as the American military planners do. This course ensures an expanded reproduction of the permanent security dilemma in East Asia, which is detrimental to the security and human interests of all the peoples in the region. Another option for China is to explore a leadership based on the promotion of international norms and thereby pursue a moral leadership, in cooperation with the other East Asian nations, in which the key weapon is not the nation's strategic nuclear stockpile but political and diplomatic imagination. A larger part of the future of the East Asian international order in the 21st century will depend on that choice.

The wealth and power of many of the East Asian nations have been rapidly growing in the last decades, and impressed other parts of the world. They have, however, almost no ability to impress and change the regional order of East Asia, not to mention the global order. I deplore the preponderance of military imagination in the American 21st century strategy toward the world, including this region. What is more important to me, however, is whether the nations of this region are capable of working together to build alternative visions that can impact and transform the way the United States behave in this part of the world.

The problem in the current regional system is overwhelming and frustrating. A substantial part of this destabilizing dynamics is of external origin. If the nations of the region are genuinely serious about finding solutions as they should, however, they themselves must be the ultimate source of the solution. And the heart of the possible solution is to pursue a different structure of interaction in the region which goes beyond the reach of the cynical realist expectation of the American security planners about the possible intellectual limits of the leaders of East Asia.

This paper was written for the conference "Moving Beyond Missile Defense" in Shanghai on Nov. 30/Dec. 1 2001.

Samsung Lee is professor at The Catholic University of Korea, tel. +82-32-340 34 06; samsunglee@yahoo.com.