책, 논문, 칼럼 등 소개

북한 핵실험에 관한 한국 글 및 Financial Times에 실린 세 개의 칼럼 등

동숭동지킴이 2013. 3. 3. 17:47

 

((북한 3차 핵실험과 관련된 글 모음))

 

 

<북한의 3차 핵실험(시험)에 관한 글들을 아래에 소개합니다. 우선 한국분들이 쓴, 읽을 만한 글로는 다음과 같은 것들이 있습니다.>

 

* 2월 15일 '프레시안의 토론회 정리 "'핵보유국' 북한, 어떻게 해야 하나"

http://www.pressian.com/article/article.asp?article_num=10130215102559

 

* 2월 18일 '통일 뉴스'에 실린 박선원 노무현정부 청와대 통일외교안보전략비서관의 인터뷰

   "북, '핵보유 문턱' 넘었다"

http://www.tongilnews.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=101490

 

* 2월 18일자 '시사인'에 실린 남문희 기자의 정리 "MB와 미국이 쏘아올린 '이명박의 핵'"

http://www.sisainlive.com/news/articlePrint.html?idxno=15718

 

* 3월 1일자 중앙일보의 김영희 기자의 칼럼 "전술핵과 독자 핵개발은 환상이다"

http://joongang.joinsmsn.com/article/547/10820547.html?ctg=

 

 

<그리고 Financial Times에 실린 흥미로운 칼럼 3개를 소개합니다.>

 

첫번째 글은 최근에 우리 언론에도 대대적으로 소개된 글입니다. 중국 공산당 학교 신문사 부주필인 사람의 글로서 중국이 북한을 포기할 것을 촉구하고 있습니다.

두번째 글은 영국의 유명한 한반도 전문가가 인도나 파키스탄 등 다른 나라의 핵보유와 비교하면서 북한의 핵 문제를 다룬 글입니다,

마지막 글은 FT의 필진이 비핵화 대신에 핵동결을 목표로 북한의 체제보장과 경제지원을 제공할 것을 제창하고 있습니다.

 

글 내용이 꽤 길기 때문에 여러분들이 모두 읽으려면 힘들 것입니다. 흥미로운 부분만 시간 날 때 참고하십시오. 그리고 영어 글은 구글 번역기를 사용하면 대체로 이해할 수 있는 모양입니다.

(3월 4일에 추가로 "김정은이 북한을 방문한다면"이라는 제목으로 제가 페이스북에 올린 글을 옮겨 놓았습니다.)

 

 

(1) February 27, 2013 7:25 pm

 

 

China should abandon North Korea

 

 

By Deng Yuwen

 

 

North Korea’s third nuclear test is a good moment for China to re-evaluate its longstanding alliance with the Kim dynasty. For several reasons, Beijing should give up on Pyongyang and press for the reunification of the Korean peninsula.

 

 

First, a relationship between states based on ideology is dangerous. If we were to choose our allies on ideology alone, China’s relationship with the west today would not exist. Although both countries are socialist, their differences are much larger than those between China and the west.

 

 

Second, basing China’s strategic security on North Korea’s value as a geopolitical ally is outdated. Even if North Korea was a useful friend during the cold war, its usefulness today is doubtful. Just imagine if the US, because of Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons, came to see North Korea as a grave threat to its national security and launched a pre-emptive attack on it.

 

 

Would China not be obliged to help North Korea based on our “alliance”? Would that not be drawing fire upon ourselves? If so, what useful “buffer” would be left to speak of? China’s own strength and openness will be its most reliable safeguard.

 

 

Third, North Korea will not reform and open up to the world. The international community once hoped that Kim Jong-eun would push reforms after taking power in 2011, and North Korea seemed to show signs of such a move.

 

 

But even if he personally had the will to push small-scale reform, the country’s ruling group would absolutely not allow him to do so. once the door of reform opened, the regime could be overthrown. Why should China maintain relations with a regime and a country that will face failure sooner or later?

 

 

Fourth, North Korea is pulling away from Beijing. The Chinese like to view their relationship with Pyongyang through their shared sacrifice during the Korean war instead of reality. They describe it as a “friendship sealed in blood”. But North Korea does not feel like this at all towards its neighbour.

 

 

As early as the 1960s, North Korea rewrote the history of the war. To establish the absolute authority of Kim Il-sung, its founder, North Korea removed from historical record the contribution of the hundreds of thousands of sons and daughters of China who sacrificed themselves to beat the UN troops back to the 38th parallel that now divides the peninsula.

 

 

Many cemeteries commemorating the volunteer soldier heroes have been levelled, and Kim Il-sung was given all the credit for the offensive. For the North Korean people, shaking off the “Chinese bond” was seen as an expression of independence and autonomy.

 

 

Last, once North Korea has nuclear weapons, it cannot be ruled out that the capricious Kim regime will engage in nuclear blackmail against China. According to Xue Litai of Stanford University, during former US president Bill Clinton’s 2009 visit to Pyongyang, the North Koreans blamed the poverty of their economy on China’s “selfish” strategy and American sanctions.

 

 

Kim Jong-il, then leader, hinted that the motive for withdrawing from six-party talks on his country’s arms programme was to free Pyongyang from Beijing. It was not directed against the US. He suggested that if Washington held out a helping hand, North Korea could become its strongest fortress against China. And Pyongyang revealed it could use a nuclear arsenal to coerce China.

 

North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons is, in part, based on the illusion that it can achieve an equal negotiating position with the US, and thereby force Washington to compromise. But it is entirely possible that a nuclear-armed North Korea could try to twist China’s arm if Beijing were to fail to meet its demands or if the US were to signal goodwill towards it.

 

 

Considering these arguments, China should consider abandoning North Korea. The best way of giving up on Pyongyang is to take the initiative to facilitate North Korea’s unification with South Korea. Bringing about the peninsula’s unification would help undermine the strategic alliance between Washington, Tokyo and Seoul; ease the geopolitical pressure on China from northeast Asia; and be helpful to the resolution of the Taiwan question.

 

 

The next best thing would be to use China’s influence to cultivate a pro-Beijing government in North Korea, to give it security assurances, push it to give up nuclear weapons and start moving towards the development path of a normal country.

 

(The writer is deputy editor of Study Times, the journal of the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China)

 

 

(2) February 17, 2013 5:59 pm

 

View from N Korea is of a nuclear world

 

 

By Aidan Foster-Carter

 

Even as the world rightly condemns North Korea for its latest nuclear test, it behoves us to consider the view from the bunker. Not the one where South Korea’s hardline president Lee Myung-bak, who leaves office next week, hastily convened a security meeting to discuss how to react to the latest threat from his Northern nemesis. I mean, rather, the metaphorical bunker in which North Korea is permanently hunkered down, circumscribing how it sees the world.

 

 

The world the Kims see is a nuclear one. North Korea was in a sense born from the only nuclear weapons ever used. In 1945, the fire visited on Hiroshima and Nagasaki made Japan surrender sooner than expected.

 

 

A quick fix was needed for Korea, which had been harshly ruled from Tokyo for 40 years. The US suggested “temporarily” dividing the peninsula. Stalin agreed, and an ancient nation remains sundered to this day.

 

 

Five years later Kim Il-sung, the young guerrilla installed in the North by Moscow, staked all on invading the South – only to be beaten back by General Macarthur, who, before he was sacked as commander of UN forces, wanted to use nuclear weapons on North Korea and its sustaining ally China.

 

 

In 1975 US defence secretary James Schlesinger again threatened North Korea with a nuclear attack if it tried to take advantage of the fall of Saigon. By then South Korea’s dictator Park Chung-hee – whose daughter Park Geun-hye will become the South’s president on February 25 – was also pursuing a secret nuclear programme, until the US quashed it.

 

 

By then Kim Il-sung, too, knew what he needed to feel secure. His philosophy of juche (self-reliance) milked both Moscow and Beijing for aid, while secretly seeking a nuclear deterrent to keep the world at bay.

 

 

Documents from Pyongyang’s erstwhile communist allies – none of whom liked or trusted Kim – collated by the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington reveal that, as early as the 1960s, North Korea evinced a keen interest in nuclear technologies.

 

 

The rest is history: of twists and deceptions by the Kims, and lamentable failure of the global community to rein them in. North Korea now has two separate nuclear capacities, based on plutonium and uranium. Its first nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009 used the former; it is not yet clear whether the latest and largest blast may have involved enriched uranium.

 

 

Why do they do this? A decade ago George W. Bush named North Korea as part of an “axis of evil”. We now know this was a rhetorical flourish by a young speech writer, who needed to add a state that was not Muslim.

 

 

But seen from Pyongyang, Iraq, the first country on the list, was promptly invaded by the US, its regime overthrown and its leader killed. The idea of attacking the number two, Iran, before it gets the bomb is still openly canvassed.

 

 

The Kims have also seen other nuclear violators – Israel, Pakistan and India – get away with it. None ever joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and then left it, as North Korea did. But each has made itself impregnable, and all get US aid. Such double standards nurture the Kims’ delusion that they too will get away with this if they hold fast.

 

 

And in a sense so they will. The same old round of UN condemnation and sanctions, while justified, has had scant success so far. There is, frankly, little accessible left to sanction. Meanwhile, China is not only lax in enforcing sanctions but pursues the opposite strategy, greatly increasing bilateral trade and investment.

 

 

Yet, ironically, the young Kim Jong-eun and his party allies are also reining in the Korean People’s Army, even as they test rockets and missiles. Beijing is playing a long game but its patience is wearing thin.

 

 

Its greater fear is still collapse and ensuing chaos: huge refugee flows across its northeastern border, plus loose nukes that the US and its South Korean ally – which still claims the whole peninsula, as does the North – have contingency plans to come looking for. In Chinese eyes, that scenario is even worse than the worrying status quo.

 

 

China’s official advice to the region echoes that wartime cliché du jour: keep calm and carry on. Its internet chatter, by contrast, is angry, scared or both. “Mad dog fatty Kim”, as he is called, is widely seen as both an ingrate and the kind of ally it should neither want nor need.

 

 

Next month China inaugurates a new president, Xi Jinping. In 2010 Mr Xi praised the 1950-53 Korean war as a great joint victory over US imperialism. He may sing a different tune now, but actions speak louder than words. There will probably be some token Chinese punishment, after which Mr Xi will grit his teeth and carry on propping up the Kims.

 

 

Yet the balance of Beijing’s judgment is not immutable. Those who know Kim Jong-eun call him hotheaded. He will need a cool head to avoid goading China beyond endurance, and he may yet learn the hard way that brandishing nuclear weapons gives North Korea no true security.

 

(The writer is honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds university)

 

 

(3) February 13, 2013 5:50 pm

Grand deal with N Korea beats hollow talk

By David Pilling

 

 

The world’s policy towards North Korea is now very much like Robin Williams’ joke about how Britain’s unarmed policemen try to apprehend criminals: “Stop! Or I’ll shout stop again.”

 

No sooner had Pyongyang made its third nuclear weapons test this week than the UN pulled off its best impression of a British Bobby by threatening to pass a “swift, credible and strong resolution” in response.

 

That should really hurt. In his State of the Union speech, Barack Obama used equally hollow language, saying North Korea’s “provocations ... will only isolate them further”. This is a bit like telling J.D. Salinger that, if he doesn’t behave, you’ll be forced to ignore him completely.

 

The truth is that, when it comes to North Korea, the world has run out of good options. This week’s test suggests that Pyongyang’s scientists are getting better at making smaller and more powerful weapons. North Korea’s state media hinted it may have used highly enriched uranium as the bomb’s fissile material, which would be an alternative to the plutonium it deployed in previous tests.

 

In December, Pyongyang finally managed to put a satellite into orbit, beating Seoul to the punch. All the evidence suggests that Pyongyang is edging closer to its goal of producing an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead as far as the US.

 

This could still be years away, although Pyongyang appears to be progressing faster than many expected. There is also credible evidence of nuclear co-operation between North Korea and Iran, long collaborators in missile technology.

 

An article in The Jerusalem Post suggested that Pyongyang may have tested this week’s device on behalf of Tehran in the presence of Iranian scientists. You don’t need to believe Iran has outsourced its nuclear programme to North Korea to think the threat of proliferation has increased.

 

One thing seems clear. The current sanctions regime isn’t making much difference. Even very poor countries, it turns out, can make nuclear weapons.

 

Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt of the International Crisis Group says of Pyongyang’s “military first” policy: “They would eat grass for a hundred years if they could have a nuclear deterrent.” If anything, sanctions may have pushed the regime deeper into criminal activity and weapons proliferation as a way of earning foreign currency.

 

If the west so chose, there are probably ways in which it could turn the screws still tighter. one would be to revive the financial sanctions so effectively imposed by the US Treasury in 2007, although Pyongyang may be less vulnerable to such tactics than it was then.

 

Another would be to mount some sort of naval blockade to intercept ships travelling to and from North Korea. Washington has shied away from both, partly because such measures would not really bite unless China also took part.

 

That is most unlikely. China supplies North Korea with oil. Last year it had roughly $6bn of bilateral trade with the country, accounting for some two-thirds of North Korea’s trade, no mean sum for an economy with a total output of just $40bn.

 

If anything, China has increased its economic engagement with Pyongyang in recent years, granting visas for thousands of North Koreans to work in China (and remit wages) and investing heavily in infrastructure that will allow it access to an estimated $6tn of North Korean mineral reserves.

 

There are signs, it is true, that Beijing is losing patience with Kim Jong-eun, the country’s missile and Mickey Mouse-loving new leader. After December’s rocket launch, Beijing unusually backed a UN resolution on tighter sanctions.

 

It warned Pyongyang against conducting a third nuclear test and this week scolded it for going ahead, expressing – in a phrase that would stop any British bank robber in his tracks – “strong dissatisfaction” at Pyongyang’s defiance.

 

Beijing has even come under pressure from its own netizens who can’t understand why it allows itself to be humiliated by its small and impoverished neighbour. Yet, when push comes to shove, China will not jeopardise the existence of a regime that stands between it and a reunified Korean peninsula hosting US troops.

 

Beijing would prefer to have a nuclear North Korea on its doorstep than a collapsed state, a policy that one Chinese blogger likened to “keeping a crazy dog to guard the house”.

 

That leaves few choices. Andrei Lankov, a North Korean expert at Kookmin University in Seoul, argues in Foreign Policy this week that Pyongyang is already effectively a nuclear state. The “pipe dream of denuclearisation”, he argues, is over.

 

If that is right, the most than can be expected from Pyongyang is a nuclear freeze. Having witnessed events in Libya, Mr Kim is well aware of what happens to leaders who trade in their nuclear toys.

 

All that remains then is to strike some sort of grand bargain: money and a security guarantee in return for verifiable limitations on the size of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. It would be a horrible deal, tantamount to giving in to extortion.

 

Nor could Pyongyang be remotely expected to play fair. But short of a military campaign aimed at toppling the Kim dynasty – a policy for which no one has shown the slightest appetite – it may be the very best one can hope for. If anyone has a better idea, just shout.

 

-----------------------------

(추가) 3월 4일. 페북에 올린 글을 추가합니다.

 

<김정은이 미국을 방문한다면? (수정본)>

 

오늘 오전에 박근혜 대통령이 대국민 담화를 발표했습니다. 제가 일전에 블로그에서 표현한 대로 '서슬퍼런 박근혜'의 모습이었던 모양입니다. 페북에서는 '표독스럽다'는 표현까지 있네요. 저도 어째 약간 무서워지네요.

이런 식으로 나라를 잘 이끌어갈 수 있을지 의문입니다. "제2의 새마을 운동" "제2의 한강의 기적" 하면서 박정희 시대의 독재정치까지 부활하려 한다면 참으로 큰 일이겠지요. 

 

하지만 박근혜대통령 앞에서 꼼짝 못하는 여당의 모습 따위를 보면 옛날로 돌아가려고 하는 '방향성'을 무조건 부정할 수는 없어 보입니다. 그렇게 되지 않기를 바랍니다만, 만약 그리 된다면 시대착오적이지요.

 그리고 이럴 때 가장 걱정되는 것이 남북한 관계입니다. 만약에 시대착오적인 남한정권과 시대...착오적인 북한정권이 충돌한다면 남북한 백성들이 엄청난 피해를 입게 될 테니까요.

이와 관련해 소개하고 싶은 내용 두가지가 있습니다. 며칠 전에 평양을 방문해 김정은과 옆자리에 앉아 웃음을 터트린 미국 NBA 농구선수 Rodman의 이야기입니다.

 그는 미국에 돌아와 ABC와 인터뷰를 했습니다. 거기서 그는 김정은이 오바마가 자신에게 전화해주기 바란다고 했다고 말했습니다.

 

그런데 미 CIA 출신으로 주한 미대사를 역임했던 Greg도 미국이 김정은을 초청할 것을 주장한 바 있습니다. 정확히 언제부터 그가 그런 주장을 했는지는 모르지만, 작년 말 미국에서의 그의 강연에서 그 사실을 확인할 수 있습니다.

옛날에 쿠바의 카스트로가 혁명 직후 미국을 방문한 적이 있는데, 당시는 카스트로와 미국의 적대관계가 그리 심각한 상태가 아니었을 때였습니다.

하지만 북한과 미국의 적대관계는 심각한 수준입니다. 그런 상황에서 김정은이 미국을 방문한다면 이건 북미 관계의 커다란 변화를 초래할 가능성이 있습니다.

만약에 김정은의 방미가 추진된다면 한국정부는 어찌해야 할까요. 박근혜 정부가 그걸 잘 처리해 갈 수 있을지 의문입니다.

참고로 유튜브(www.youtube.com)에 들어가면 Rodman의 ABC인터뷰를 볼 수 있습니다. (Dennis Rodman This Week Interview 를 치면 됩니다.)

사회자가 난처한 질문을 퍼붓는 데 대해서, 여유 있게 잘 대답하고 있습니다. 우리 정치인들이나 진보파도 배울 부분이 있습니다. 그는 김정은이 자기 친구라고까지 말했습니다.

그리고 위에서 언급한 그레그의 강연은 역시 유튜브에서 들을 수 있습니다. (Donald Gregg Can we prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear power 을 치면 됩니다.) 

강연의 1/3쯤 지난 부분부터 북한에 관한 이야기가 나옵니다. 그는 북한 외상 김계관의 질문도 소개하고 있고, 북한의 핵보유 노력이 미국의 침략을 막기 위한 것으로 보는 듯하네요.

그레그의 주장에 동의하든 안하든 한번 들어볼 만한 내용들입니다. 그리고 뭔가 바람직한 방향으로 남북관계의 전기가 마련되면 좋겠습니다. 중미관계가 핑퐁외교로부터 해결되었듯이 북미관계가 농구외교로부터 해결된다면?

 

(페북에 처음 글을 올렸을 땐 로드만의 발언을 잘못 소개했습니다. 오바마가 김정은에게 전화(call)해 달라고 한 것인데, 미국으로 초청해 달라고 한 것으로 잘못 소개했습니다. 그 인터뷰를 보기 바로 전에 그레그의 강연을 들은 터라 그런 식으로 해석했습니다. 죄송합니다.)