Gordon G. Chang, Contributor
I write primarily on China, Asia, and nuclear proliferation.
On Monday Seoul announced that the Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety had detected unusually high levels of xenon gas near the North Korea border on May 14. The concentration of xenon was eight times higher than normal, and the presence of the gas is indicative of nuclear activities.
Because the wind was blowing south at the time, the source of the gas could not have been one of South Korea’s nuclear plants. The xenon might have originated in China or Russia, but the most likely place was the land of unexplained events, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
This is a particularly good week to take stock of North Korea, the world’s least comprehensible nation. Why? On Friday the regime headed by Kim Jong-il will celebrate the start of what it calls the “Great Fatherland Liberation War.” On June 25, 1950, Kim Il-Sung, the current leader’s dad, took South Korea and the U.S. by complete surprise by sending his forces south. In four days he had captured Seoul, and soon he pushed the South Korean and American armies into a small perimeter around the southern city of Pusan–in other words, almost into the sea.
Since then, he and his son, the current leader, have continued to surprise us. Among other crimes, the Kims snatched the Pueblo from international waters in 1968 and tortured the crew for 11 months. They also killed 31 American aviators by downing an unarmed Navy reconnaissance plane in international airspace in 1969. They repeatedly used violence whenever trends were not going their way. That is perhaps the best explanation why a midget North Korean submarine torpedoed the Cheonan, killing 46 South Korean sailors this March.
And the North’s ability to surprise gets us back to the mysterious release of the xenon. We know its technicians can make nuclear weapons with plutonium cores. After all, they detonated two of them–in 2006 and 2009–and Kim has a half dozen more in his arsenal.
Did he set off one of his stock in May? Because there was no artificial seismic activity at the time, Seoul ruled out a third North Korean underground nuclear test. Xenon is also released during a nuclear accident, a possibility.
Another possibility–the most disturbing one, actually–is that the North Koreans had been telling the truth when on May 12, just two days before South Korea detected the high levels of xenon, they announced they had created a nuclear fusion reaction, a step necessary to the building of a thermonuclear device. At the time everyone thought the claim was “sheer mystical flapdoodle,” as one American expert termed it. Maybe the boast was a fantastic fabrication, but any possibility that Kim’s regime was closer to the world’s most destructive weapon is obviously of concern.
To find out what really happened, we have to think like North Koreans. So here’s a theory: Pyongyang made the hard-to-accept claim about fusion so that we would be distracted from what it is really doing. Xenon is released whenever uranium is enriched, such as when it is enriched for the core of a nuclear weapon.
The North Koreans started to obtain Chinese-Pakistani enrichment technology in the early 1990s from the black-market ring headed by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. They first boasted of a uranium enrichment program in October 2002. Most analysts think the North has not gotten very far even if it has been trying to build a nuclear weapon with a uranium core. The release of xenon gas in May throws the conventional view into doubt.
Bruce Bechtol of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College will deliver, next Monday at Brookings in Washington, a paper contending that North Korea is now or will soon be capable of building a uranium-core bomb. Not every analyst agrees with Bechtol’s conclusion, but doubters need to come up with a plausible explanation why xenon was wafting over the North Korean countryside last month. At least for now, he seems the one closest to the truth.
Kim Jong-il, for all his faults, has proven he can build fearsome weapons and long-range missiles. He has also demonstrated he is capable of marketing any dangerous item, such as missile know-how to Pakistan or nuclear technology to Iran. If Bechtol is right, then Kim has one more thing to sell.
And he has one more item to use. A nuclear weapon with a uranium core would be relatively easy to build and fit atop his missiles. In August 1998 one of those missiles got so far as to scatter debris in a place called Alaska.
We tend to forget about North Korea until the Kim family reminds us of its ability to reach out and kill people. Now that the regime has nuclear weapons and long-range missiles to complement its arsenals of chemical and biological weapons, we have to remember that the Kims, father and son, have identified the U.S. as their enemy. Sixty years ago on Friday, we learned just what that can mean.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.