Fighting Off Doomsday

By Bruce W. Nelan

North Korea's Kim Jong Il, 51, wears high-heeled shoes and a bouffant hairdo in an attempt to look taller. He is a poor speaker and worries whether he can match his father's commanding power. But even those who laugh loudest at his vanities take one of his indulgences quite seriously: Kim, who has taken over day-to-day dictatorial duties from his 81-year-old father, "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, appears determined to build a secret arsenal of nuclear weapons. His government had threatened to quit the 150-nation Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons last Saturday; it had ordered all foreigners except diplomats to leave and barred international inspectors from the country. If the outside world resorted to military force, a senior ! official in Pyongyang had warned, it would mean "plunging the whole Korean peninsula into the flame of war."

But at the eleventh hour, North Korea agreed late on Friday to "suspend" its withdrawal from the pact, pulling Asia back from the start of a nuclear arms race. If Pyongyang will permanently rejoin the treaty and agree to inspections, the U.S. is ready to cancel its yearly military exercises with South Korea and make a "no first use" pledge not to initiate the use of nuclear weapons on the peninsula. While U.S. officials are still puzzled by North Korea's actions, they say they now realize how deeply inspections disturbed its closed society.

Even though the cold war is over, leaders like Kim are making the world a more, not less, dangerous place. The superpower standoff that exerted precarious control over the use and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has vanished along with the Soviet empire. North Korea has not only embarked on the road to the bomb, but according to many analysts, it has actually arrived. It reportedly has enough plutonium for at least one nuclear bomb, and it has successfully test-fired a new missile, the 650-mile-range No- Dong I, that could reach beyond South Korea to Japan, China or eastern Russia. Kim's government is an eager peddler of missiles to other countries, and Western analysts fear that Pyongyang could assist other would-be nuclear powers like Iran.

"We are facing a sophisticated Hydra of suppliers," warns CIA Director James Woolsey. More than 25 countries have or may be developing weapons of mass destruction. More than two dozen conduct research in chemical weapons or already stockpile them. More than a dozen have ballistic missiles that could one day loft nuclear warheads far beyond their borders.

Ukraine, along with the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Belarus, stumbled into the nuclear club when the empire crumbled. Although all three have promised to banish the weapons entirely, Ukraine has been wavering on its commitment. A growing number of its leaders regard their atomic arsenal as a bargaining chip to trade for Western aid and security guarantees -- and increasingly as a safeguard against possible Russian aggression that they are loath to relinquish.

Once again, the post-cold war era is turning out to be more complicated than anyone expected as the West searches for ways to stop nuclear proliferation. There is no obvious answer, and the Western dithering that has accompanied the rape of Bosnia does not inspire confidence that the international community will come up with a strong plan of action soon. The U.S. is juggling competing objectives that undercut its own commitment to non-proliferation -- the desire to improve relations with China or to secure Syria's cooperation in the Mideast peace talks -- and so far, Washington has not figured out how to galvanize its main allies around a tougher antiproliferation policy.

North Korea is currently the gravest concern. Pyongyang signed the nonproliferation treaty in 1985 but grudgingly agreed only last year to allow inspectors to examine what it insisted was its purely civilian nuclear-power industry. When the monitors showed up, they confirmed intelligence reports that the installation at Yongbyon, north of the capital, had been processing plutonium at least since 1987.

No U.S. blandishments will keep Pyongyang honest -- even if it remains formally in the nonproliferation pact -- if its real intent is to free itself from international oversight while it pursues its nuclear dream. North Korea may have temporized to forestall U.N. economic sanctions that loomed if it became the first member to quit the treaty. But most observers are pessimistic that Kim will really cave in to political or economic pressure. "We're not dealing with rational people but with an unreconstructedly Stalinist regime," says a top British diplomat. "They don't believe in compromise but in maximum advantage."

Though the Security Council could authorize military means to disarm or punish Pyongyang, any attempt to use force would be extremely tricky. Bombing a functioning nuclear facility could produce an instant Chernobyl and, probably, retaliation. "We might try to take out their nuclear capability with a scalpel," says a Western analyst in Seoul, "but they would respond with a chain saw."

Doing nothing about the North Korean bomb is a bad option too. South Korea was well along in the development of nuclear weapons in the 1970s until the U.S. pressured Seoul to cancel its program. It could quickly and easily change course again. A nuclear arsenal in North Korea "could result in the dissemination of nuclear weapons throughout the region," says Christophe Carle, research fellow at the Institut Francais des Relations Internationales in Paris. "I can't imagine Japan and South Korea and Taiwan refraining from doing so short of extraordinary U.S. assurances." An East Asia in which six powers have nuclear arms would be perilously unstable.

China is not only a member of the nuclear club but also one of the world's leading proliferators of weapons of mass destruction. The Chinese have been selling ballistic missiles and nuclear equipment to all comers in the Third World. Its missile technology has gone to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran. CIA Director Woolsey has told Congress that China is getting new missile technology from Russia and Ukraine. This is ominous, he said, not only because the transfers improve China's military capabilities, but also because China could pass this more advanced technology to other states. So far, the U.S. has been unable to persuade China to curtail its sales.

The U.S. is struggling to find a lever to persuade Ukraine to give up the nuclear stockpile it inherited. A growing number of parliamentary deputies argue that Kiev should retain at least some of the 176 strategic missiles, 30 nuclear bombers and more than 1,600 warheads as a deterrent to any ultranationalist Russian government that might try to reimpose its rule on Ukraine. A more urgent fear is that Ukraine is close -- 12 to 18 months away -- to cracking the Russian computer codes that prevent Kiev from retargeting or firing the nuclear missiles itself. If the Ukrainians succeed, they will gain operational control of the world's third largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. Moscow has not explicitly told the U.S. that it might attack Ukraine to prevent Kiev from obtaining control, but they have hinted at very high levels that this could happen. U.S. officials take these hints seriously.

Last week Defense Secretary Les Aspin proposed removing the nuclear warheads from the Ukraine missiles and placing them under international control; later they would be taken to Russia and dismantled, and Washington would purchase the fissile material inside. The U.S. Department of Energy has agreed to buy between $8 billion and $13 billion worth of the highly enriched uranium, which could net Ukraine a share reaching $2 billion. That might prove a powerful incentive for the cash-strapped country.

The West has even less leverage to prevent the further breakdown of administration all across the former Soviet Union that could lead to smuggling and illegal sales of some of the 27,000 nuclear warheads now under guard by various military units. "I do not believe the reports that one or more may have been sold already," says Harald Muller of the Hesse Institute for the Study of Peace and Conflict in Frankfurt. "But as discipline deteriorates we have to be afraid that the custodians will become ineffective."

Western officials have been worrying about nuclear proliferation for decades, but it took the Gulf War to focus everyone's attention. It startled the West to learn just how close Saddam Hussein had come to secretly acquiring an atomic arsenal. That made everyone realize the slow and massive military buildup to Operation Desert Storm would probably have been impossible if Iraq had had nuclear weapons, even mounted on inaccurate Scuds. And the high-tech efficiency of the victorious American forces telegraphed to all Third World countries that they should forget about tangling with the U.S. unless they had acquired nuclear weapons.

The problem, though, extends beyond nuclear to chemical and biological bombs and the means to deliver them to far-off targets. Ballistic missiles, with flight times of only a few minutes and an ability to penetrate most defenses, are the most psychologically destabilizing. High-performance jet aircraft can easily deliver nuclear, chemical or biological warheads. "Most countries have not yet equipped their delivery systems to carry weapons of mass destruction," said Robert Gates, former Director of Central Intelligence. But he warned that over the next decade many of them will do so if international controls fail.

The sad truth is that "proliferation cannot be stopped," says Gotz Neuneck, a physicist at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in Hamburg. "If a country wants to develop these weapons, it can do it." Even slowing the spread is difficult. The nuclear nonproliferation treaty bars development by or transfer of the weapons to non-nuclear states. It has done some good, but it has not prevented additional states from acquiring the bomb. Several, including India, Pakistan and Israel, simply refused to sign. Iraq, on the other hand, signed the treaty but cheated. Iran and North Korea signed and have gone ahead with development.

Treaties also ban chemical and biological weapons but at least 18 countries stockpile either or both. An agreement among major supplying countries, most of them Western, limits the sale of ballistic missile systems. There are no enforcement provisions and North Korea pays no attention to it, while China promised Washington to obey the rules but continues to break them.

A major obstacle to controlling the spread of these weapons is that even medium-size countries can build them using domestic industries and imported "dual-use" equipment -- high-tech items that have civilian as well as military applications. Last year, says Kenneth Timmerman, a specialist in Middle Eastern security issues, Germany sold a total of $5 billion worth of goods to Iran. Japan sold Tehran nearly $3 billion worth and the U.S. shipped almost $1 billion. Much of the trade involved "dual use" items.

In September 1991 the CIA established a center to keep track of weapons of mass destruction and stop the flow of dangerous technology to the Third World. To watch about 24 countries and more than 75 weapons programs, the center collects information from spies on the ground, satellite photos and electronic intercepts, which is used to apply pressure on importing and exporting nations. In some instances Washington quietly asks a friendly capital to stop certain exports because they are being diverted to a weapons program. In other cases the U.S. and its allies sometimes use covert action to halt the shipments.

President George Bush signed an intelligence finding authorizing covert CIA action to disrupt the supply of dangerous weapons or components. How that authority has been used is secret, but an official in Washington confirms that "it has been used. Things have been prevented from getting from one place to another." Even so, says another official, controls over exports "cannot prevent but can only make it more difficult to produce nuclear weapons."

The Clinton Administration says it is determined to strengthen international controls. But it has yet to settle on a plan of action, much less begin to persuade friends and foes to go along. In the end, to head off nuclear arms races in various regions of the world the U.S. might have to offer security guarantees to worried governments and threaten to intervene, if necessary, to keep the peace. But that would require an overhaul of its alliance system and a major expansion of its overseas commitments.

However firm its stance, the U.S. cannot entirely eliminate the ambitions and fears that prod nations to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Washington could not, even if it wanted to, guarantee Arab states against Israel, India against China, Pakistan against India or Iran against Iraq. Some of them have the bomb now, and the others will get it. In the years to come, the U.S. will have to choose very carefully where to engage its interests and its military forces. It may have its hands full just protecting itself.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Graphic by Steve Hart

CAPTION: DECLARED NUCLEAR-WEAPON STATES

UNDECLARED NUCLEAR-WEAPON STATES

WORKING ON OBTAINING NUCLEAR WEAPONS

CEASED DEVELOPING NUCLEAR WEAPONS

With reporting by James Carney/Moscow, Richard Hornik/Seoul, Jay Peterzell and Elaine Shannon/Washington with other bureaus