The world heaved at least a small sigh of relief when US President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un agreed to their historic meeting in Singapore on 12 June but, suddenly, it appears to hang in the balance.
On May 11, the US and South Korea began joint military exercises extending over two weeks and dubbed “Max Thunder” which both claim are purely for defence purposes. They are based on the agreement the two countries signed in 1953 after the armistice that ended of hostilities on the Korean peninsula and is a regular annual event.
Then, suddenly, five days later North Korea claimed that the exercises were a “provocation” and a rehearsal for an invasion and cancelled a scheduled meeting with South Korean officials that had been set for the following day.
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That scheduled meeting had been agreed to by Kim Jong-un and South Korea’s Moon Jae-in when they met on 27 April and was intended to discuss follow-up issues on everything from ridding the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons to organising the reunion of families divided by the war.
North Korea’s official news agency announced, “This exercise, targeting us, which is being carried out across South Korea, is a flagrant challenge to the Panmunjon Declaration and an international military provocation running counter to the positive political development on the Korean peninsula.”
It continued, “The United States will also have to undertake careful deliberations about the fate of the planned North Korea-US summit in light of this provocative military ruckus jointly conducted with the South Korean authorities."
The US State Department in the immediate aftermath of the North Korean announcement said it had no information from North Korea about any threat to cancel the 12 June summit and was continuing to plan for it.
Until this sudden move by the ever unpredictable North Korean regime everything seemed to be sweetness, light and optimism.
North Korea had announced that it would dismantle its Punggye-ri nuclear test ground between 23 May and 25 May and it seems that this had already begun according to satellite images. The North Koreans had announced that the dismantlement would be witnessed by invited foreign journalists and would involve “collapsing all its tunnels with explosions, blocking all entrances, and removing all observation facilities, research buildings and security posts.”
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This announcement was treated with some reserve as independent expert nuclear inspectors were not invited. It is understood that this site has been used for six underground nuclear test explosions.
However what the North Koreans have been doing on the site could well be more apparent than real.
There is a strong suspicion that the site is already mostly useless as a result of underground nuclear explosions, particularly the massive bomb detonated in September last year. There had been reports that hundreds of workers at the site had been killed by four earthquakes touched off by the bomb.
In fact, an analysis of new satellite-based remote sensing technology has confirmed that the structure of the mountain under which North Korea had been conducting its nuclear tests had changed and that its shape had been flattened and that it was half a metre shorter. After the September test last year satellite images showed that there had been massive landslides on its slopes and there was speculation that the massive bomb had vaporised an enormous chamber at its base and that this, combined with similar earlier tests, had caused the mountain to “sag”.
If all of this is true – and evidence suggests that it most certainly is – then North Korea is making a virtue (an appearance of being less belligerent) from a necessity. They are past masters with this ploy.
Disarmament experts are worried about the risk of spreading radioactive dust if there are rushed efforts to close down the facility and there is also speculation that this dismantling could be purely cosmetic and allow for a quick resumption of tests in the future.
“If it’s done well, there is no risk of radiation being released. But the question is, are those tunnels being sealed in a way that they couldn’t again be used? The only risk I see is that we will take the destruction of a couple of tunnels as a physical barrier to the resumption of testing in the future,” Jon Wolfsthal of the Nuclear Crisis Group told Reuters.
Kim Jong-un has appeared offended that the dismantling of his testing facility is a result of a catastrophic collapse saying, “Some say that we are terminating facilities that are not functioning, but you will see that we have two more tunnels that are bigger than the existing ones and that they are in good condition.”
Another recent claim which, if true, would question North Korea’s professed dismantling of its nuclear testing facility is a report in a leading South Korean newspaper that the regime has maintained a secret uranium enrichment facility separate from the Punggye-ri site. The newspaper also reported that the USA was aware of the site and would demand that it to be dismantled as a critical part of any deal to denuclearise the country.
The ever tightening noose imposed by economic sanctions around North Korea’s neck has also helped drive their new attitude.
Back in late February, President Trump announced a new round of harsh sanctions against the regime which were aimed at cutting off North Korea’s imports of oil and exports of coal. Illicit ship-to-ship transfers of refined oil and coal had allowed North Korea to avoid a fair bit of the pain of sanctions and both China and Russia have been linked to this trade.
This move which is probably the last turn of the screw of the economic vice against North Korea just stops short of an all-out economic embargo. While US Treasury Secretary stopped short of saying the nation’s navy would forcibly board ships on the high seas, he said the USA would petition China and other countries to allow inspections of suspicious ships.
The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who has met Kim Jong-un twice in recent times has said the USA will agree to lift sanctions entirely if the North Koreans completely dismantle its nuclear program.
He said that while the USA would not be willing to invest taxpayer dollars in North Korea, the lifting of sanctions would pave the way for private American investment and would create economic prosperity that “will rival” South Korea.
Critically for Chairman Kim, the USA has not said that it is not seeking regime change which should provide him with some comfort at least.