The North Korean Nuclear Weapons Crisis

The Nuclear Taboo Revisited?

J. Kim

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137386533
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137386069
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Jina Kim investigates how North Korea rationalized its pursuit of nuclear weapons programs for more than two decades, by exploring the dialectical development of the nuclear crisis and the obstacles generated by complex internal Korean dynamics and conflicting interests amongst the major players concerned.

1

Toward a Critique of the Nuclear Taboo

Puzzles

The North Korean nuclear problem is a twenty-year crisis in the making. Over the past two decades, North Korea’s attitude toward the IAEA and nuclear talks has varied, shifting between cooperative and uncooperative behavior. North Korea’s noncompliance was demonstrated in its refusal to participate in the talks, while its temporary cooperation was demonstrated in the form of its partial implementation of the agreements, concluding the agreements, freezing its nuclear weapons program and conducting nuclear tests.¹ North Korea, at least rhetorically, had proposed the idea of freeing the Korean peninsula of any nuclear threat in the early 1990s, but the North gradually changed its position on its nuclear weapons program. After agreeing to disable its nuclear program as part of the process toward the ultimate goal of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, Pyongyang conducted its nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009, revealed its HEU program in 2010, stipulated its status as a nuclear state in the socialist constitution in 2012, and established legal and institutional mechanisms for the pursuit of nuclear capability after its third nuclear test in 2013.

As much as its behavior is incomprehensible, its rhetoric is confusing. Pyongyang continues to argue that its actions were driven by US hostility and North Korea’s mistrust of the US. Right after its first nuclear test, North Korea argued that the test “constituted a positive measure for its implementation of denuclearization.” North Korea’s philosophy of “nuclear test for denuclearization” sounds paradoxical to foreign observers, which leaves many wondering about such questions as, Why does North Korea resist international calls for its denuclearization? and How has North Korea rationalized its pursuit of nuclear weapons programs?

To interest-based theorists, Pyongyang’s seemingly confusing decision—first to join the NPT and then to withdraw from it—and the development of nuclear weapons at the risk of provoking its regional neighbors and alienating further the international community in times of urgent need of international aid may seem like a very irrational approach. However, North Korea’s requested preconditions for freezing its nuclear program have been very consistent. To norm-based theorists, North Korea’s noncompliance is understood in the light of the country’s international isolation, which has led to its markedly different perception of nuclear weapons technology. North Korea seems not to have been burdened by the normative belief that developing nuclear weapons programs is a risk or liability that increases anxiety about the utility of the NPT. However, North Korea has also participated in many international forums and protested against vertical nuclear proliferation, which implies that it is aware of the normative international culture on nuclear weapons.

Therefore, whether North Korea’s behavior is driven by the structural context, as it contends, or whether Pyongyang is just playing a game of so-called “brinkmanship” as many believe, needs thorough examination. Serious works on nuclear proliferation in the 1960s began by realists, but they focused on the impact that the spread of nuclear weapons could have on international security.² Both proliferation optimists and pessimists have focused exclusively on the impact of nuclear weapons on global stability rather than the motivation behind states’ decision to go nuclear.³ The recent effort among scholars who have performed statistical analyses on new datasets such as the availability of technical means, crisis cost, and patron–recipient relationships,⁴ however, presents just necessary, not sufficient, conditions for nuclear proliferation.

Realist approaches explain a nuclear weapons program as an appropriate response to an existential threat, to secure useful shields against adversarial aggression,⁵ to balance against a powerful rival⁶ or to enhance prestige in the international community.⁷ Rosecrance suggests that nuclear weapons may be sought as a means of waging or terminating a struggle with a major foe.⁸ In the same light, Goheen observes that a state threatened by an adversary’s actual or potential nuclear weapons capability may be compelled to develop a similar capability of its own.⁹ Epstein argues that non-nuclear countries without a nuclear umbrella feel that they may ultimately have to rely on nuclear weapons.¹⁰ According to this logic, North Korea becomes one of the nuclear candidates that are concerned foremost with their unique security concerns.¹¹ However, such views do not adequately explain why North Korea’s nuclear crisis broke out when tension on the Korean peninsula began to thaw or why North Korea pursued their nuclear weapons capability at the risk of embarrassing China and Russia.¹²

Neoclassical realists who accommodate anomalies under a realist framework address the role of various domestic sources. Mastanduno, Lake, and Ikenberry assert that national leaders respond to internal challenges and demands in ways that often influence how a country conducts its relations with other states.¹³ Solingen suggests that the more open states are to the international economy, the less likely they are to seek nuclear weapons, due to harmful consequences that may jeopardize international trade and investment.¹⁴ The argument that domestic public pressure to go nuclear has sometimes played an important role in countries where public enthusiasm pressures the government to undertake the nuclear option is valid to the degree that domestic processes influence decision-makers who owe their identities and interests to the domestic context. However, some domestic variables behind a state’s nuclear decision-making, including competition among political parties,¹⁵ private groups, and bureaucrats,¹⁶ are not very useful for the study of North Korea, which is characterized as a synthetic organism.

Neoliberal institutionalists positively view mutual expectations among the parties and their commitment to cooperate with the regime. The nuclear nonproliferation regime is also believed to create a convergence of expectations about behavior¹⁷ and to enhance cooperation among member states that share certain expectations and observe specific rules and decision-making procedures. The neoliberal institutionalist approach can explain that North Korea was persuaded to join the IAEA and furthermore the NPT because it could reap gains by cooperating with the IAEA.¹⁸ However, they limit their perspective to institutions¹⁹ and tend to be less concerned about the intersubjective conception of process in interstate relations. Besides, the framework based on the assumption of states’ rationality does not take into account how principles and norms are actually perceived by the states.²⁰ They cannot adequately explain why North Korea, after joining the NPT, has been so critical about the practices of the regime, and they provide little insight into why North Korea withdrew from the NPT. North Korea was offered support to build civilian nuclear reactors, which would have helped to reduce its energy shortage, but it eventually abandoned its membership of the treaty.

Neoliberal institutionalism’s utilitarian approaches can only provide a partial explanation on North Korea’s strategic mind. They restrict their rationale to cost–benefit calculation of the states²¹ and do not adequately explain why North Korea stepped back from the 1994 Geneva Agreed Framework. North Korea’s noncompliant behavior continued even after receiving rewards for its abandonment of nuclear facilities as a result of the 1994 Geneva Agreed Framework. A static model of incentive salience cannot adequately explain North Korea’s attitude change. In addition, North Korea’s gesture, designed to hurt the nonproliferation regime, counters the belief that small states may view themselves as the beneficiaries of a collective good, believing that it gives them legitimacy and power.²²

Social constructivists offer a different perspective on the role of the nuclear nonproliferation regime through which nuclear nonproliferation norms are discussed and internalized. Social constructivists problematize the actor’s preferences, interests, and identities, which are taken as stable within a rational framework. The motivation behind states’ desire for positive identification is neither an enforcement nor strategic choice from cost–benefit calculations.²³ As Wendt notes, conceptions of self and interest tend to “mirror” the practices of significant others over time.²⁴ States’ desire to become a part of the web of relationships drives them to live up to international principles and standards. However, positive identification occurs “when an individual accepts influence because he wants to establish or maintain a satisfying self-defining relationship to another person or group.”²⁵ It should be noted that states with the potential to develop nuclear weapons refrain from going nuclear because they are not dissatisfied states, particularly in their relations with the NWSs.²⁶ Therefore, by positively identifying themselves with the others and endorsing the influence of the nonproliferation norm, these states confirm their positional status as respected member states. This logic also implies that states with difficulties in constructing positive identification may not construct the same perception and attitudes toward the nuclear nonproliferation norm.

Constructivist Approaches

The social constructivist approach helps us understand that certain actions and sensations have an enormous influence on North Korea’s reactiveness.²⁷ It is concerned to show that identities may be shaped through interaction because practices construct a social structure, which then shapes a direction of a state’s behavior. Therefore, this book aims to examine the dynamic workings of negative identification and negative interaction through which North Korea came to rationalize its pursuit of a nuclear weapons program tabooed by the international community. It explores the construction and development of the nuclear taboo and then an application of this concept to the case study of North Korea’s attitude toward the nuclear taboo.

Constructivist studies introduce the concept of identification and interaction, but the concept of negative identification and negative interaction, although these terms appear in the existing literature, is not thoroughly explained in previous studies. Negative identification means a process through which a state identifies itself in an adversarial relationship with others and regards itself as being outside the system. Negative interaction occurs in an antagonistic structure and inhibits a state’s positive identification. Identification is a dynamic model that better represents the formation of North Korea’s interests. We cannot simply determine that a state’s national identity is an indicator of adherence to the nuclear taboo. The problem with such a static classification is that, as is often found in rationalist models, states’ identity and interests are set prior to interaction. Therefore, this book operates under the assumption that social expectations and reputations constrain a state’s capability to define and redefine itself.²⁸

North Korea’s negative identification hinders internalization of the nuclear taboo and instead leads to Pyongyang’s resistance to social expectations. Social constructivists suggest that social identity enables actors to determine relative positions in a society of shared understandings and expectations and that an internalization of new identity occurs when states engage in cooperative behavior and gradually come to change their own beliefs about their self-identity. However, social identities can be either cooperative or conflictual, since identification is a continuum from negative to positive.²⁹ In his theoretical work, Social Theory of International Politics, Wendt points out that the transformation of identity through the evolution of a cooperation story faces a fundamental constraint because it presupposes that actors do not identify negatively with one another. The logical progression of this train of thought, this book argues, is that antipathy and distrust lead a state to sustain a competitive identity and show noncompliant behavior. Wendt explains that states can tend toward the negative end of the identity continuum from conceiving the other as anathema to the self to conceiving it as an extension of the self.³⁰ If a state identifies other states negatively, it is more likely to define its interests egoistically in terms of relative gains.³¹ According to this logic, North Korea forms negative identity when it identifies its interests negatively with those of the others, and hence North Korea’s flaunting of the international demand can be examined in this light.

Because identities and interests are relationship-specific,³² understanding North Korea’s negative identification cannot be separated from its interactions with other states. The core claims made by social constructivists are that states’ interests are constructed by intersubjective interactions in the system³³ and that frameworks of interstate interaction composed of practices, shared understandings, and threat complexes play an indirect causal role in defining states’ interests.³⁴ Because actors make choices based on substantive reality, knowledge of the external environment mirrored by their belief shapes a state’s nuclear policy.³⁵ States’ compliance with the shared nuclear norms reinforces the identity of states and their status as legitimate members of the international community.³⁶ However, the converse logic also comes into play as conflict is also an intersubjective phenom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Toward a Critique of the Nuclear Taboo
• 2 Context of the First Nuclear Crisis (1991–94)
• 3 Negative Identification
• 4 Negative Interaction
• 5 Context of the Second Nuclear Crisis
• 6 Repetitive Patterns of the Crisis
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index