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North Korea: Nuclear Test

My Lords, North Korea’s decision last month to conduct a first nuclear test can hardly be said to have taken the world by surprise. Not only was it signalled well in advance by intelligence analysis but it fitted precisely into the pattern of defiance of international treaty obligations and international opinion that has characterised North Korea’s policies throughout the 60 years of its existence as an independent state. This is a country that has invaded its neighbour; which used state-controlled terrorism; which seems to have signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty principally to provide cover for a covert nuclear weapons programme; which has watched many of its citizens starve to death; and which abuses their human rights more comprehensively than any other state. If North Korea’s nuclear test should not have been a surprise, it is certainly a major shock to the whole system of international controls against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and, more widely, to the prospects for peace and security in north-east Asia and beyond. So the fact that it is about as far away from this country as anywhere on earth should not be a cause for complacency or detachment. It is surely right that we should have a full debate on this issue today, and I warmly thank my noble friend Lord Alton for having initiated it. Faced with this litany of transgressions of international law, standards and disciplines, largely unpunished and certainly not effectively countered over the years, it is easy to head towards one or other of two extremes. We can either conclude that nothing much can be done with a regime so defiant of international opinion and thus lapse into helpless verbal denunciation or, alternatively, examine the case for threatening and, if necessary, using force to bring about a change in North Korea’s policies. Either course would be mistaken. The first course is likely to lead to spreading nuclearisation of the whole region and the fall into disrepute of many of the multilateral disciplines that protect our security and human rights. The second course, quite apart from the risk of a nuclear exchange and the extreme vulnerability of the South Korean capital, Seoul, would be a mistake because we are not yet at a point at which it would be reasonable to conclude that the preferable alternatives of a combination of reassurance and pressure have no chance of succeeding. Another trap to be avoided would be falling back into disunity and arguing that the current predicament is all the fault of the US Administration’s policy during President Bush’s first term of office. Here my assessment differs somewhat from that of the noble Lord, Lord Garden. It is fashionable enough to criticise the Bush Administration’s policies on pretty well every front. It was misguided to have broken the thread of the discussion with North Korea that the previous Administration had so laboriously established. However, there is ample evidence—the noble Lord, Lord Garden, referred to it—of the fact that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions were not in fact being held in check, let alone reversed, by that dialogue and none whatever for believing that last month’s test was simply a response to unfair and bellicose treatment. The international community would most likely have found itself in a predicament similar to this one, irrespective of the US Administration’s initial policy response when it came into office. What is the best way ahead? First, it clearly is urgent to reconstitute the six-nation talks, which offer by far the best prospect of a negotiated outcome. It is good to hear that there is some chance of them resuming before too long. We should not be looking on those talks just as a short-term method of fixing a particularly acute problem. Rather, they should be seen as foreshadowing a permanent sub-regional organisation that could provide the international disciplines and the underpinning for peace and security in the north-east Asian region, with North Korea playing its full part in it. Embedding concepts such as the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and the commitment to avoid the pursuit of regime change by force will be of much greater and more lasting value if they are part of a multilateral framework in which all members participate as equals, as is now the case in many other regions and sub-regions around the world. Aiming at such a desirable outcome may well, and almost certainly will, require some direct dealings between the US and North Korea, but those should not be seen as the be-all and end-all of activities on the diplomatic track. There clearly does have to be pressure on North Korea through targeted economic sanctions, such as those decided by the UN Security Council last month. A policy lacking such an instrument, when faced with such open defiance and obduracy, would lack any credibility. Targeted economic sanctions can be effective, as was demonstrated in the case of Libya, but they need to be pursued with a determination to make them effective. In the immediate aftermath of the sanctions decision in New York last month, there was to my mind far too much talk of what the sanctions would not consist of rather than what they would consist of. It is regrettable that the Government of South Korea are not willing to fully implement the proliferation security initiative designed to interdict North Korean trade in prohibited items. Perhaps some change in that attitude may occur after the country’s elections next year. There is the enigma of China’s attitude towards the implementation of sanctions. In truth, China’s role in the handling of policy towards North Korea is absolutely central to the outcome. A China whose economic strength and political influence continue to grow, and whose position as North Korea’s main trading partner and principal ally is of long standing, cannot possibly escape from the centrality of that role. It can exercise it by default by doing as little as possible, in which case a negotiated outcome is exceptionally unlikely. Or it can exercise it by actively shaping solutions to the main problems and by making clear that further acts of defiance by North Korea will bring further pressure on it from a united international community. No doubt China will reach decisions on which version of its role to assume on the basis of its own calculation of its own national interest. That is what countries tend to do. China has much to lose from any further destabilisation or nuclearisation of the north-east Asian region, and much to gain from drawing the sting from the current, highly unstable situation. It may be argued that the approach that I am suggesting, which is quite close to that suggested by my noble friend Lord Alton, places too little emphasis on the sufferings and the human rights of the North Korean people. That criticism was levelled at the Helsinki Charter, which was signed some 30 years ago between the then Soviet Union and its then satellites, on the one side, and the countries of what can loosely be called the West on the other. It was said that, by accepting and legitimising the post-war division of Europe, we were somehow abandoning the peoples of eastern Europe to their fate. It did not quite turn out like that. A combination of time and patience, together with modest incremental steps towards opening up their societies to the outside world and increasing economic interaction with that world, brought about major changes and opened the way to a peaceful transition to what we now call the post-Cold War world. It may seem a bit over-sanguine to assume that the same process could work as well at the other end of the world in quite different circumstances, but what are the viable alternatives? If there is none, would we not be better served by trying this approach? I would strongly support what my noble friend Lord Alton described as Helsinki with an Asian face. One final thought. The problems posed by North Korea’s nuclear test clearly need to be addressed on their own merits and in their own regional context. We should not lose sight of the wider picture. That test was only one, even if the most immediate, of the threats to the global nuclear non-proliferation regime, which is under greater stress than it has ever been before. Last year, the international community failed twice—at the NPT review conference in May and at the UN summit in September—to strengthen that regime. It is surely high time now to resume the effort to do that and not simply to devote all our energies to dealing with the individual cases of North Korea and Iran. There are plenty of ideas out there on the table; among them are proposals for a nuclear fissile material cut-off treaty and for the internationally guaranteed supply of enriched uranium for legitimate, civil nuclear purposes, which we discussed in this House as recently as earlier this week. What is needed now is a concerted campaign to reach agreement on some of these proposals. I hope that the Minister will be able to say how firmly the Government are committed to that purpose and what they intend to do to bring it about.