Even as the world rightly condemns North Korea for its latest nuclear test, it behoves us to consider the view from the bunker. Not the one where South Korea’s hardline president Lee Myung-bak, who leaves office next week , hastily convened a security meeting to discuss how to react to the latest threat from his Northern nemesis. I mean, rather, the metaphorical bunker in which North Korea is permanently hunkered down, circumscribing how it sees the world.
The world the Kims see is a nuclear one. North Korea was in a sense born from the only nuclear weapons ever used. In 1945, the fire visited on Hiroshima and Nagasaki made Japan surrender sooner than expected. A quick fix was needed for Korea, which had been harshly ruled from Tokyo for 40 years. The US suggested “temporarily” dividing the peninsula. Stalin agreed, and an ancient nation remains sundered to this day.
Five years later Kim Il-sung, the young guerrilla installed in the North by Moscow, staked all on invading the South – only to be beaten back by General Macarthur, who, before he was sacked as commander of UN forces, wanted to use nuclear weapons on North Korea and its sustaining ally China. In 1975 US defence secretary James Schlesinger again threatened North Korea with a nuclear attack if it tried to take advantage of the fall of Saigon. By then South Korea’s dictator Park Chung-hee – whose daughter Park Geun-hye will become the South’s president on February 25 – was also pursuing a secret nuclear programme, until the US quashed it.