Behind the nuclear issue in Korea

When U.S. troops landed in southern Korea at the very end of World War II, the strategic planners for U.S. imperialism looked on the peninsula as just a stepping stone to eventual domination of the Asian mainland. They paid little attention to the revolutionary army of Koreans, organized by Marshal Kim Il Sung, that had come down from the north alongside Soviet troops and begun disarming and deposing the power structure set up during Japanese colonial rule.

The United States didn't take seriously the great social revolution that had begun in Korea. But Kim's liberation army was encouraging the people to overturn not just the officials who had collaborated with Japan but the landlords and capitalists who had exploited and oppressed them and had been the internal class base that Japanese imperialism had relied on for many decades.

Land reform in the north, begun in 1946, eased the dire poverty of the peasants and inspired the growth of revolutionary sentiment in the south.

As the Cold War began to emerge, the Truman administration started characterizing Kim Il Sung and his followers as nothing more than puppets of the Soviet Union, which had entered the war against Japan after it defeated Hitler's armies in Europe. Washington thought that once Soviet troops had withdrawn from northern Korea, the United States would be able to bring the whole area, including China, under its "sphere of influence."

But the revolution continued in northern Korea and in neighboring China. By 1948, the U.S.-dominated south of Korea had declared the formation of a separate government, thus making official the division of the country along the 38th parallel. In response, the revolutionary forces led by Kim Il Sung then established the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north.

Soviet troops immediately began withdrawing from the north, which has had to defend itself ever since. Some U.S. troops withdrew from the south, but many remained as "advisers" to the dictatorship of Syngman Rhee, a brutal right winger who had lived for decades in the United States before being anointed the leader of South Korea by Washington.

Repression and war

Rhee had begun a reign of terror against all progressives, including many who had been heroic fighters against Japanese colonialism while he was in Washington, sitting out the war.

Beginning in 1950, U.S. forces flooded back into Korea to prop up Rhee's tottering dictatorship. A horrendous three-year war against the DPRK followed in which millions of Koreans were killed. When a cease-fire was finally declared, U.S. imperialism, despite its enormous advantages in military technology and industrial might, had failed in its objective--to overturn the socialist regime in the north--and the country remained divided.

The war never officially ended. Washington has refused to even discuss a peace treaty with the DPRK. Nearly 40,000 U.S. troops have continued to occupy the south ever since, and the movement there to get them out has become enormous.

Today, the Soviet Union--the first workers' state and for over seven decades the main target of German Nazi imperialism and then of U.S. nuclear threats, economic and political subversion--is no more. Its demise was a great shock and material loss to all the countries trying to stay out of the clutches of imperialism.

But the revolution led by Kim Il Sung and his Workers' Party of Korea has proven its viability. The DPRK under the leadership of Kim Jong Il continues to defy the rulers in Washington and will not bow down to U.S. empire.

The Bush administration is now learning the hard way what previous U.S. administrations, both Democrats and Republicans, learned about the DPRK. It will not give in to threats. Threats only make the Korean people and leaders redouble their efforts to defend their sovereignty and their socialist system.

The issue today, as framed by Washington, is the DPRK's development of nuclear weapons.

DPRK's right to exist

From the Korean point of view, however, the issue is the continued hostility of the United States more than half a century after the 1950-53 war, and their right to maintain a strong defense against a nuclear power that has insulted their leaders and openly declared its intention of destroying their system.

It is clearly recognized by most of the world today that the collapse of the USSR was interpreted by an extremely aggressive grouping in the U.S. ruling class as a green light for global imperialist expansion. The so-called neocons, who have shaped many of the policies of the Bush administration, laid out their plans for world domination more than a decade ago.

Their military planning was focused mainly on undisputed control over the oil wealth of the Middle East--the first war against Iraq coincided with the crumbling of the USSR--but they also expected to prevail over what they called "rogue nations" that refused to fit into a world dominated by U.S. corporations and banks.

Cuba, cut off from trade and technology exchange with the Soviet bloc, was supposed to fall. So was the DPRK.

It is now 15 years later. Neither Cuba nor the DPRK has collapsed.

The DPRK has undergone years of extreme hardship while facing the possibility of renewed U.S. military aggression. But its political structure, based on a workers' party and a state forged out of a revolutionary struggle by the masses, has not fractured.

It is one of Washington's oft-repeated laments that it cannot get a clear reading of what is happening inside the DPRK. In other words, imperialism cannot find a social base from which to agitate against and subvert the leadership and the system. So it calls the DPRK a "hermit kingdom" and other disparaging labels.

In his January 2002 State of the Union speech, President George W. Bush included the DPRK in an invented "axis of evil," along with Iraq and Iran. A year later, the United States had launched a full-scale invasion of Iraq to overthrow its government and set up a puppet regime.

The DPRK took serious note of all this.

"We consider Bush's State of the Union address to be a de facto declaration of war on the DPRK," the DPRK's ambassador to the UN, Pak Gil Yon, told Workers World at that time. (Workers World, March 28, 2002)

The ambassador also drew attention to the Pentagon's January 2002 Nuclear Policy Review, which projected plans to use nuclear weapons against seven countries, including the DPRK. "This is a very serious development," underlined the ambassador, saying that it canceled earlier agreements between the two countries.

For years, the United States had threatened the DPRK with its huge array of nuclear weapons. The Pentagon had land-based weapons in South Korea. It also had submarines, bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles all armed with nuclear weapons that could be used against North Korea.

The Pentagon claims to have removed its nuclear weapons from South Korea, but there is no independent verification of that. Meanwhile, it continues to keep its "nuclear umbrella" menacing the area.

In his interview with WW, Ambassador Pak reiterated his assertion that Bush's speech was "a declaration of war," and added that "all counter-measures will be taken to defend the sovereignty of the country."

Since then, the Bush administration has kept up its diatribe against the DPRK, even while committing terrible war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. This April, Bush escalated his rhetoric, calling Korean leader Kim Jong Il a "tyrant" and claiming the DPRK's conduct justified U.S. plans for spending untold billions on a space-based "anti-missile" system.

It should therefore come as no surprise that the DPRK has announced its own development of nuclear weapons as a deterrent to any attack from the United States. It is demanding that the broader question of the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula be addressed if there is to be a peaceful resolution of this issue.

The Bush administration had hoped to make the DPRK's nuclear weapons a main target of criticism at the recent UN meetings on nuclear non-proliferation, and wants to get some kind of UN sanctions imposed on North Korea. But the delegates from around the world are much more worried about the thousands of nuclear weapons that the Pentagon has refused to dismantle and that are kept on high alert.

Analyst Peter G. Cohen writes: "The Bush administration has been requesting funds for the development of new weapons and to improve the reliability of older ones. Nuclear weapons are still a central element of the Bush defense policy." (Common Dreams, May 19)

Even former war hawk Robert McNamara wrote in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine, "I would characterize current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous."

As for economic sanctions, South Korea is now sending 200,000 tons of fertilizer to the north to help with its agricultural recovery. Three ships from the DPRK docked in South Korean ports in mid-May for the first time in 21 years. The last time ships from the north had gone to the south, it was to deliver cement, rice and other aid to their southern compatriots after a typhoon had devastated the area.

So far, the Bush administration's dangerous efforts to intimidate, isolate and economically strangle the DPRK, giving as an excuse that country's justifiable efforts to defend itself from the open threat of aggression by the world's number one nuclear power, have been to no avail.