North Korea and the History of the Bomb

by Larry Smith

By some accounts, Japan tested a small atomic bomb in North Korea during the final days of World War Two. And now, 61 years later, North Korea has tested its own bomb - making it the eighth country with confirmed nuclear weapons, and creating a big new problem for the world.

The background to North Korea's test can be traced to the discovery of nuclear fission in Europe in the 1930s, when two competing alliances began vying to build a super bomb. At the time, Britain and the United States were locked in a life and death struggle with Germany and Japan.

Japanese research began in 1940 under the direction of physicist Yoshio Nishina. And to escape Allied attacks the project was moved to a remote Japanese naval base in Korea, where some intelligence sources say prototype bombs were assembled, and one may actually have been tested.

German efforts were led by physicist Werner Heisenberg and produced a nuclear reactor that never worked. Although a number of other revolutionary weapons were produced - including the world's first jet fighter, stealth bomber and ballistic missile - analysts doubt that the Nazis ever came close to making a bomb.

But the British and Americans were convinced they had to have these decisive weapons to survive. So the Manhattan Project was launched in December, 1941. Fearing a Nazi victory, many leading scientists encouraged this research. They famously included Albert Einstein, who wrote to US President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939:

"It may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future...This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable — though much less certain — that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed."

Ironically, the Manhattan Project was set up on the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. It was to produce three atomic warheads - the first was tested in July, 1945 in the New Mexico desert; the others were dropped on Japan a month later to bring the most destructive war in human history to a close.

At that point, the US was the world's only nuclear power. Not even the British - who had been full collaborators in the Manhattan Project - were allowed access to US atomic technology. But the Soviet Union had launched its own research during the war, with the help of Western spies, and became the world's second nuclear power in 1949.

Britain then decided that the atomic bomb was needed to maintain its position in the world. In the words of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin: "We've got to have it and it's got to have [a] bloody Union Jack on it." The first British nuclear device was detonated off the west coast of Australia in 1952.

The Americans and Russians went on to develop even more powerful hydrogen bombs in the mid 1950s. France exploded its first bomb in 1960 in the Algerian desert, and the Chinese - aided at first by the Russians - tested theirs in 1966. Japan and Germany maintained strict non-nuclear policies as a result of their wartime experiences.

These five original nuclear powers had all played significant roles in the Second World War, and today they are all permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

Despite the tensions of the Cold War that lasted until 1989, no nuclear exchange has ever occurred. In fact, the closest we ever came was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when Fidel Castro wanted to launch Soviet-installed missiles at the United States.

The British, French and Chinese built up small stockpiles of a few hundred warheads apiece. But experts say the threat of mutually assured destruction enforced by the thousands of warheads and ICBMs developed by the Americans and Soviets kept the Cold War from getting hot.

This status quo changed in 1974, when India (the home of non-violence) detonated what it described as "a peaceful nuclear explosion". International pressure kept the lid on India's ambitions until 1998 when a nationalist government tested a hydrogen bomb. It is believed that India now has a few dozen warheads.

The Indian tests prompted Pakistan - which had been developing bomb technology since the early 1970s with the help of China - to conduct its own nuclear tests. Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India are neighbours that have fought several wars. And Pakistan's top scientists have been involved in the illicit spread of nuclear technology to states like Libya, Iran and North Korea.

Iran, which is governed by a radical Islamic theocracy, is said to be five to 10 years away from acquiring the bomb. And North Korea has now confirmed that it already has the bomb - despite years of alternating bribes and pressure from Japan, China, South Korea and the United States to stop it from going nuclear. More to the point, analysts say, it is very likely that at some time in the future terrorists will be able to obtain a nuclear device from poorly secured stockpiles in the former Soviet Union, or from Pakistan or North Korea.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world negotiated the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan and Israel did not sign (athough Israel is widely believed to have a nuclear arsenal, it has never acknowledged one or conducted tests), and North Korea recently withdrew from the treaty.

The Bahamas is a party to this treaty along with most other countries. It prohibits the transfer of nuclear weapons or the technology to make them, and non-nuclear states undertake not to acquire such weapons. The treaty also calls for international safeguards on nuclear materials and promotes nuclear disarmament.

Some countries have actually given up nuclear weapons. South Africa had a weapons programme aided by Israel in the 1970s, and may have conducted a nuclear test over the Atlantic in 1979. But it signed the non-proliferation treaty in 1991 after destroying its small nuclear arsenal. Libya has also renounced nuclear weapons technology, and several former Soviet republics destroyed or transferred to Russia the bombs they inherited from the Soviet Union.

It is noteworthy that many of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War Two later disassociated themselves from nuclear weapons research - including Albert Einstein who had started the ball rolling with his letter to President Roosevelt.

In 1955 - just days before his death - Einstein signed a famous manifesto stressing the dangers posed to humanity by weapons of mass destruction. The statement pointed out the special responsibilities of scientists to alert the public to the global nuclear threat:

"There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest."

Nuclear weapons have drained global resources. A 1998 study by the Brookings Institution found that the US alone had spent more than $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons between 1940 and 1996, and continues to spend some $25-$35 billion annually on research, development and maintenance of its nuclear arsenal. All of these misspent resources represent lost opportunities for improving the health, education and welfare of the people of the world.

North Korea is a remarkable example of this misplaced priority. Its economy is a shambles; its people locked down by a militaristic regime that tolerates no dissent. Economic mismanagement has led to famine that has killed millions of citizens while the regime supports a massive army and fires potentially nuclear-tipped missiles into the Sea of Japan, which will only encourage new arms races.

As American foreign policy analyst Michael Mandelbaum points out, the great danger of nuclear proliferation is that it makes otherwise weak states equal to strong ones by giving them what they never had before: the power to inflict grave damage.

He concludes that where nuclear weapons are concerned, "the fewer there are, and above all the fewer the number of countries that have them—that is, the fewer independent centres of nuclear control there are—the safer the world will be."

And as the German nuclear scientist Otto Hahn confessed at the end of World War Two: "I thank God on my bended knees that we did not make a uranium bomb."

Comments

[EB Christen]

Great article. One suggested correction - for the sake of objectivity. Castro had no intention of launching nukes at the United States - at least none that could ever be proven. His aim was to achieve strategic parity in union with the Russians in order to secure Cuba against the ever expected American invasion. While I agree that the US was absolutely correct in preventing this development, it is inflammatory to suggest that Castro had a desire to 'launch' his bombs against the United States in an unprovoked attack. Castro may be many things, but it is precisely his communism and his 'rational' approach to power that differentiates the 'threat' he represented from the threat that regimes like North Korea, Iran and nuclear non-state actors represent. It is a very important distinction to maintain. Our greatest threat lies in the smuggling of a bomb into a major port of the western world by non-state enemy combatants.

Other than this small critique, great article - as always. Thanks.

[larry smith]

This is excerpted from a 1998 Miami Herald article:

Unknown to US intelligence for 30 years, the Soviet Union had sneaked about 100 small nuclear weapons into Cuba at the time of the 1962 missile crisis, in addition to its more powerful strategic missiles.

Cuban President Fidel Castro wanted to keep the tactical weapons -- short-range rockets and airplane bombs -- even after the crisis, and Moscow's defense minister initially ordered his troops to train Cubans in their use.

But Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, horrified that Castro had urged him to launch strategic nuclear missiles against the United States at the height of the crisis, ordered that all the tactical weapons be swiftly removed.

The crisis ended and the last of the tactical warheads was reported returned to the Soviet Union in December 1962, according to documents found by Western and Russian researchers in once-secret Soviet archives.

``In retrospect, it shows the crisis was more dangerous than thought,'' said George Washington University professor Jim Hershberg, an expert on the crisis. ``If we had invaded Cuba, and they had used some of these [tactical] weapons, it would have been awful.''

The Soviet archives showed that the CIA's failure to spot the tactical nukes led to a potentially catastrophic underestimation of the threat that Cuba posed as President Kennedy was considering invading the island to knock out the strategic missiles.

[EB Christen]

I didn't dispute that Castro would have used nukes in the event that he had been invaded. In fact, I said exactly that: he wanted the nukes for strategic parity to stave off the expected invasion of Cuba. It is naturally implied that if the USA had invaded Castro would have wanted to or even would have used the nukes in retaliation. My exact wording was:

"Castro had no intention of launching nukes at the United States - at least none that could ever be proven. His aim was to achieve strategic parity in union with the Russians in order to secure Cuba against the ever expected American invasion. While I agree that the US was absolutely correct in preventing this development, it is inflammatory to suggest that Castro had a desire to 'launch' his bombs against the United States in an unprovoked attack."

My point in contrasting Castro with the 'new nuclear threats' was to show that unlike Castro, the new nuclear threats of North Korea, Iran and various non-state actors exist as a major threat precisely because of their unpredictably. Iran has long sponsored terrorism and has used smaller proxy agencies to wage asymmetric warfare against the USA. If it acquired nuclear weapons there is no reason to assume that it wouldn't be willing to allow Hizballah to use one on Israel or allow Al Qaida to smuggle one into a western allied country. Likewise, since North Korea is so cash strapped, it is not unlikely to see a scenario where a nuke could be exchanged for cash and similarly slip into the 'wrong hands'. These new actors don't want nukes 'exclusively' for deterrence or for defensive parity - therein lies the difference and the danger. The non-state actors want nukes to wage war and they are willing to strike first. Castro had no such desire that we could ever tell. He wanted the nukes to prevent an invasion he assumed would happen. This might seem like hair splitting, but there is an important distinction between these two kinds of threat.