The dance on the Korean peninsula between North Korea and South Korea exposes some new proliferation concerns. While North Korea persues obtaining special nuclear materials through "conventional means" the recent news item that South Korea has used laser enrichment to make a fraction of a gram of slightly enriched U238-235 shows that South Korea is capable of very sophisticated technical projects, a fact that should be sobering to the North Korean government leadership. The South Korean experiments show that SK could gain this capability should their government decide to persue such a course.
Back during the Korean war, declassified security documents show that the US moved to make the N-weapon threat from the US credible, moving assets closer to the conflict even while debating the utility of such weapons in the conflict. Some at the time thought that these weapons would have little tactical utility, partly due to the topography, partly due to the geopolitical consequences of such a move.
This was discussed in the journal International Security a number of years ago.
It is apparent to me that both Japan and South Korea as well as Taiwan could have such weapons at any point if given the go-ahead of the United States, or if their leadership initiated a clandestine program. In some way, it might be stabilizing if T,J,SK had such capability, as the North Korean's are more vulnearable to strategic bombing if they were to use such a doomsday weapon on South Korea than they were so many years ago.
Hopefully folks like me will never know if these states decide to persue such a course, as the evidence will remain hidden, and the weapons won't be used. It is facinating to see the public disclosures as part of the diplomatic dance, and to hope that the West will be able to bring a peaceful end to the "cold war" continuing on the Korean land.
It is my hope that North Korea will change it's approach to being in the world, but as long as China finds it useful to have a rogue state in it's corner, there isn't much that the West is willing to do that will truely shift the course of the North Korean persuit of power. The existance of slave labor camps in North Korea doesn't get much press these days, nor do we hear much about the economic geography of North Korea.
It might be useful for the nations around North Korea to begin to make public more about how the North Korean economy functions, which other nations have trade relations with the North, how the flow of money and goods ties them to the rest of the world. Such knowledge would be useful in dealing with this emerging threat, as world economic forces are at least as important in the long term as military power.
The stability of the government in the North is a concern, as it is certain from public disclosures that enough U and Pu exist in enriched form to be a proliferation concern. If the U-hexaflouride that was found in North Africa indeed came from NK, then it's not much of a stretch to think that a war on terror must put a priority on containing this regime. North Korea's involvement in the amphetamine trade shows that they have routes that could bypass most border controls, and the confluence of these two trade routes would be truely terrifying to the rest of us.
The roll-up of the Pakistani proliferation network has addressed a big threat to world stability, but without addressing this NK component, the threat is only mitigated and is likely to spead further. The NK threat to sell technology is mild compared with the threat to sell snm to rogue ngo and must be considered as a primary threat to world political stability.
