Posted on: Monday, May 10, 2004

EDITORIAL
South Koreans worry about North's missiles

The South Korean press has alerted us to preparations in North Korea to deploy a new missile that could reach Guam and possibly Hawai'i.

What's instructive about this news is not that North Korean missile capabilities have changed especially, but that South Koreans are fretting that the North Korean threat has all but disappeared from the White House radar screen.

No wonder, with 130,000 U.S. troops pinned down in Iraq, a defense secretary on the ropes and an election around the corner.

Nevertheless, prudence should dictate that North Korea is not an issue that can safely rest on the back burner for months on end.

The Pyongyang leadership is backed into a corner from which there is no exit. Launching a war will bring certain destruction. To survive, it must perpetuate a situation that stops short of war but also stops short of peace.

That would have been a novel formula for stability, were it not for intrusive realities, like disaster, starvation — and the White House. President Bush has threatened North Korea under the "axis of evil" rubric, abrogated the 1994 Agreed Framework and now begun moving U.S. troops away from the DMZ — a tactic Pyongyang sees (not illogically) as preparation for a U.S. invasion.

From satellite photos of two new missile bases, it's evident they are intended for something other than North Korea's workhorse Rodong missile. A South Korean official says the new missile might have a range of 1,800 to 2,500 miles.

But remember that in 1998 North Korea fired a more advanced missile, the Taepodong, right over Japan, scaring the wits out of a lot of people there and elsewhere. If that missile is fitted with a second stage, then it should be able to fly 4,000 miles or more, reaching parts of the U.S. Mainland.

So potential missile reach isn't what has changed. More worrisome is the new CIA estimate that the North Koreans have eight nuclear weapons, along with evidence that they've been working on miniaturizing them to fit atop missiles.

If North Korea can reach American bases in Japan or Guam with nuclear weapons, that's all the deterrent it may need.