DAR AL HARB - NORTH KOREA: KIM JONG IL WILL NOT GIVE UP HIS NUKES, NOT AFTER SPENDING DECADES IN TRYING TO GET THEM

North Korea unlikely to give up its atom weapons, analysts say

HONG KONG: For decades, North Korea badgered its communist allies to supply it with a nuclear reactor and the technical know-how that could have allowed it to build a nuclear bomb. It eventually achieved both.

After such a long struggle, North Korea is unlikely to agree easily to dismantle the weapons it possesses, despite an agreement this week to start the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, analysts said.

They said that, at best, it would require long and arduous negotiations, and further diplomatic and economic concessions, before North Korea would agree to dismantle nuclear weapons, without any certainty that it was fully disclosing the extent of its nuclear weapons capability. The agreement has been widely criticized for failing to directly address the issue of scrapping the weapons already built by North Korea.

But Joseph Bermudez, an expert on the North Korean military and a senior analyst with Jane's Information Group, said that Washington had been "desperate" to get a deal because time was running out for six-nation talks on the nuclear crisis to make progress and that it had "settled for less than could be had."

"I believe the North Koreans will say dismantling nuclear weapons is not in the letter of the agreement," Bermudez said in an interview.

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"The word weapon or disarmament doesn't seem to be anywhere in the agreement," said Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst and specialist on Korean security at the RAND Corporation.

"So what we have agreed, at least in the letter of the law, is to stop their production but not necessarily to get rid of what they already have."

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The second factor is that North Korea will find it harder to improve the quality of its existing capability and have fewer options as to how it uses nuclear weapons if the number of bombs it has is kept small and the country is prevented from obtaining the material to build more.

In a 2005 paper on the military implications of North Korea's nuclear weapons program, Bennett warned that there was a risk of North Korea using nuclear weapons not as a last resort but in the opening stages of a conflict and to target vital military installations if it acquired a sufficiently large arsenal.

"As the numbers of North Korean weapons grow, nuclear use becomes more likely, and that use will tend to start early in a campaign." Bennett said.

In such a scenario, North Korea might calculate that it could use a nuclear weapon against a military target without necessarily risking automatic nuclear retaliation because it would retain the potential for escalation by next hitting a major population center.

Bennett calculated that a 10-kiloton bomb dropped on a South Korean city could kill about 200,000 people. The Oct. 9 test was estimated to be only 1 kiloton, underscoring the importance of preventing North Korea from improving the yield of its weapons or developing an effective missile-delivery system.

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