Subject: EEE会議（Re:北朝鮮の戦略）
Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 10:25:41 +0900
From: "Kumao KANEKO" <kkaneko@eeecom.jp>

各位殿

北朝鮮問題への対応を巡るブッシュ政権内の激論は依然として続いておりますが、米
側当局者が特に心配しているのは、北のミサイルは主に日本を標的にしていること、
そして北朝鮮は、かつて冷戦時代にソ連がSS-20中距離ミサイルの配備によって米欧
間の離間を図ったように、盛んに日米の離間を狙っていることのようです。つまり、
北のミサイルはまだ米本土には届かないので、在日米軍を背後で支えている日本をま
ず狙う、そこで日本が「人質」になるわけだが、その際日米の対応に違いが出てくる
可能性があり、日本人の不安感が高まり、その結果日米同盟に亀裂が入る危険性があ
る、北はまさにそれを狙っているというものです。この辺は、先月ワシントンで小生
が実際にペンタゴンの担当者等から聞いたことですが、本日付けのNew York Timesが
詳しく分析しており、参考になります。ちょっと長文ですが、全文をお目にかけま
す。ご参考まで。
金子熊夫

**********************************************

U.S. Aides Split as Change Is Seen in Korean Threat
By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER


ASHINGTON, May 10 ・As President Bush enters two weeks of intense diplomacy
over disarming North Korea, American and Asian officials say the nature of
the threat it poses to the world has changed significantly in recent years
・and with it, so have the bitter arguments over how to prevent a starving,
desperate nation from lashing out.

When South Korea's new president, Roh Moo Hyun, arrives in New York on
Sunday and Washington later in the week, he will discover an administration
that remains divided about North Korea, as it debates what may prove to be
one of the biggest strategic changes toward the Communist government since
the Korean War ended 50 years ago this summer.

Mr. Bush's advisers are engaged in a running argument over whether to
continue negotiating with a country that says it is building nuclear
weapons, or to organize an international economic blockade meant to leave
North Korea's leadership with a stark choice between collapse and
dismantling its nuclear programs.

But just as Mr. Bush's senior advisers are divided over the right mix of
inducements and penalties, the governments of both South Korea and Japan are
increasingly viewing the North Korean problem through their own domestic
political prisms, further complicating the task of drafting a unified
strategy.

Mr. Roh ・who has never before visited the United States ・is an untested
leader who fears that Washington is headed toward a repeat of its
confrontation with Iraq, and was elected on a platform of conciliation with
the North that is intended to keep South Korea from being caught in the
cross-fire, quite literally.

His visit will be followed the next week with one to Mr. Bush's ranch in
Texas by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, whose own efforts at
reconciliation with North Korea ended badly last year, and whose government
is now talking publicly, for the first time in two generations, about
expanding its definition of self-defense to embrace active containment of
North Korea.

After decades of worrying primarily about how to protect South Korea from a
military strike from the North, Washington now believes that if the North
Korean leadership lashes out, its wrath could be directed first at Japan ・
and at the American forces based there.

American officials and Korea experts point to evidence that North Korea is
investing heavily in medium- and long-range missiles that would be able to
reach Tokyo and other major Japanese cities ・and eventually even the West
Coast of the United States.

There is growing fear here that the new North Korean threat may also include
the sale of nuclear material to terrorists or states like Iran and Syria ・
longtime buyers of North Korean missiles and other weapons.

"You've got two sets of challenges here," said one senior administration
official who has been deeply involved in the Korea debate. "One is the
challenge of maintaining a common front" with South Korea and Japan, he
said, "given that people list the priorities in the different order:
deterring war on the peninsula, preventing nuclear transfer to terrorists
and preventing missile development."

The second challenge, he said, is "coming up with the right mixture of a
willingness to negotiate with a willingness to confront."

The missiles that are of concern to Japan, American and Japanese officials
say, have a political purpose far beyond their military capacity. They are
increasingly viewed as a calculated effort to intimidate Japan and strike
fear into its population to drive a wedge between Tokyo and Washington. One
former Japanese intelligence official compared the North Korean strategy to
the Soviet deployment two decades ago of SS-20 medium-range missiles able to
reach Western Europe in an effort to pull NATO allies away from the United
States, a comparison echoed within the Bush administration.

The North Koreans know that "Japan has the potential to be a large logistics
base for anything coming against them," said one American intelligence
official. "From a military planning perspective, it's a rational decision to
want to be able to deter or influence Japanese willingness to support a
conflict, or even to attack U.S. military bases in Japan."

But rather than dividing Japan from the United States, the missiles appear
to have had the reverse effect. The combination of the missile threat and
North Korea's admission that it kidnapped Japanese citizens for intelligence
training has opened a discussion in Japan about whether to join any American
effort to strangle North Korea economically, and even to deploy its own
version of an American-designed missile defense.

But the biggest challenge for Mr. Bush will be to find common ground with
Mr. Roh. The South Korean president took office saying he was shocked to
learn that some in the Bush administration had considered a pre-emptive
strike against North Korea's nuclear facilities, an option that Bush
administration officials have recently played down but not ruled out.

Reflecting the views of his postwar generation, Mr. Roh has promised to
continue trade and investment in North Korea in an effort to draw out its
isolated leader, Kim Jong Il. The question now is how he will handle an
American president who has publicly said he "loathes" Mr. Kim and has vowed
never to allow what he considers a rogue state to develop nuclear weapons.

"Roh Moo Hyun and the president will get along well as people," said Donald
Gregg, who served as the C.I.A.'s station chief in South Korea and then as
ambassador under President Bush's father. "The problem is, how will they get
along when they start talking about North Korea."

The Bush administration came to office deeply divided over how to handle
North Korea, and Mr. Bush's first meeting with South Korea's previous
president, Kim Dae Jung, was considered a diplomatic disaster, because the
administration had not settled on a strategy.

Yet the administration's debate over how to offer North Korea inducements to
give up its weapons, and whether to back that up with the threat of economic
strangulation, continues. Last Wednesday, Mr. Bush's top advisers met by
video teleconference for another inconclusive discussion on whether to enter
a second round of negotiations with North Korea and how to handle the
back-to-back visits.

The first negotiations, in Beijing last month, ended with North Korean
declarations that the country had already turned 8,000 spent nuclear-fuel
rods into plutonium ・a boast American intelligence officials discount. But
there is satellite evidence suggesting that some small-scale reprocessing
may be under way, which puts enormous pressure on Mr. Bush to decide in the
next few weeks whether the problem can be solved diplomatically, or may
require economic sanctions or military force.

"We think that the president really does have all the options on the table,"
one senior South Korean official said this week, speaking of Mr. Bush. Mr.
Roh's task, he said, would be to persuade Mr. Bush to let the negotiations
play out, which the president seems willing to consider.

American officials say they expect that after the meetings with Mr. Roh and
Mr. Koizumi of Japan, Mr. Bush will authorize a limited set of talks with
North Korea. But those talks may be intended primarily to convince China and
allies like South Korea that the North will never give up its nuclear
program on reasonable terms, and to win their support.

Mr. Bush wants to do more than dismantle the nuclear program; he says North
Korea must also give up its missile exports and production, something the
Clinton administration never tried to negotiate.

North Korea has fielded more than 100 Nodong missiles and has sold that type
to Pakistan, which is redesigning it to carry a nuclear warhead, officials
say. Iran, which is developing its own nuclear arms program, has also
purchased the missile, American officials say.

Although the Nodong can easily reach Japan, it is highly inaccurate, and
would be militarily useful only with a biological, chemical or nuclear
warhead, according to Pentagon and intelligence officials ・which only
increases the potential threat to Japan. The missile is considered an effort
at intimidation, playing on the fears of the Japanese public that they would
be hit if they sided with the United States in confronting the North.

But "it represents a fundamental miscalculation on the part of the North
Koreans," said a senior Defense Department official. "What they have done is
almost single-handedly overturned a very deep-seated, third-generation
pacifism."

In contrast, the South Korean government is barely concerned about the
missile threat. It has declined to take part in the American-led antimissile
program because it does not view the Nodong as a serious new threat. For
decades, the South Korean capital has been within easy range of thousands of
conventional artillery pieces and short-range bombardment rockets that could
destroy it in a matter of hours.

"Because that threat looms so large, and that hostage situation looms so
large, it really allows the South Korean military and South Korean defense
thinkers to not even address the Nodong issue," the senior Defense
Department official said.