On The Nation: Lisa Owen interviews Anna Fifield
Lisa Owen: The war of words between America and North Korea is ramping up, with Pyongyang talking of a ‘super mighty pre-emptive strike’ that would wipe out the US mainland. And the United States vice president saying any such attack would meet ‘an overwhelming and effective response’. So I spoke to Anna Fifield, the Washington Post’s Tokyo bureau chief and asked her how real those threats are.
Anna Fifield: Right, so, North Korea is a master of this bombastic kind of propaganda. These threats are one of the few reliable exports that North Korea has. So this kind of language, while very incendiary is kind of par for the course for North Korea. But it’s April. April is always a very sensitive time on the Korean peninsula, because every April the US and South Korea militaries conduct joint exercises in the southern half of the peninsula in which they basically rehearse to strike North Korea or to respond to a collapse of North Korea, and North Korea find this a very provocative action, because they view that as a pretext for an invasion. So North Korea is already on tenterhooks in April, plus there’s these two really big anniversaries that the North Korean regime celebrates with a lot of fanfare and this sort of military parade that we saw last week here. But the wild card factor that’s come in this April to make it a bit different is Donald Trump. We’re used to dealing with one unpredictable leader when it comes to North Korea, but right now, frankly, we have two.
The assumption at the moment is that North Korea doesn’t yet have the missile capacity to reach the US, but do we know that for sure?
We don’t know it for sure, because we won’t know it until they actually test one of these intercontinental ballistic missiles. But for years and years, people, particularly in the US, have been saying, ‘Oh, North Korea will never be able to do this kind of stuff. This kind of stuff is really hard.’ It is hard, but North Korea is trying really hard. They have the political will to do this, and increasingly they are developing the technical capability to do it too. So a year ago, North Korea could not shoot a ballistic missile from a submarine. By the end of the year, they could. Same things with some of their medium-range missiles that are thought to become, or designed to be, some of the stages in this three-stage long-range missile. They are getting better and better at doing that. So it’s very unwise to say, ‘Oh, North Korea can’t do this,’ because while they may not be able to do it right now, they are working towards it, they are making very tangible, observable progress, and they will be able to do it eventually.
So the missile failure recently, there has been talk that the US intervened in that through some form of hacking. Is that plausible?
I guess it’s plausible. I don’t think it’s likely, though there has been some talk about hacking. If the US was able to hack into North Korea’s missile programme, it’s more likely that they would be able to infect the system as a whole with some kind of malware of something. Experts I talk to say it’s very unlikely that they would be able to disrupt individual missile launches along the way. So I think that that’s really unlikely in this latest situation.
So, in the worst case scenario, if there was a full-blown conflict in the region, what would that mean for US relations with both Russia and China?
It would be very, very difficult for relations all across the region with US. China and the US would find themselves at loggerheads again. It would be very complicated. But I think we are a long way from that even being a reality right now. I do not think that there is a high risk of conflict happening right now simply because it’s in nobody’s interest for this to happen. The US does not want to get bogged down in another military conflict. For North Korea, even though it does have these nuclear devices and some missiles that do work, they would be annihilated by the superior power of the US if they got involved in a conflict. But the overall restraining factor here, as it has been for decades, is South Korea, is Seoul. There are 25 million people living in greater Seoul. It’s less than 50km from the DMZ that separates North and South Korea. And that’s within range of North Korea’s conventional artillery. Like, never mind about nukes and missiles; they’ve got all these rocket launchers lined up on the border there that they could unleash on Seoul and cause a lot of devastation, a lot of panic. Some estimates say they could kill 60,000 people with conventional artillery in the first day. And that, whether it’s the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, Obama, now, that has always been the restraining factor that the US simply can’t get involved in any kind of military action in North Korea because it would come at such a huge cost to its ally in South Korea.
So then what happens now? What’s the way forward?
Yeah, I think we’re going to see more of these tensions and jitters and the psychological warfare continuing over the next few weeks. Coming up next week we have another big anniversary in North Korea on Tuesday that they will celebrate. Maybe they’ll just celebrate it with statements. Maybe we’ll see another missile launch. It’s likely that we will see another nuclear test at some stage. Maybe not around a big date, maybe not in the next month, but before the end of the year, it’s very possible that North Korea will try to test again to, you know, learn from the test, learn what its capabilities are and to send a signal to the outside. So the question is, really — how does the US respond again? Because now the Trump administration has completely ruled out diplomatic negotiations with North Korea, so it leaves them very few good options for handling this situation. Right now all of the focus is on China, on putting pressure on China to put pressure on North Korea and try to convince Kim Jong-un to change his mind, which is a pretty tall order.
Anna Fifield, thanks so much for joining us from Tokyo this morning. Appreciate your time.
Transcript provided by Able. www.able.co.nz

© Scoop Media