Abstract
Negative interactions prompt a situation where a state’s policy is less affected by social interactions built by civil societies on a global scale. Inattention, perceptual gaps, the exchange of hostile rhetoric, and vacillating attitudes were apparently in place during the North Korean nuclear crisis. In addition, a gap between codified principles and actual practices, which stimulated North Korea’s questioning of the legitimacy of existing beliefs, further worsened misperceptions and misjudgments, completing a vicious cycle of negative interactions. The outcome was that North Korea’s behavior seemed not to be influenced by generalized principles of conduct. As Oh and Hassig note, North Korea was rational, but its calculus of rationality was “bounded” by the specific context of the surrounding environment.1 Therefore, it is important to carefully examine the structure, which was so constraining as to play a role in driving North Korea into a corner.
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Notes
Kongdan Oh and Ralph C. Hassig, North Korea through the Looking Glass (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 192.
For the weaknesses of the IAEA safeguards, see Matthias Dembinski, “North Korea, IAEA Special Inspections, and the Future of the Nonproliferation Regime,” The Nonproliferation Review 2, no. 2 (1995): 31–9.
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Technology transfer of nuclear energy from the East German Nuclear and Radioactive Safety Committee was possible as North Korea signed a protocol on cooperation in the field of atomic energy for peaceful purposes with the Czechoslovakian Nuclear Energy Commission. Leis Engineering GmbH, an East German company, was suspected of selling a special steel alloy to North Korea that can be used for containing radioactive materials in November 1991. The German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), the West German intelligence agency, reported that the West German company Leybold A.G. supplied North Korea with two electron-beam furnaces, two laboratory furnaces via India or Pakistan and a small laboratory furnace via former East Germany in 1992. The BND also suspected that a Leybold employee went to North Korea to work on a nuclear facility. Joseph S. Bermudez Jr, Jane’s Intelligence Review, September 1991, 408–10;
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During the second nuclear crisis, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung’s sunshine policy set forth flexible principles in accepting the US approach. However, the fundamental difference between the US and South Korea originates from their divergent policy goals toward North Korea: South Korea views the nuclear issue as a Korean issue, while the US focuses its efforts on the responsibility of North Korea as a member of the international community. Chi Yong Pak, Korea and the United Nations (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2000), 141.
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Narushige Michishita, North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, 1966–2008 (New York: Routledge, 2010), 97–8.
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© 2014 Jina Kim
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Kim, J. (2014). Negative Interaction. In: The North Korean Nuclear Weapons Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386069_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386069_5
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