Countering the Rogue Nuclear Triad of China, Pakistan and North Korea
By arming countries in China’s periphery, India could undermine the
security system Beijing has so ruthlessly installed to further its goal
of domination.
North Korea’s fifth underground nuclear test,
when it happens sometime later this year, will occasion dread and set
off the usual flutter of apprehension in the West. With this, the
perception will grow of the bomb affording vulnerable states near
absolute security in a complex international threat system, and leading
to the spread of nuclear weapons and the breakdown of the
Non-Proliferation Treaty-based nuclear order. Leading the charge in
dismantling the NPT system is the rogue nuclear triad of China, Pakistan
and North Korea, which has left its footprint in the major hot spots of
the world (Iran, Iraq, Libya). But, curiously, far from suffering any
retribution, these states have individually benefitted from their
proliferation activity. This may be because, with China at its core and
Pakistan, the US’s perennial “frontline state”, in the mix, Washington
is disinclined to exercise forceful actions, fearing unpredictable
outcomes. The reluctance may also be because the US and many European
countries had a role in establishing the triad, and now find it
impolitic to acknowledge the menace they created, let alone deal with
it.
The fact is, triadic
arrangements to clandestinely transfer nuclear materials, technology and
expertise have been the disruptive means in the nuclear age to
strengthen strategic partners, unsettle adversaries, cultivate
diplomatic and military leverage, maintain regional balance and
otherwise to influence international politics. By permitting states
more fluidly to share resources, responsibility, executable actions and
to dissipate external pressure, such schemes – quasi-military alliances
actually – are flexible, historically proven instruments to achieve
large strategic goals. Participation in nuclear triads, moreover, allows
states to maximise their mischief value and to pursue risky policies
under the protective cover of the principal state – China, in the
present case.
The precursor triads
Nuclear proliferation occurred early in the Cold War on a bilateral
basis as part of the intra-bloc capacity-building of allies. In many
cases, the dyads grew into triads involving states in ideological or
strategic sync. In the 1950s, the US separately assisted the UK and then
France to become nuclear weapon states. Post the 1956 Suez Crisis, the
US and France helped nuclearise Israel, resulting in a jointly-designed
French-Israeli nuclear device being tested in the Algerian desert in
1959. Then, in a sort of nuclear daisy chain, under the US aegis, Israel
provided erstwhile white-ruled South Africa with nuclear weapon
capability. In the new century, considerations of economical use of
resources led to a revamped US-UK-France cooperative scheme to share
nuclear weapons research and development expertise and infrastructure,
as well as to cut modernisation costs. Thus British scientists from the
Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston utilised the 2006
Anglo-French ‘Teutates Project’ to configure the original B-76 design
given to the UK by the US in 1980 into the new B-76-1 Mk-4 nuclear
bomb/warhead capable of taking out hardened targets, a design approved
by Sandia nuclear weapons laboratories in March 2011 before, presumably,
going into production.
A similar Cold War intra-bloc dynamic prompted the Soviet Union to
seed China’s nuclear military program until the ideological rift between
the two Communist countries in the mid-fifties led to the abrupt
termination of Russian technical assistance. But by then having mastered
the relevant science and technologies, China tested an implosive
fission device in 1964 and, three years later, a thermonuclear bomb,
thereby securing itself against both the Soviet Union and the US.
Bolstered by the rapprochement with the US in the early seventies, China
cast its sights wider. Appositely, Washington’s myopic,
“realpolitik”-infused policies of the Nixon era to nurture the ‘China
card’ to use against the Soviet Union allowed China to rapidly become a
global manufacturing base, a trading powerhouse, a wealthy economy and a
burgeoning military power to eventually surface as a peer competitor
and great power rival to the US.
China’s military advancement is recognisably the skew factor. It was
also in the early 1970s that Pakistan, afflicted by terminal insecurity
aggravated by the 1971 war that saw India midwife an independent
Bangladesh, approached China for seminal nuclear assistance. India’s
“peaceful nuclear explosion” in 1974, a much delayed realisation of the
weapons threshold reached in March 1964, subsequently offered Pakistan a
justification. China jumped at the opportunity to permanently hobble
India, its natural Asian rival, and contain it to the subcontinent by
arming Pakistan with nuclear missiles. This proliferation began in the
era when India was regarded by Washington as a Soviet stooge, a
perception cemented by the 1971 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation
that deterred potential armed interventions by the US and/or China to
forestall the Indian dismemberment of Pakistan. Beijing compensated for
the 1971 lapse in their “all weather friendship” by transferring nuclear
goods and expertise to Islamabad and vetted a Pakistani-designed
nuclear device and tested it at the Lop Nor site in 1990.
Meanwhile, Washington was incentivised to do nothing about Pakistan’s
nuclear empowerment by General Zia ul-Haq’s 1979 deal permitting the US
Central Intelligence Agency to use Pakistani territory and resources to
wage an asymmetric guerrilla campaign against the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan. What is not as well known is Pakistan paying back China
with sensitive Western technologies. The blueprints for the individual
vertical centrifuge and for the centrifuge cascades at the Urenco plant
at Almelo in the Netherlands purloined by A.Q. Khan, a Pakistani-origin
metallurgist working at the Urenco plant, became the initial currency
for technology barter. In exchange for Chinese nuclear weapons design,
relevant materials and bomb-making expertise, Pakistan offered advanced
centrifuge technology to China, facilitating its switchover from the
costly, clunky and obsolete gaseous diffusion enrichment stream it was
stuck in. With a view to help China reverse-engineer and incorporate
into its aerial combat platforms the latest technical advancements,
Pakistan allowed Chinese aviation experts to scrutinise and study the US
F-16 aircraft inducted into its air force. More recently, a Tomahawk
long-range cruise missile fired from an American warship in the Arabian
Sea at a Taliban target in Afghanistan that crash-landed in Pakistan,
and the remains of the high-tech stealth rotors of the helicopter that
crashed in Abbottabad during the 2011 US SEAL operation to take out
Osama bin Laden, were passed on by Pakistan to China. That Washington
never took umbrage at these Pakistani leaks of its technologies suggests
the China-Pakistan-US (CPUS) collusion is still on. Moreover, the CPUS
triad was established in the late 1970s, around the time the US and
Israel were materially assisting the apartheid regime in Pretoria to
acquire nuclear weapons . It undercut any Western moral outrage and
criticism of Beijing’s policy of nuclear missile arming both an unstable
Islamic state, Pakistan, and, subsequently, a reckless regime in North
Korea, which ended up forming in the 1990s the full-blown rogue nuclear
triad of China, Pakistan and North Korea.
The nuclear rogues: dependent on China and the West’s denial
Whether the CPUS triad should be considered rogue depends on how one
views the China-Pakistan-North Korea triangle. If one is rogue the other
is too because they are joined at the hip. Just how deeply Washington
is engaged in the CPUS trilateral can be gauged from how the US
government still propagates the fiction that the “nuclear Walmart” that
sold sensitive nuclear technologies for cash to Iran, Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq, and Muammar Gaddafi-ruled Libya, and as payment-in-kind to North
Korea, was a commercial venture run illegally and exclusively by Khan to
enrich himself, when actually it was from the beginning a well-oiled
Pakistan army-run operation. The Pakistan-North Korea nexus, in turn,
was forged at China’s behest as a convenient route for Beijing to
proliferate nuclear weapon and missile technologies to these countries.
Specifically, Pakistan-produced centrifuges were traded for North Korean
missiles and technologies transferred by China to Pyongyang. It is the
established pattern of remote Chinese proliferation. This triad has
since grown into a complex web of strategic interlinks.
Ruled by the mercurial Kim family, North Korea has all along been the
triad’s ace card to keep the US and its Asian allies off-kilter, and
give China the advantage. An absolute dependency of China, the Kim
Jon-un dispensation precipitates strategic crises with South Korea,
Japan and the US at will, or at Beijing’s prompting. China then inserts
itself into a downward spiralling situation as the intermediary able to
hammer sense into a supposedly risk-acceptant Pyongyang, to prevent a
tense situation with Seoul and/or Tokyo and/or Washington from becoming
worse. It earns Beijing grudging respect and even a measure of goodwill
from the US, Japan and South Korea as a situation stabiliser. In
comparison, Pakistan is too constrained by its traditional links to the
US and the West to be as useful to China, but its pugnacity keeps India
distracted. With two able and willing nuclear conspirators, Beijing
keeps the geopolitical pot simmering at the two ends of Asia, enhancing
its diplomatic stock as the indispensable middleman and peacekeeper in
the Korean Peninsula and potentially in South Asia.
While some aspects of the dyadic activities of the
China-Pakistan-North Korea combo have come to light, the dots have
seemingly not been connected by the US or any other Western government,
or even by Japan and South Korea. If they have indeed noted the growing
nuclear association between the three outliers, they have abstained from
even acknowledging the problem, other than to complain about
Pyongyang’s provocations. The fact is the three rogue countries act in
concert to advance their separate politico-strategic interests. Consider
the separate stakes of these nuclear rogue states. China is at the core
of this cabal responsible for almost all nuclear proliferation in the
world since 1975. “Deng Xiaoping’s China apparently decided”, writes
Thomas C. Reed, a one-time nuclear weapon designer at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory and former US Secretary for the Air Force,
“to actively promote nuclear proliferation within the Third World
[because] it would be in [its] best interest to accept, or even
encourage, multiple nuclear events (or wars)” to thus keep the US and
the West on tenterhooks. China has achieved this aim. Nuclearising
Pakistan and North Korea has endowed it with the capacity, moreover, to
manipulate regional and Asian power balances at the expense of India,
Japan and the US, and to simultaneously blunt the strategic edge of the
three countries whose getting together China fears. In this triad
China’s all-round heft affords protective cover to its lesser partners.
Pakistan prizes nuclear weapons because they help it to emulate the
19th century English satirist William Makepeace Thackeray’s frog blowing
itself up to ox-size. It enables Islamaba to remain relevant in the
Islamic world, and in the subcontinental, Asian and global politics,
gain some international traction and negotiating leverage for itself,
and, by the by, dissuade a conventional military-wise superior India
from taking liberties with it. But it is North Korea – the true outlaw
state – that is the lynchpin. It has apparently no qualms and no
interest in adhering to the rules of the road, or following established
norms, or entering the international mainstream. Backed by Beijing’s
unwavering support, Pyongyang exploits its pariah status to the fullest
to create havoc when and where it can. Kim Jong-un’s devil-may-care
attitude means the crisis North Korea periodically triggers to needle
the US, frighten its Asian allies and raise China’s value as mediator,
also offers Pakistan opportunities to sharpen, under Chinese expert
guidance, its nuclear weapons designing and production skills and
competencies, and to test its designs.
How the Pakistan-North Korea tandem – the active part of the triad –
functions was evidenced in the fourth North Korean test explosion of a
Pakistani crafted fusion-boosted fission (FBF) device on January 3,
2016. Preparations for it, such as the digging of an angled L-shaped
tunnel in the Hamyongg Mountains, began at least three years prior to
the event. Several aspects were of note: the similarities between the
instrumentation bunkers at Pungyye and Pakistan’s Ras Koh nuclear
testing complex; the presence of South Asian-looking men in Pyongyang
and the possibility that these were Pakistani nuclear technicians
readying the nuclear device for testing; the Chinese vetting of the
design, and its transportation along with the fusion fuel – tritium, and
highly-enriched uranium needed for the FBF device – by road across the
mountainous border from the adjoining Jiangsu province to the test site
in northwestern North Korea to minimise the chances of detection. The
open-ended nuclear tests in North Korea of Pakistani-designed weapons
under Chinese supervision offer Beijing the means of controlling the
nuclear skill levels of its partners just so this issue does not end up
hurting its own interests, while enabling Islamabad’s nuclear weaponeers
to validate their advanced designs without Pakistan having to conduct
tests on its own territory and facing the prospect of damaging Western
economic and other sanctions. Throughout this process of explosive
testing, Pakistan and China are insulated from its consequences, even as
North Korea, immune to economic bans and prohibitions, has its
reputation as a budding nuclear weapon state burnished, gaining for the
Kim Jong-un dispensation the freedom from fear of an external attack or
externally-induced regime change.
Pyongyang’s nuclear antics precipitate crises that heighten Beijing’s
clout and enhance the confidence of the Pakistani nuclear weapons
complex. The pattern is for North Korea to fire off a missile, conduct a
nuclear test, or create a rumpus in the demilitarised zone and threaten
to incinerate Seoul, Tokyo, or Manhattan. The targeted countries get
agitated and mull an appropriate action, but ere a collective response
can jell China, in its “responsible state”/stakeholder avatar joins
Washington in calling for restraint, reins in its client state, leading
to military de-escalation of a nascent conflictual situation and a
Beijing, allergic to destabilising the current, diplomatically useful
regime in Pyongyang, ensures Kim Jong-un stays on.
Such crises only deepen the mystery about how North Korea – a dirt
poor, pre-industrial country with a subsistence agrarian economy and no
science and technology infrastructure worth the name – has progressed
inside of 20 years from the basic fission weapon stage and
conventionally-armed missiles to, in 2016, testing a boosted fission
nuclear device, launching a three stage rocket with an engine that can
propel missiles intercontinental distances and miniaturising nuclear
warheads. The literature on the Chinese policy of nuclear weaponising
North Korea is meagre. There is no dearth of news reports and
commentaries, however, along the lines of a nuclearised North Korea
requiring Western help to avoid an implosion with potentially disastrous
consequences for the region. It is a view Beijing would like to see
gather steam in American policy circles in order to revive the “six
party talks” that could lead to a negotiated outcome that will see the
US sharing with China the costs of pacifying the mercurial Kim Jong-un
regime.
Strangely, westerners permitted access to the closed North Korean
system far from being informative, end up supporting the Chinese line
that Beijing has little or no influence on the North Korean nuclear
programme. Thus Siegfried S. Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos
National Laboratory, the main US nuclear weapons designing centre, who
has visited Pyongyang’s secretive nuclear programme, said after his 2010
trip, that North Korea’s progress in the uranium enrichment field was
due to Pakistan’s help with centrifuges, and raised the spectre of
Pyongyang emerging as an autonomous nuclear proliferator. It is again
the sort of worry the North Korean dictator and Beijing would like to
see kindled in order to strengthen Pyongyang’s negotiating hand in
future talks with Washington, whenever these happen. Around the time Kim
Jong-un was threatening nuclear attacks on Seoul in April 2013, Hecker
returned from another North Korean trip and, once again, was off on a
tangent, this time referring to North Korean capability-shortfalls in
centrifuge enrichment, while avoiding any mention of China’s role in
that country’s advancement in the nuclear weapons sphere. Perhaps,
deliberately ignoring China’s role, he wrongly asserted that nuclear
warhead miniaturisation was beyond Pyongyang’s ken. Two years later,
Hecker, who claims to have visited North Korea seven times and the
Yongbyon nuclear complex four times, astoundingly absolved China of all
responsibility for the North Korean nuclear program growing “from having
the option for a bomb in 2003, to having a handful of bombs five years
later, to having an expanding nuclear arsenal now”, saying flatly that
“Chinese experts did not have access to Yongbyon”. In the meantime, the
US military’s assessment of North Korean strategic capabilities was
increasingly less sanguine. Testifying before the US House Armed
Services Committee in October 2015, heads of the US Pacific Command and
US Northern Command declared that North Korea can hurl missiles with
miniaturised warheads at US targets and is “the greatest threat”,
directly contradicting Hecker’s 2013 estimate of North Korea’s warhead
miniaturising capability. In the event, the conclusion India should
reasonably reach is that China, through the North Korean channel, has
managed to transmit the warhead-miniaturising skills and capability both
to Pakistan’s strategic plans division, to inject credibility into its
tactical nuclear missile-based deterrence, and to Pyongyang.
Bending over backwards to not implicate China in Pakistan and North
Korea’s nuclearisation and assigning benign motives to Beijing’s
policies despite its reckless nuclear proliferation track record is
something that has been correctly ascribed to Henry Kissinger’s awe of
China, which has since been institutionalised, congealing into a
Washington foreign policy blind spot. But it does not explain why, some
25 years after the termination of the Cold War and a decade since
China’s emergence as a military rival and economic peer competitor to
the US, Washington continues to coddle China – the Frankensteinian
monster it created as a Cold War ploy. A powerful China now wants to
construct its own world order on the ruins of the existing NPT system.
Whence, Kim Jong-un is stimulated to carry on with his confrontationist
tactics to maximise its own peace-keeping value and Pakistan is
encouraged to keep the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT) talks at
the UN Commission on Disarmament in Geneva gummed up, because Beijing is
unconvinced the FMCT serves its security interests. Diplomatically it
is all gain and no pain for China, notwithstanding accusations by
informed commentators that the US government is reinforcing “the worst
tendencies in Beijing by inadvertently creating a set of perverse
incentives”.
Fostering North Korea and Pakistan as nuclear security threats and
helping to deal with the contingencies they create firms up the
perception that no regional or international issue of war or peace can
be resolved without China’s goodwill and involvement. It allows Beijing
to condition its help in tackling the crises its rogue clients
precipitate on the US terminating its arms sales to Taiwan, and to carry
on freely with aiding and abetting the clandestine efforts of
non-weaponised nuclear aspirant states, such as Iran. As a strategy, it
has helped China to decisively turn regional and international affairs
to its advantage. The failure of Washington and the US’ Asian allies to
recognise and react to China’s running with the hares and hunting with
the hounds policy, and to accept Beijing as the source of nuclear
security problems and an inalienable part of their solution, is doubly
evident. China is thus nicely placed, unique in its ability to
simultaneously undermine the global system, strengthen its own relative
position, and to exploit the privileges and manoeuvring room it enjoys
as a near great power and a Non-Proliferation Treaty-recognised nuclear
weapons state to pursue its narrow national interests without regard for
the common good.
A triadic counter
With Washington uneasy about doing anything other than skirting
around Beijing’s culpability for creating nuclear flashpoints, Asian
countries directly in the line of fire have to wonder if US President
Barack Obama’s policy of “strategic patience” does not amount to doing
nothing and whether the natural follow-on to this isn’t Republican
presidential candidate Donald Trump’s view that because the US cannot,
in any case, afford to protect Japan and South Korea, they would be
better off procuring nuclear weapons of their own for security? In the
event, is it now time to begin assembling a counter-triad of India,
Japan and South Korea to take the fight to China? This is the drastic
solution for the dire security situation they face, to function in an
overt-covert concert to replicate for China the touch-trigger situation
Beijing has created for them by arming countries in China’s periphery,
such as Vietnam, with nuclear missiles and other strategic armaments.
Such a counter-triad would right the distribution of power long
tilted in Beijing’s favour and strategically roil the security situation
for the Asian behemoth in the manner India, Japan and South Korea have
been discommoded by China and its nuclear henchmen, Pakistan and North
Korea, and will be in line with the US policy of strategic partner
capacity building. It is a strategy to compel Beijing, as Washington
Post columnist Charles Krauthammer put it, to “share the [nuclear]
nightmare”. Such a response has become urgent with the news that China
may be upping the ante by transferring wherewithal to help Islamabad and
Pyongyang configure full-fledged thermonuclear armaments and ICBMs.
Unless the game is turned around, and harsh payback and high costs
imposed on Beijing, China will persist with its policy of targeted
nuclear proliferation to undermine its adversaries.
India’s situation is in every respect more worrisome and, should
Tokyo and Seoul be pressured by Washington and otherwise have
reservations about participating in a counter-triad to blunt China’s
aggression, New Delhi should prosecute its own policy of selectively
providing strategic technologies to an assertive Hanoi, which has time
and again shown the mettle to stand up to China. India is aware of
China’s responsibility for equipping Pakistan with nuclear missiles, and
concerned about Islamabad’s role in using the North Korean nuclear
tests to improve its “boosted fission” weapon- and, eventually, hydrogen
bomb-making skills. The time for payback is nigh. A platform exists for
the transfer of expertise to Vietnam – the 2003 India-Vietnam civilian
nuclear cooperation agreement. It was augmented in 2009 by the defence
cooperation accord and in May 2015 further enhanced by the ‘joint vision
statement’ envisaging a comprehensive upgrade in relations. In line
with its new “Act East” thrust of policy, the Narendra Modi-led BJP
government has finally agreed to sell to Vietnam the indigenous Brahmos
supersonic cruise missile. It is another matter that New Delhi is yet to
dispatch them to Hanoi.
It is possible that Washington’s reluctance to call out China in a
more forceful manner on nuclear proliferation is inducing caution in New
Delhi. The other factor that may be acting as a dampener on an
aggressive Indian policy towards Southeast Asian countries inclined to
stand up to Chinese bullying is the potentially adverse reaction of the
US, which the Modi regime is particularly mindful of. Will Washington
react with its usual mindless nonproliferation zeal, or look the other
way, which it has repeatedly done in the past? In this respect,
notwithstanding the US government’s consistent opposition to India
resuming nuclear tests and acquiring credible thermonuclear armaments to
achieve at least notional strategic parity with China, the fact is such
a development serves US strategic interests. The chances, however, are
Washington will stay with its longstanding “Kissingerian” policy of
currying favour with Beijing in the hope of constituting a global G-2
order with the US and China at the apex, permitting the CPUS triad to
covertly “balance” a nuclear India with a nuclear Pakistan in South
Asia, and to bind a worried Japan and North Korea more closely to
America by keeping alive the bogey of a crazy nuclearised North Korea.
Japan and South Korea may ultimately be restrained by Washington. But
a determined and resolute India that knows its interests and is intent
on equalising the strategic correlation of forces in Asia cannot be
stopped from strategically undermining by any and all means the security
system China has over the years so ruthlessly installed to further its
goal of domination. The policy of empowering its Asian friends may win
New Delhi some genuine respect in the world. Then again, Beijing is,
perhaps, banking on the proven timidity and diffidence of Indian rulers
to escape the actions of a justly vengeful India (and an Asian
counter-triad). The question, therefore, is whether the Indian
government will be disruptive for a change in order to permanently
reduce China strategically – a big enough goal for New Delhi to temper
its risk-averse habit of mind.
Bharat Karnad is senior fellow in National Security Studies at the
Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and author, among other books, of
Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, India’s Nuclear Policy and, most
recently, of Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet).
![The eventual deployment of the North Korean nuclear-armed missiles might easily push South Korea towards acquiring its own nuclear deterrent, writes Lankov [The Associated Press]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tjt-dcfU6BbyGyMnJ2PDAUvPoiOQLggXtovdG0oT-y8paxAHrt24TAIYR63LjZMuNGh9KPZbNTx5vbwEzX9C1eH_nltLa65Dj_tpc_CH5-5v_UmWuzP3efZhU-yaaEedrlHvkZl-ES_qJs15ESKLLG0-LkF79fXeFlP2MVhMzWNkNblsGZ_wHZaQWF1c4EEfqvtkYQY-2f74cx=s0-d "A nuclear arms race in East Asia?")