North Korea - a Case in Isolation

"If no other means can be found to restrain North Korea, I believe we will have no choice but to use whatever means are available to us"
- Richard Perle

Shortly before the session, news had started to trickle out on a massive explosion that rocked a rail station near North Korea's frontier with China. Many people were reported dead.

Full details of the explosion, a few hours after North Korea's secretive leader Kim Jong-il was reported to have passed through the station on return from a visit to Beijing, may never be known fully.
The story and its various aspects, including the fact that Kim Jong-il had been returning from meetings with Chinese leaders mainly on the Six Party talks (US, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and North Korea) designed to quell North Korea's nuclear ambitions, pointed up some of the major global problems posed by the country.

Relatively few people, including journalists, are permitted to enter North Korea. Sources in the country are strictly limited and the North Korean media is largely a propaganda tool firmly in the grip of the leadership.
China's help to neutralise North Korea's offensive nuclear ambitions took centre stage at the start of the session, with Richard Perle warning that the United States would have to take direct action against North Korea unless China could help to neutralise its nuclear threat.

Mr Perle said China was in a unique position to demand that the North Korean regime give up the development of nuclear weapons. The Chinese authorities had shown signs of cooperating in the search for a peaceful solution but needed to do more to avert a catastrophe.

The American message to China was that the United States might have to resort to other means if the crisis could not be resolved through negotiations. Until China decided to give its full support, he said he was not optimistic about the current series of talks.

"The time will come when we have no choice but to take direct action," he said. "If no other means can be found to restrain North Korea, I believe we will have no choice but to use whatever means are available to us." But Mr Perle stressed that he was not speaking for the US Government.

The session was illustrated with excerpts from a BBC documentary television programme - "Access to Evil" - produced by Ewa Ewart, one of the panellists. The documentary alleged that the North Korean regime was developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and engaging in live human experiments on the effects of poison gas.

Mr Perle praised the film and said North Korea conformed to the definition of a rogue state, using the profits from exporting drugs and counterfeit currency to build missiles and develop weapons of mass destruction.
Two other panellists objected that the charges against North Korea were not proved, leading to a lively debate on and off the platform.

Vladimir Rerikh, editor-in-chief of Kazakhstan's "ASAR" newspaper, said there was not enough evidence to draw conclusions and compared the North Korean issue with the US argument that Iraq had been developing weapons of mass destruction.

On the US search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he said: "It is like trying to find a black cat in a black room. And then finding that there is no cat after all."
Shiraz Paracha, a Pakistani journalist, accused the United States of lack of credibility and using double standards in its conflicting attitude to the reported nuclear capabilities of Israel and North Korea.