The pariah's nuclear blackmail
NONE would dispute the generally held belief that North Korea and Burma have the two most oppressive regimes in Asia. They rule over two of the continent's backwater, and that's no coincidence whatever. Notwithstanding the many common features they, however, have stark differences between them. No foreign leader of distinction cares to pay court to the ruling generals of Burma in their weirdly grandiose new capital of Naypidaw. In sharp contrast, even Bill Clinton, one of the world's most recognisable celebrity statesmen, makes pilgrimage to Pyonyang.
Clinton had gone there, of course, to secure the release of two American journalists who were apprehended on the China-North Korea border a few months ago and held hostage since then. It is presumed that the North Koreans did so with the explicit purpose of forcing a high level American visit and hitting the news headlines. The US did pay the Devil but with a private US citizen rather than his wife, the US secretary of state, making the visit to Kim Jong-il.
However, here's the big difference. The Burmese regime is looked upon by most foreign governments as ugly but basically harmless except to its own people, but the North Korean regime is seen both as ugly and as extremely dangerous. And the dangerous thing about North Korea is its nuclear weapons. If the Burmese generals also want to have emissaries from great powers genuflecting at their doorstep they need some nuclear pieces in their arsenal, although a nuclear-armed Burma is indeed a ridiculous idea. Burma has no external enemy that it needs to deter, let alone wants to attack.
But respect also matters for a regime like the one at Burma, otherwise it feels neglected and the regime's legitimacy is always put to the question. According to the regime's estimate, a few Burmese nukes on a launching pad would elicit a whole lot of foreign attention as well as respect. The articles published recently by Prof. Desmond Ball of ANU (an authority on strategic matters) in the Sydney Morning Herald and Bangkok Post pointed for the first time to the Burmese nuclear ambition, Ball's revelations suggest that the Burmese military regime has already sought North Korean help to build its own nuclear weapon. It specifically wants the North Koreans to create a plutonium reprocessing plant in the caves near Laung Laing in Northern Burma -- not far from the site of a civilian nuclear reactor that is being built with Russian help.
So far, the story surrounding Burma's nuclear activity sounds like a fantasy. But the usually reliable website "Dictator Watch" has been publishing warnings about Burmese nuclear weapon projects for several years now. Most of the information emanating from the website come from the defectors. For example, a former army officer who was sent to Moscow for two years training in nuclear engineering never returned, and joined the ranks of informers on Burma's nuclear secrets.
The speculations, however, are about why North Korea would be in complicity with Burma to further proliferate nuclear technology. One guess is that North Korea is being paid in "yellow cake" -- partially refined uranium which Burma is endowed with. And North Korean help is also needed because of the fact that the country is willing to sell technology to anybody equally willing to pay. These make her more dangerous. And being so dangerous is what forces people like Clinton and Hillary to visit this otherwise pariah state. In this process of appeasement, a stage may be reached when even Barack Obama may be willing to talk to it.
There are several other pointers that North Korea is really helping Burma to develop its nuclear weapon -- Prof. Ball suggested that Burma could be processing 8 kg of plutonium per year by 2014, after which it could produce one atomic bomb per year. But it is also know that apparently competent intelligence agencies like CIA and Mossad have been predicting that Iran would have nuclear weapons within five years -- practically every year since 1990. They were wrong about Iran every year. And Iran is a much more advanced country in scientific, technological and industrial terms, than Burma.
Supposing the prediction as regards Burma comes true, why would Burma be doing it? Not to nuke Thailand, Malaysia or Bangladesh for it has no serious quarrel with these neighbours. But one can imagine that Senior General Than Shwe and his colleagues would be a great deal relieved. Because then the US and other great powers, instead of condemning and boycotting the Burmese dictatorship, would be begging it to be responsible and give up its nuclear weapons. North Korea also developed nuclear weapon precisely for the same purpose.
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