Abstract
The coverline–“Inside North Korea”–is a bit misleading. It has the tabloid flavor of the B-movies I grew up with–New York Confidential, Kansas City Confidential, and the like. North Korea figures prominently in the news now and then with reports of famine, a possible nuclear weapons program, provocative missile launches, and U.S. demands to inspect a mysterious underground facility. The coverline suggests that we are offering the inside story about one of those topics. That's not the case. “Wind Farm in the Cabbage Patch” (page 40) is actually about a wind-power project put together by the Nautilus Institute, a California-based non-governmental organization, and some North Korean organizations.
The project was small–the seven wind generators erected last year in a coastal farming village probably do not provide enough power to keep a brace of air-conditioned American homes humming through the summer. So why devote nine pages–and the cover–to such a trivial project? Although the Nautilus people did not travel widely in North Korea, they were keen observers. Given the dearth of information in the West about North Korea, their observations and insights alone make the story worth reading.
But more to the point, we suspect that the project is far from trivial. U.S.-North Korean relations have been especially tense in recent years, mostly because North Korea and the United States have done nearly everything possible to keep passions high. North Korea may have violated the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty early in the decade with a clandestine nuclear bomb program. Once it was discovered, war talk in the United States grew like a strep culture until former President Jimmy Carter defused the crisis in 1994.
However, the subsequent “Agreed Framework” between North Korea and the United States (with South Korea and Japan) has not been fully honored by either side. The pact was built on a foundation of hypocrisy. Although the agreement has many ins and outs, in outline it calls for North Korea to end its bomb program and for the United States, South Korea, and Japan to invest billions of dollars in building a nuclear power plant for North Korea.
Too little progress has been made in fulfilling the terms of agreement, partly because it has been a political hot potato in the United States. (It is axiomatic to some in Congress that if we help North Korea today, they will repay us by nuking Chicago tomorrow.) More important, perhaps, when the agreement was consummated, the United States (and its South Korean and Japanese partners) were hopeful that North Korea would soon collapse, thus mooting the deal before it got too expensive. The North Koreans, of course, have done their part to sabotage the agreement through selective stonewalling, general obdurateness, and reckless rhetoric–not to mention test-firing a three-stage rocket last August over Japan's northern tip.
The prevailing view in Washington these days seems to be that U.S.-North Korean relations are almost beyond repair, even though the administration currently has former Defense Secretary William Perry heading an effort to salvage something. So where does the wind-power project fit in? A wonderful question, and I wish we had the definitive answer. But the fact that the project happened at all suggests the possibility that North Korea was sending a we-can-work-with-you signal. Yes, “signal” is one of the most onerously vague words in diplomat-speak; nevertheless, countries do send “signals” from time to time. If that is what North Korea has done, we ought to take note.