Steve Inskeep talks to Joel Wit, senior fellow at the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, about how to stop North Korea's nuclear ambitions.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Let's ask how serious North Korea might be about launching an intercontinental ballistic missile. A spokesman says the country could launch a long range missile anytime it wants from anywhere it wants in the country. This is of interest to many people, not least of them Joel Wit, a former U.S. diplomat and visitor to North Korea. He's now at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and he's come by our studios this morning. Good morning, sir.</s>JOEL WIT: Good morning.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Can we start with the evidence? Because North Korea makes claims all the time. What is the evidence that they have an effective missile that they could launch any moment?</s>JOEL WIT: Well, North Korea has been working on this missile for a number of years, and recently, we've seen it in military parades in North Korea, so we know it exists. And secondly, they've recently conducted tests of rocket engines, large rocket engines, that could be used for this weapon. And third, of course, they launched satellites into space.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: So they've got some - they've got some...</s>JOEL WIT: They've got a lot of technology they've been working on.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: But of course, the thing that Americans would worry about most, I suppose, is a missile that hypothetically would be launched at - what? - Anchorage, Alaska, Los Angeles. What could this missile hypothetically do?</s>JOEL WIT: Well, it's very interesting because the recent test of this large rocket engine has led experts to believe that North Korea can not only reach Hawaii or Alaska or the West Coast but now can also reach the east coast of the United States.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Can they fire a missile that would carry a nuclear warhead?</s>JOEL WIT: Once again, they've conducted five nuclear tests. They're certainly working on putting a warhead on top of this long range missile, and I believe they will eventually succeed.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: But I guess we should say you have to be able not only to have a nuclear device that works, but you have to miniaturize it to get it on top of the missile, right? They can do that?</s>JOEL WIT: Exactly. And that's part of what they've been doing with these five nuclear tests. That's one of the objectives, I'm sure, although I don't - you know, I'm not there. I'm not observing the tests, but it's certainly one of the objectives of these tests that they've been conducting.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: So this is not saber-rattling necessarily or missile-rattling. This is a serious thing you think.</s>JOEL WIT: It's a serious thing. It's not going to happen overnight. They're not going to be deploying operational missiles overnight. So experts like myself think by 2020, but they're going to have to start testing them soon in order to deploy them in 2020.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Now, let's remember the sequence of events. Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, said something about this missile test on the new year. Is this right?</s>JOEL WIT: Yeah. The North Korean leader gives an annual New Year's speech, and so it was part of that speech he gave.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: And then President-elect Donald Trump said on Twitter this is not going to happen.</s>JOEL WIT: Right, right.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: And now North Korea has said actually we can do this anytime we want. I can fire a missile anytime I want.</s>JOEL WIT: Right. So there's this kind of very superficial exchange, and no one really knows how President Trump is going to stop this from happening. And that's, of course, the million-dollar question for everyone.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: How could you stop this from happening?</s>JOEL WIT: Well, there's a lot of speculation about how you might do this, ranging from launching a preemptive attack, destroying the missile when it's being - before it's being tested, shooting it down with anti-ballistic missile systems that we might have based in Asia, to starting some sort of serious dialogue with the North Koreans and trying to head off this possibility before it happens.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: OK. Let me ask about that because people have tried for decades to engage this regime. You've been involved in that during the Clinton administration in the 1990s. How's that work?</s>JOEL WIT: You know, it's kind of hard for me to reduce 20 years of diplomatic interchange to a few seconds. But the bottom line is people - one of the myths about dealing with North Korea is that you can't talk to them. And my experience during the 1990s when I was in the State Department was you can reach agreements, and the agreements can have a real impact on what they're doing. So what I would say is we just need to be persistent and keep trying because the alternatives are really horrible.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Such as a war.</s>JOEL WIT: Such as a war. If we try to launch a preemptive attack against a missile that's about to be launched, it's very likely the North Koreans will respond militarily.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: But let's be real here. Twenty years of talks, and during that time, North Korea has continued developing nuclear weapons, has conducted multiple tests of nuclear weapons and is now saying that they're on the verge of testing the delivery system.</s>JOEL WIT: Actually, you're right. But for 10 years of that time, North Korea was not doing anything really. And they actually cut back their programs because of an agreement we reached in 1994. I'm not saying that we can do that again. But I'm saying it's certainly worth a try. And we should forget about these myths and focus on what might work and move forward with it.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Should the U.S. goal - in just a few seconds - then, in your view, be to buy time and hope that eventually the regime changes or something else happens a few years from now?</s>JOEL WIT: Well, you know, people have been thinking that the regime was going to change since the Soviet Union collapsed. And that ain't going to happen. So I think what we really need to do is dig in our heels and try a serious diplomatic effort, and if that doesn't work, then we can move on to much tougher measures.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Joel Wit, thanks for coming by this morning, really appreciate it.</s>JOEL WIT: Thank you.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: He is at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He's a former U.S. diplomat.