Hazel Smith is the Professor of International Relations and Director of the MZ programme in International relations at the University of Warwick, UK. She has worked on DPRK issues for nearly two decades, and has been a regular visitor since 1990. She has worked for almost two years in North Korea for the UN World food programme, UNICEF and the UN Development Fund and continues as an adviser and consultant on North Korea for international organisations, government, NGOs, business and the international media.
The DPRK is Not a Military Strong Power
It may seem obvious, even logical, that the DPRK, which has suffered well-recorded economic devastation for over 15 years and has as a consequence almost total industrial infrastructural collapse, would have little in the way of functioning military hardware or a very fearsome army.
Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom is that the DPRK has a formidable arsenal, ready to be unleashed on all comers, from Tokyo to Alaska, with South Korea in between. Table 1.1 starkly reveals the actual capacity of the DPRK military.
Table 1.1
Source: International Institute for strategic studies. The Military Balance 2006. London: Routledge/IISS.2006.
The DPRK annual defence budget is dwarfed by that of its neighbours at US$2 billion in 2005 compared with Japan’s US$45 billion and South Korea’s US$21 billion. In addition, per capita spending on its huge armed forces has to cover food, clothing, housing and health supplies as well as every aspect of what would normally come from a civilian infrastructure in a developed state – telecommunications, transport, food supplies and agricultural production. This is because the social infrastructure barely functions and the civilian industrial fabric has all but disappeared since the economic meltdown of the 1980s.
Additionally the data in Table 1.1 assume a formal exchange rate that in practice has been replaced by market rates since at least the mid-1990s. In 2006 the market rate for the won was conservatively 2,000 per US dollar –compared with the official exchange rate of 150. Taking this conservative market rate as the actual exchange rate, DPRK per capita expenditure on its soldiers in 2006 was actually around US$1 a year. This expenditure is not enough to make for a powerful army.
The incapacity of the North Korean army is an important reason why the DPRK tried to build a nuclear weapon. Its nuclear test in October 2006 demonstrated that it could use nuclear weapons as a deterrent and did not have to rely on decrepit military infrastructure and its poorly paid and malnourished armed forces. Relatively cheap investment in nuclear fission means that the DPRK would not have to find billions of dollars to support its hungry and economically unproductive army.
No serious military analyst anywhere in the world views the DPRK as an offensive military threat to its neighbours or to any other state This is partly because of the weak military capacity of the DPRK and partly because of the lack of a military strategy that argues for either offensive attack against its neighbours or pre-emptive defence. However the possession of one or more nuclear weapons does make the DPRK a more dangerous place and exacerbates regional security dilemmas – there is no democratic control over the nuclear programme; it is probably being managed in a highly inefficient and risky manner; and there are many incentives for freelance initiatives in terms of the potential for smuggling fissile material.
From a paper by Hazel Smith “Reconstituting Korean Security Dilemmas” in the book: Reconstituting Korean Security – A Policy Primer. Edited by Hazel Smith. United nations University press, Tokyo. 2007. ISBN 978-92-808-1144-5.