THE FIRST SIGNIFICANT CYBERWARFARE STRIKE WAS CARRIED OUT BY Israel and the United States in 2009, targeting Iran’s nuclear program at its Natanz complex 150 miles south of Tehran. Computer engineers developed malicious software, known as Stuxnet, that invaded the Natanz computer system.105 Centrifuges used for uranium enrichment failed and computers crashed, showing that even without direct military strikes Iran’s program was vulnerable to attack. Stuxnet may well have confused Iran enough to bring it to the negotiating table to strike the 2015 deal with the United States and other governments. It is planned that a similar strategy could work with North Korea. Kim Jong-un ordered an investigation as to the reach of the US cyberwarfare operations against him, and analysts believed the result may have been the execution of some of his officials.
Cyberattacks and counterattacks revolve around playing catchup with your opponent. With Stuxnet, Israel and the United States were at the forefront, but that prompted China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia to up their own games. The Iran operation focused on a known and stationary target at the Natanz underground enrichment plant. Practice runs were carried out on a mock-up of the installation whose details were obtained through covert intelligence gathering. It took time, high expertise, and long experimentation to get it right. North Korea is a higher challenge because the regime is far more controlling and the missiles are not at stationary locations, but fired from mobile launchers and from different sites around the country.
Cyberwarfare and space warfare are entwined in that satellites control much of our connectivity and electronic lives, and China and the United States closely watch each other’s space programs. Beijing plans to have its first fully manned space station operational by 2023 and has developed a massive workhorse of a rocket, the Long March 5, to do the heavy lifting of carrying material to the station. Its inaugural 2016 launch broke with the government’s traditional policy of secrecy over space. Beijing invited crowds of tourists and VIPs to a lavish ceremony to watch the fifty-seven-meter-high rocket blaze off from a platform emblazoned with the Chinese flag, leaving a streak of yellow flame glowing in south China’s night sky.
Beijing boasts that the Long March 5, with its twenty-five-ton payload, matches America’s Delta 4 heavy launch rocket, and that as well as servicing the space station it will also be used to carry equipment for a robotic moon landing that will send back samples of moon rock for analysis.
THE UNITED STATES is historically sensitive about space. The Soviet Union’s surprise launch of the Sputnik program in 1957 prompted it to set up both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for its own space program and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose mission is to ensure that US military technology remains better than anything produced by an enemy. Since then DARPA has given us e-mail, satellite navigation, simultaneous translation, and many other high-tech gadgets.
Beijing spends about $6 billion a year on its space program, a fraction of America’s $40 billion annual budget. But China is playing catchup with such worrying determination and speed that the United States has forbidden its scientists from any collaboration, and China is excluded from the American-led multinational International Space Station put together by Canada, Japan, Russia, the United States, and the European Space Agency. Dozens of astronauts from some twenty countries have visited since it began operation in 1998, but none from China. The long historical rivalry on space exploration is based on two elements. One is that breaking barriers, such as a moon or Mars landing, is seen as a symbol of national pride. The other is that cutting-edge space technology feeds into more sophisticated weaponry.
The United States tested space as a theater of war with the Soviet Union long before China was a global player. Moscow experimented with missiles that could destroy satellites, and the United States developed the Strategic Defense Initiative against Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, known as the Star Wars project. In the honeymoon relationship at the end of the Cold War, Russia and the United States sought cooperation in projects like the International Space Station, which continues, despite the later ups and downs of the US-Russian relationship.
China came into the frame as a space rival in 2007 when it used a missile to destroy one of its own weather satellites, proving both the satellite’s vulnerability and the ease with which one can be attacked. The next year the United States made a retaliatory point by shooting down one of its own already malfunctioning military satellites. Both attacks showed the possible consequences of a fully-fledged space battle. Satellite navigation; live television; instant phone calls; video chats; crop and market prices; climate change surveillance; tsunami, hurricane, and drought predictions; and much more are all coordinated through space. Space hostilities together with cyberwarfare on Earth could change the world in a more fundamental, if not more devastating, way than a nuclear attack.
In recent years Chinese military cyberwarfare units have carried out repeated attacks on American companies and government departments. Bill Gertz, in his book iWar: War and Peace in the Information Age, lists numerous Chinese infiltrations, including stealing personal details of 2.7 million federal employees, pilfering eighty million records from a health care provider, and hacking into such companies as Alcoa and Westinghouse as well as the Service Workers International Union. Sensitive information stolen includes air refueling schedules for the US Pacific Command, which would give China details of aircraft capabilities; records of thirty-three thousand officers and 300,000 US Navy user identifications and passwords; missile navigation and tracking systems information; and nuclear submarine and antiaircraft missile designs.106
In 2010 China carried out a blitzkrieg-style cyberattack throughout Southeast Asia. A Chinese military cyberwarfare unit operating out of the Chengdu military region and known as 78020, used 1,236 Internet protocol addresses across twenty-six cities in eight different countries to strike networks in Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.107
Gertz writes that China is accused of stealing fifty terabytes of data in all, or the equivalent of five times the information contained in the nearly 161 million books and other printed materials held by the Library of Congress. The response from Washington, DC, has been to set up the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team in 2003 as part of the Department of Homeland Security, and the US Cyber Command, a new unit within the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade in 2009, together with other government and military units. Britain set up its National Cyber Security Centre in 2016, which covers both commercial and government protection and is run out of Britain’s NSA counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters, in the western city of Cheltenham.108
In 2014 a grand jury indicted five Chinese military hackers from the People’s Liberation Army based in Shanghai and known as Unit 61398. Even though there would be little chance of ever bringing them to justice, cyberattacks dropped off for a brief time, then resumed with extra energy and damage. The next year, records of twenty-two million current and former US federal employees were stolen from the Office of Personnel Management, including fingerprints, background checks, and other personal details. Many worked in security and defense areas. US intelligence traced the cybertheft back to Unit 61398, where the indicted hackers allegedly worked.
“China already has infiltrated US information networks on a grand scale,” writes Gertz, “and is believed to be preparing for future warfare that will involve computer-based attacks capable of shutting down US electrical power grids, or destroying the networks used by financial institutions, thus crippling our ability to function as a nation and disrupting civil society in ways we have yet to fully fathom.”109
In 2014 China’s ally North Korea was identified as a cyber enemy when its computer experts broke into the database of Sony Pictures Entertainment just as it was about to release a movie making fun of the podgy young leader Kim Jong-un. The Interview was a satirical comedy in which Kim is assassinated and North Korea gives up its nuclear weapons and becomes a democracy. Even before the release, complaints came in from North Korea, prompting Sony to reedit the end and try to make it more acceptable. “I would be horrified if anyone got hurt over this,” the movie’s screenwriter, Dan Sterling, told Creative Screenwriting.110 But that wasn’t enough. Hackers calling themselves Guardians of Peace broke into the Sony system, released personal details of staff including pictures of them with their families, and threatened attacks against any movie theater that showed the film. The release was curtailed to a handful of theaters, but its digital release grossed $40 million, a new record for Sony.
Citing intelligence and open sources, Gertz tells how the attack was orchestrated by Unit 121 from North Korea’s Cyber Warfare Guidance Bureau, which was headquartered in northern Pyongyang but carried out this attack from a hotel in Thailand. The same unit is held responsible for striking three television stations and a bank in South Korea in 2013. South Korean and US intelligence believes Unit 121 has twelve hundred cyberwarfare specialists and a total hacking force of about six thousand.111
North Korea was also high on the suspects list for an international cyberstrike in May 2017 that demanded ransom. It froze some 300,000 computers in 150 countries, affecting FedEx, Russia’s Interior Ministry, and Britain’s National Health Service, where medical operations had to be canceled and ambulance services were disrupted. Significantly, this attack followed the failure of the April 2017 North Korean missile test, about which the United States refused to confirm or deny if it had used cyberwarfare to infiltrate the software and cause the missile to crash on launch.
Each of the past US presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama had signed a deal with North Korea, in 1994, 2007, and 2012, respectively. None worked. The most significant was the 1994 Agreed Framework, which had come about precisely because North Korea had been close to building a nuclear weapon. The United States had drawn up detailed plans for a military strike, and war was close. There is much debate as to why the Agreed Framework collapsed and whether the United States should have done more to keep it alive. Under the deal, North Korea would shut down its two nuclear reactors used for making weapons material. The United States and its allies would build two new ones that could not produce weapons material and, in the interim, supply oil for its energy. It worked well for a time, but was then torn up not by the North Korean regime but by the administration of President Bush. At precisely the time that it was preparing to invade Iraq, the United States declared that North Korea was violating the agreement. In October 2002 US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs James Kelly had visited Pyongyang and accused the regime of running a uranium enrichment project. The United States cut off the promised oil shipment, after which North Korea removed UN nuclear monitoring equipment and started up its Yongbyon nuclear reactor. The regime broke seals on eight thousand rods of spent fuel, which could be used to make weapons-grade plutonium. The Agreed Framework was dead.
“North Korea feels emboldened because of the world’s interest in Iraq,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2002, as the Pentagon was planning the Iraq invasion. “If they do, it would be a mistake. … We are capable of winning decisively in one and swiftly defeating in the case of the other. Let there be no doubt about it.”112
But the United States neither solved the North Korean problem nor destroyed its nuclear weapons plants. Instead it became bogged down in Iraq, while Pyongyang built the bomb. Over the years of this seesawing US policy, North Korea took its technology from the Soviet Union, China and Pakistan and sold it to Libya and Syria, and possibly some elements back to Pakistan. By 2017, North Korea was estimated to have about ten basic nuclear bombs of about five kilotons each. Its nuclear test in September 2017, heralded as a hydrogen bomb, measured well over a hundred kilotons, more than three times more powerful than a test carried out a year earlier.
The 2002 allegation against North Korea coincided with the false US claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Therefore, questions are now being asked about how much the evidence against North Korea was exaggerated, fabricated and politicized.
The argument against the Bush administration’s North Korea policy was put forward in detail by an Asia specialist, the late Selig Harrison, who had a good deal of experience in reporting on North Korea. As Harrison wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine, “Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did on Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons.”113
Harrison detailed the complexities, including the need for reliable electricity flows, technically sophisticated centrifuges, and a long list of related equipment. He concluded, “Washington must not once more become embroiled in a military conflict on the basis of a worst-case assessment built on limited, inconclusive intelligence. There is a real danger that military and other pressures on North Korea, designed to bolster a failing diplomatic process, could escalate into a full-scale war that none of North Korea’s neighbors would support.”114
Some nuclear experts dismissed Harrison’s argument, saying that North Korea had been violating the Agreed Framework all along and that by 1998 already had one or two crude nuclear weapons.115
Even so, at that stage, it had been a far lesser threat than in 2017. Long before North Korea conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 2006, Harrison points out, “The US confronts the disturbing immediate reality that the breakdown of the 1994 freeze agreement has made the United States less secure.”116
When Donald Trump moved into the White House in January 2017, North Korea was at the top of his foreign policy challenges and he quickly announced that he would be changing policy. But North Korean aggression and its incrementally advancing nuclear weapons program were nothing new. In 2010, four years after its first nuclear test, relations had become particularly tense. In March, the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan sank off the west coast of the Korean Peninsula, killing forty-six seamen. A team of international experts found it had been hit by a North Korean torpedo. Eight months later, in November, North Korea reacted to South Korean military exercises by shelling the South’s Yeongpyeong Island, killing four civilians and injuring nineteen in one of the most dangerous confrontations since the 1953 armistice. The increased tension coincided with the then leader, Kim Jong-il, consolidating a power base for his son, Kim Jong-un, who was due to succeed him. Analysts believe the younger Kim was involved in both the Cheonan sinking and the shelling. His father died the next year. Kim took power, violently cleaned out those who opposed him, and continued to build missiles and nuclear weapons.
“Diplomacy has failed because Pyongyang remains determined to build its nuclear arsenal,” write North Korean experts Joshua Stanton, Sung-Yoon Lee, and Bruce Klingner in the May–June 2017 issue of Foreign Affairs. “The only remaining hope for denuclearizing North Korea peacefully lies in convincing it that it must disarm and reform or perish.”117
Stanton, Lee, and Klingner chronicle the history of failed agreements with North Korea since the early 1990s and argue that the policy of engagement had seen money pour into the regime, which had given nothing in return and had continued developing its nuclear weapons. Tellingly, they expose how Pyongyang had successfully dodged sanctions to use the US banking system as a source of dollars. Compared to the treatment of other rogue governments, the sanctions against North Korea were lenient and favorable.
“By July 2014, the Treasury Department had frozen the assets of just 43 (mostly low-ranking) people and entities in North Korea,” they write, “compared with about 50 in Belarus (including its president and his cabinet), 161 in Zimbabwe, 164 in Myanmar (including its junta and its top banks), nearly 400 in Cuba, and more than 800 in Iran. Foreign banks that processed transactions for Cuba, Iran or Myanmar risked getting hit with secondary sanctions and multimillion-dollar fines. The result was that many banks avoided doing business with those countries altogether. But doing business with North Korea posed no such risks.”118
The US Congress finally put a stop to this practice in February 2017, but Stanton, Lee, and Klingner note that Washington had to make clear that it preferred the regime’s chaotic collapse to a nuclear-armed North Korea: “Washington must threaten the one thing that Pyongyang values more than its nuclear weapons: its survival.”119
By mid-2017, Trump was turning long-standing North Korean policy around. He hosted Chinese president Xi Jinping at his Florida resort, moved a carrier group into the North Korea theater, threatened military action, and promised to end the regime’s nuclear weapons program. He also complimented Kim Jong-un on being “a smart cookie,” and said that under the right circumstances he would be honored to meet him.120
China, too, has become impatient and irritated with North Korea, more so since Kim Jong-un took power, and North Korea has been distancing itself from China. Gone from the official rhetoric is the Chinese view that the two countries were “as close as lips and teeth,” or the North Koreans’ declaration that their bond with China was “forged in blood in the victorious war to liberate the fatherland.”121
In a 2016 visit Financial Times reporter Jamil Anderlini found that, even in the presence of his North Korean minders, people were venting hostility toward Beijing. “That only made the anger at China more striking,” he writes, “since it means such attitudes carry a certain amount of official approval.” Anderlini noted that in their condemnation of Japan and South Korea, North Koreans seemed to be going through the motions. “With China, however, the insults were more spontaneous and the depth of feeling obvious.”122
A year later, that depth of feeling became official with a blistering commentary against China from the Korean Central News Agency. In short, Pyongyang told Beijing to back off and stop interfering. “China should no longer try to test the limits of the DPRK’s patience,” the commentary said. “China had better ponder over the grave consequences that would ensue from its reckless act of chopping down the pillar of DPRK-China relations.”123
Such rhetoric has prompted fresh thinking in Beijing whereby China itself could examine how to engineer regime change in Pyongyang. It would need a shift of mindset not only in China but also in South Korea, Japan and Washington and the process would be fraught with disagreements. The aim would be to install a Beijing-friendly leadership in North Korea and ensure China’s continuing influence and the securing of the nuclear weapons. Beijing could move on to initiate a formal peace treaty between the north and south, thus removing the threat of war. A final step would be to persuade South Korea that it no longer needed a US military presence on its soil. If successful, and the American bases close, China would have won a significant strategic victory without a shot being fired in anger.
“At a fundamental level, China would be acting not to assist the United States but to ensure that a reunified Korea would not include U.S. troops,” writes Oriana Skylar Mastro of Georgetown University. “In that case, the end of a permanent U.S. military presence on the peninsula would be a reasonable price to pay to ensure that a second Korean war had the best possible outcome.”124
In January 2018, as President Trump boasted about the size of the ‘nuclear button’ he could use against Pyongyang on Twitter, North and South Korea, in contrast, were embarking on unusually conciliatory talks about the North’s involvement in the winter Olympics in the South, indicating again that with America’s depleted reputation. Once again, there are signals here of a diminished American involvement against an increased Chinese one.
In some respects, the China–North Korea relationship can be compared to the US-–Saudi Arabia one: they might not like it, but they need each other, and the collapse of either could have a catastrophic global impact. Just as the United States believes it can ill afford to abandon Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, for China to relinquish influence in North Korea would go against Beijing’s wider ambition in the Asia-Pacific.