http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee 317 Anass Gouyez Ben Allal North Korea´s nuclear programe: the survival of the... relations with Japan. This relationship of mistrust is due both to numerous attempts by Japan in the past to invade the peninsula, and to the period of effective Japanese colonialism in Korea (from 1910 to 1945)7. In this context, Pyongyang constantly denounces the Japanese government, on the grounds that the Japanese defence forces represent a threat to the security of Eastern Asia8. The intimate enemy of the Kim regime is South Korea, and it views the government of Seoul as corrupt and completely subject to the imperialist and hostile will of the US administration. The North Korean press invariably qualifies the South Korean army as a “puppet army”. In this sense, the military alliance between Seoul and Washington is one of the most disturbing elements in the dialectic of this confrontation. It is the most durable and solid alliance in the region. The constant manoeuvres carried out by the US and South Korean armed forces are intended to discourage any proactive action by the Pyongyang regime. For its part, however, the DPRK perceives them as acts of war, and in the end they have become a permanent source of tension. The end of the Cold War and the subsequent normalisation of diplomatic relations between the USSR and China with South Korea led the North Korean system to make its policy more extreme. Later, the increasingly aggressive statements by the United States on the risk of suffering an attack further reinforced the need for a military force capable of defending the survival of a deprived and isolated state, forced to rely on its own resources to ensure its security in the absence of an ally. Thus, North Korea saw in nuclear weapons the only strategy that could remove the country (and its political system) from the spectre of an invasion from the enemy9. The Pyongyang regime was not able to meet the costs of modernising its old-fashioned conventional armaments, and found in nuclear arsenal the most economical 7 The Japanese occupation of Korea for 35 years (1910-1945) was part of the expansion of the Japanese Empire in Asian territory and lasted until the Japanese surrender in World War Two. 8 “KCNA Blasts Japan’s Moves to Become Military Power”, KCNA, March 8, 2010, on www.kcna. co.jp/index-e.htm (page consulted on April1, 2013). 9 In 1959 North Korea celebrated its first scientific cooperation agreement with the USSR, and shortly afterwards it was equipped with a subcritical reactor in the Department of Nuclear Research of Kim Il-Sung University, built an underground laboratory in Pakchon and with Soviet assistance included an R & D unit in the Nuclear Physics Department of the Kim Chaek Industrial Institute. Shortly thereafter, in 1965, the USSR supplied them with a 1 Megawatt research reactor, which was installed in the Yongbyon Nuclear Complex, and later increased its power to 4 Mw. The same reactor figures in the IAEA registers as a 5 Mw Soviet heavy-duty IRT reactor with a plutonium production capacity and is managed by the State Atomic Energy Committee. See SALAZAR SERANTES, Gonzalo de, El nuevo desafío: la proliferación nuclear en el umbral del siglo XXI, Documentos CIDOB Seguridad y Defensa, n° 4, 2004, pp.72-73; INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY, Nuclear Research Reactors in the World, Reference Data series, nº 3, IAEA, Vienna, 1997, p. 119; INSTITUTE FOR DEFENSE & DISARMAMENT STUDIES, The Arms Control Reporter: A Chronicle of Treaties, Negotiations, Proposals, Weapons and Policy, Institute for Defense & Disarmament Studies, Cambridge, vol. 1998, p.457.
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