Politics in Asia Series. Annotated ed. London; NewYork: Routledge, 2012. 256 pp., US$195.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-20792-8.
This book is an inquiry into the dynamics of the armament of the two Koreas, the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, from the Korean War period to the 1990s. The author aims to describe, analyze, and explain the armament processes of the two Koreas using a more objective and critical perspective.
This book consists of seven chapters, including the introduction and the conclusion. Chapter 2, “State and armament: theory and hypotheses,” overviews approaches to armament in general, and evaluates relative merits and demerits of the external and internal explanations. While criticizing the arms race model, the author attempts to explain the armament process more deeply and fundamentally by following an approach based on the synthesis of the state and civil society that focusses on resource potential, mobilization and allocation. Then, the author suggests four sets of hypotheses of armament of the two Koreas, one on external relations and others on internal processes, to be examined in the following chapters.
In Chapter 3, “On military capabilities: facts and methods of assessment,” the author attempts to find the most appropriate indicator of the armament process that can simultaneously represent military capabilities and the defense burden. The author criticizes the widely used “bean counts” and their variants including “firepower scores” for their exclusive concern with quantity, and defines that the military capabilities are human, material, and organizational components in quantitative and qualitative dimensions. The author suggests that the stock should be compared in the balance assessment, and the ratio of defense expenditures over GNP represents the burden of national defense in resource allocation in the case of the two Koreas. Noting that the defense expenditure is the best available indicator of military capabilities as well as defense burden, the author examines alternative data sets and balance assessments, as the official defense budgets of the two Koreas are not reliable (to varying degrees).
Chapter 4, “Conflict and militarization on the Korean Peninsula” is a historical description of armament efforts of the two Koreas and consequent dynamics of military balance during the postwar years. The author suggests that the military buildups of the two Koreas have periods of acceleration, deceleration, and status quo. He argues that these changes are caused by both internal and external factors, but that the former has become more important as both Koreas have become more self-reliant in armament funding.
Chapter 5, “Military balance and arms race between two Koreas”, is a more systematic and quantitative assessment of the inter-Korean military balance. The author utilizes the stock of military spending to assess the dynamic military balance, and tries to answer the questions of whether and how the inter-Korean arms race has developed in the postwar years. The balance assessment shows some interesting trends of the North around 1970 and the South since the early 1980s that cannot be explained as an arms race. The author asserts that North Korean military capabilities have remained stagnant or even declined because of internal constraints, especially resource potential. On the other hand, the South Korean military buildup since the early 1980s is not arms race behavior but the result of its rapid economic growth.
Chapter 6, “Resources, state power, and armament” is the analysis of the internal sources of armament. Since available estimates of North Korea’s GNP are incomplete, unstable or biased, as the author estimates it utilizing North Korean national income data, assumptions of its inflation rate, and the consequent exchange ratio of its own currency. The analysis yields the following. First,, overall resource base sets the limit of armament. Second, the limit varies considerably — 20 percent of GNP in the North whereas 7 percent in the South. Therefore, the resource constraint is stronger in the North. Third, the defense burden of each Korean state depends on the degree of overall state power. The defense burden grows as state power in extraction grows, reaches a plateau, and then declines as state power further grows. The increased marginal political cost of state power or the increased weight of consent/capital in the composition of state power tends to reduce the relative importance of armament as the means of coercion. Fourth, the autonomy of the state in resource mobilization accrued from massive aid from patron states that enabled both Koreas to over arm themselves until the early 1960s in the North and until a decade later in the South.
Based on the above analysis, the author concludes that, first, the South is far superior to the North in military as well as overall capabilities. Second, it would win with or without US support. Third, the South would be heavily damaged, however, and it would lose what it has striven to defend. Finally, over-arming does not guarantee more security. The author suggests the Korean conflict is not a classical prisoners’ dilemma, for a “tit-for-tat” in confidence-building has not worked well in the past. Then the author suggests that since armament is the outcome of both external and internal processes, one cannot do much with the internal dynamics of North Korea, and asserts that to “buy peace” is a more practical approach. This indeed is true for the economic cooperation between the two Koreas as seen through the success of the Kaesong Industrial Complex, even though it has been experiencing some difficulties in the last several months.
Since the author’s assignment is based on conventional weapons, North Korean nuclear arms and missiles are not taken into account. The author only points out that the North took the nuclear card as it is inferior to the South in the area of conventional weapons. Since this book was originally published in 1999, it could have dealt a little further with North Korean nuclear arms and missiles.
Finally, there was a small but serious error on page 39. The author writes the date of the Armistice as “June 27th, 1953,” but it is actually “July 27th, 1953.” This year commemorates its 60th anniversary.
Tomohiko Kawaguchi
Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan
pp. 357-359