EDITOR’S NOTE: The following sidebar, which did not appear with the main story about a World Affairs Council lecture on the Koreas in last week’s edition of the Daily Planet because of space limitations, is being reprinted in full here.
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By JOHN NORTH

Following his April 7 lecture on “Problems and Prospects in the Korean Peninsula,” Mark Mohr, a retired career U.S. Foreign Service officer, fielded a number of questions about Korean affairs and U.S. foreign policy.

The 30-minute Q&A, held in Owen Conference Center at UNC Asheville, was part of the third annual Barbara Chisholm Memorial Lecture program, sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Western North Carolina.

Mohr is now a program associate for the Asia Program at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.

An unidentified man asked if North Korea would be a good market for trade with the United States.

“In a perfect world, it would be good to trade with North Korea,” Mohr replied. However, because of its listing on the U.S. list of terrorist nations, “you’re not allowed to trade with North Korea” now.

Even if the trade sanctions are lifted, “it’s going to be a long time” before North Korea can recover to be a viable trading partner. “Their economy is a quarter of what it was in 1990. They have to rebuild it first.”

When someone asked later how long it would take to lift the import/export requirement on North Korea, Mohr said if North Korea signs a declaration that it will give up its nuclear program, “they could be removed from the list within a couple of months.”

Another questioner asked if the reported world food shortage is “going to make it more difficult to get food (aid) to North Korea?”

As for a world food shortage, Mohr said, “I think there’s surplus food. There’s no food shortage — just a food price hike” that makes food too expensive for many people around the world to buy.

As for North Korea, Mohr said he believes humanitarian food aid should be a separate issue from the negotiations. He praised the U.S. for continuing to feed its enemy.

A questioner asked if, within the six-party talks, which include North and South Korea, China, Russia, Japan and the U.S., “is there any input” regarding the presence of U.S. forces in South Korea?

Only from North Korea, Mohr said, paraphrasing its stance as “basically, you’re bad and should get out.”

To another questioner, Morh confirmed his comments during his lecture that, before 2002, North Korea produced enough plutonium to build two or three nuclear bombs, and from then until now has produced 12 or 15 more such bombs.

Shaking his head, he noted, “They were armed with two or three nuclear weapons, but we gave them extra time to build more.”

When another questioner expressed concern about North Korean threats to bomb South Korea, Mohr said, “They would never bomb South Korea. They’re Koreans. That’s just propaganda.”

A woman who identified herself as a South Korean blamed the Bush administration for causing North Korea to “lose face — repeatedly,” and said such a situation reflects clumsy handling of U.S. foreign policy in the region.

Instead of bombing South Korea, the woman said that “if North Korea could get away with it, the country North Korea would bomb would be Japan.”

Addressing Mohr, a man said, “You seem convinced that the North Koreans would not do things,” such as drop nuclear bombs on an enemy, “because it would be suicidal. But history is riddled with leaders and countries doing things that are suicidal.”

“If they drop six nuclear weapons, we (the U.S.) would annihilate them within a couple of hours,” Mohr said evenly of North Korea. “I would suggest they not do it.”

A man asked Mohr if he had corroboration on his earlier contention that the U.S. provoked North Korea before the Korean War.

The man also said he had heard that the U.S. split its weapons in the Pacific area after World War II into two lots and sent them to South Korea and South Vietnam.

Of the latter assertion, Mohr said, “This sounds to me like classic conspiracy theory. Facts are facts. This information has been declassified.”

He added that the “historical facts show the aggression against North Korea was unilateral.”