A voice of reason in our region

Amid the gravest threat of nuclear war in the Asia-Pacific region since 1945, the Turnbull government, with bipartisan support from Labor, is engaging constructively with Australia’s allies. After his 30-minute phone conversation with Donald Trump yesterday, Malcolm Turnbull said their focus remained on full enforcement of the current sanctions regime, the possibility of additional sanctions and the importance of China stepping up economic pressure on North Korea. If acted upon, the Prime Minister’s shrewd call for China to cut off its oil pipeline to Pyongyang might exert the kind of extreme pressure required for North Korea’s murderous dictator Kim Jong-un to see sense. More likely, unfortunately, as Russian President Vladimir Putin says, North Korea would rather “eat grass” than suspend its nuclear weapons program.

The threat posed by the rogue regime to the Asia-Pacific region also dominated the phone call between Mr Turnbull and Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Tuesday night. In Seoul, Defence Minister Marise Payne is meeting South Korean leaders for an update on the situation on the ground. And as Rowan Callick reported from China yesterday, scientists there fear another North Korean nuclear test might cause the mountain under which five bombs have already been detonated to implode, causing radiation to drift across the region — a process the Chinese call “taking the roof off’’.

While Australia updated its travel advice for South Korea and Japan yesterday and Julie Bishop warned Australians not to travel to North Korea, the government is discussing contingency plans to evacuate Australians living in South Korea and Japan in the event of a conflict. Such contingency planning is essential, especially in view of the expectation that North Korea is preparing to launch a ballistic missile, so soon after testing a hydrogen bomb more powerful than the US device that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

War with North Korea, as US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis put it, would have “catastrophic” consequences. Pyongyang is essentially holding greater Seoul’s 30 million people hostage with about 15,000 cannons and rocket launchers aimed at the South Korean capital, 50km away.

But as Paul Dibb, Australian National University emeritus professor of strategic studies, argues today, one of Washington’s options, as an adjunct to diplomacy, would be to demonstrate its ability to destroy North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles at the point of launch, when they are most vulnerable. The danger, Professor Dibb notes, is that such an action could provoke Kim Jong-un to strike out.

In the long term, however, the price of not acting more decisively against the North Korean threat could be an arms race in which Japan and South Korea felt compelled to develop their own nuclear strike capabilities. The nation most opposed to such a development would be China — an argument the US and its allies should press in seeking to persuade Beijing to be more proactive in pressuring North Korea. The hostile reaction of a popular Chinese newspaper to Mr Turnbull’s call for China to cut off oil supplies to North Korea shows many in China have a poor grasp of the dangers to their nation, and the region, posed by the North Korean menace. Their misconceptions need to be rectified.