The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (13 page)

“If revolution takes place in South Korea we, as one and the same nation, will not just look at it with folded arms but will strongly support the South Korean people,” Kim declared. Then, in a takeoff on Karl Marx’s famous dictum that in revolution, the working class has nothing to lose but its chains, Kim added, “If the enemy ignites war recklessly, we shall resolutely answer it with war and completely destroy the aggressors. In this war we will only lose the Military Demarcation Line and will gain the country’s unification.”

Untangling what Kim said from what he meant and what he expected in terms of support from the Chinese is still not at all clear. Kim arrived in Beijing just as China’s leader, Mao Tse-tung, was about to begin an internal political struggle with a group who opposed the newly rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping. For this, among other reasons, Mao would not have been interested in the situation flaring up in Korea, and Kim would almost certainly have been astute enough to realize that this was not a good time to expect support. Moreover, North Korean officials reportedly told East European diplomats around that time that Pyongyang was not happy with Vietnam’s victory because it meant the US military would be free to shift its focus and resources back to Korea.

By contrast, another view is that Kim took heart from events in Vietnam and sought to capitalize on the moment to press his own priorities but was rebuffed by Beijing. According to a Chinese source with intimate knowledge of Korean affairs, Kim told Chinese leaders it would be “no problem” to liberate South Korea, but Premier Zhou Enlai and his colleagues opposed any such idea. Without addressing Kim’s ideas specifically, according to this source, Chinese leaders stressed the need for stability on the Korean peninsula, and “Kim was clever enough to understand” without having to lose face. About the same time, according to a former Soviet diplomat who was working on Korean issues at the time, Moscow made it explicitly clear to Kim that “we only support peaceful means for solution of the [South Korean] problem.” Significantly, Kim did not stop in Moscow during an extensive trip to Eastern Europe and North Africa immediately following his Beijing visit. In a sign of discord between Kim and his senior communist sponsor, the North Korean leader even flew many hundreds of miles out of his way to avoid passing through Soviet airspace.
*

ECHOES OF SAIGON

Even more than flirtation with China, Park was shocked and alarmed by the US failure in Vietnam. The prospects and plight of South Vietnam, the US-backed anticommunist half of another divided country, bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the situation in South Korea. At the American behest, Park’s government sent two divisions of Korean troops to fight in Vietnam, and they had remained until 1973, when the slow withdrawal of American forces was nearly complete. Although Korea was well paid for its efforts through procurement and construction contracts, to the point that revenues from the Vietnam War made up as much as 40 percent of its foreign exchange earnings, Park considered his troop commitment to be a self-sacrificing contribution to the anticommunist cause and a payback to Washington for saving the South in the Korean War. In Park’s view, the American pullout from Vietnam and especially the betrayal of South Vietnam in the Paris negotiations with communist North Vietnam raised agonizing doubts about the reliability of the United States.

As South Vietnam was collapsing that April, Ambassador Richard Sneider in Seoul appealed to Washington for an urgent review of American policies in view of “declining ROK confidence in [the] U.S. commitment,” accompanied by a “risk of North Korean provocation to test both U.S. intentions and ROK capabilities.” Sneider, a cerebral State Department officer who had studied communist political operations during the Korean War, wrote in a secret cable that “Korea is not repeat not yet in a crisis era” but that this could come. To head it off, he recommended a long list of potential confidence-building measures, ranging from more weapons and economic support for the Seoul government to contingency planning for special US air and naval deployments to Korea in case of a serious threat of a North Korean attack.

The broader and longer-term problem, Sneider wrote, was the need for a fundamental shift in the US relationship with a Korea that, “while still dependent on us, is no longer [a] client state.” Sneider recommended immediate initiation of a major review of Korea policy in Washington.

Two months later, in June 1975, Sneider fired off a more extensive rendition of his views to a US capital that was still preoccupied with the aftermath of the failure in Vietnam. Sneider wrote in a remarkable twelve-page cable:

Our present policy toward Korea is ill-defined and based on an outdated view of Korea as a client state. It does not provide a long-term conceptual approach to Korea, geared to its prospective middle power status. It leaves the ROKG [ROK government] uncertain what to expect from us and forces us to react to ROKG
on an ad hoc basis. We have not for example made clear to the Koreans what the prospects are for a continued, long-term U.S. military presence. Nor have we clarified what the ROKG can expect from us in the way of military technology, although we discourage President Park’s efforts to develop his own sophisticated weapons. These uncertainties lead President Park into preparations for what he sees as our eventual withdrawal, preparations which include internal repression and plans for the development of nuclear weapons. They also induce optimism on the part of North Korea about our withdrawal and doubts in Japan about our credibility and about the future of Korea.

Sneider saw two main alternatives to the existing policy: disengagement or the establishment of a new basis for durable partnership.

Back in Washington, now assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Philip Habib was on the receiving end of Sneider’s cables. Habib had observed at the time of Park’s martial-law takeover in October 1972 that the process of US disengagement from Korea had “already begun” and “should be accelerated.” However, in the wake of the debacle in Vietnam, Sneider made the case that “disengagement, whether gradual or otherwise, is now far too risky as long as the North Korean posture remains militant; it would escalate the possibility of conflict and risks a breakdown of Japanese confidence in our treaty commitment.” Perhaps as a gesture to Habib’s views, Sneider added, “Under different circumstances, a gradual disengagement could be worth serious consideration.”

Sneider called his preferred alternative “durable partnership” with long-term guarantees for Korea, along the lines of the NATO and Japanese partnerships. He wrote, “The longer we stave off the inevitable decision as to whether our relationship, including our military presence, is temporary or durable, the more President Park and Kim Il Sung will pursue their premises that it is in fact temporary, adding further to the instability on the Korean peninsula.”

As he saw it, an improved relationship would involve such things as greater Washington-Seoul consultation, a transition from economic aid to private investment (which was already happening), and a higher priority for Korea on the US negotiating agenda with China and the Soviet Union. However, the most important element he recommended was “a significant U.S. force presence with indefinite tenure . . . publicly projected with major reductions linked to changes in the security situation in Northeast Asia and arrangements between North and South reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula.”

In the aftermath of Vietnam, Washington was wary of open-ended commitments. President Gerald Ford had told Park during a brief visit
to Seoul in November 1974 that “we have no intention of withdrawing U.S. personnel from Korea.” However, this statement was interpreted by Ford’s National Security Council staff as applying only to total, not to partial, withdrawals. Responding to the South Korean fears of a US pullout during a visit to Seoul in August 1975, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger privately reassured Park that he foresaw “no basic changes over the next five years” in the level of US forces. But when this comment got back to the White House via a memorandum of the conversation, a National Security Council staff aide objected that Schlesinger had gone beyond administration policy.

In any case, it was obvious that Ford would face serious Democratic opposition the following year, which could change the situation. Schlesinger told Park that “he expects President Ford to be reelected, but if not the Democrats are not likely to eliminate U.S. support for South Korea.” Schlesinger may not have known or cared that Democrat Jimmy Carter, then considered a long-shot contender for his party’s presidential nomination, was already advocating the complete withdrawal of American ground troops from Korea.

With the election looming, no new American relationship along the lines of Sneider’s recommendation was instituted. Despite US attempts at reassurance, Park continued to feel a deep sense of vulnerability. In mid-1975 he put three laws through the National Assembly to set the nation on a wartime footing: a tightened public security law, coming on top of the issuance of Emergency Decree Nine, which in effect banned all political criticism of the government; a civil defense law creating a paramilitary corps of all males between the ages of seventeen and fifty; and a broad new defense tax.

The government doubled defense expenditures in the 1976 budget and continued to increase them sharply for the next three years. In 1979 they doubled again, bringing them to four times the expenditure level of 1975. Although the South was devoting a far smaller percentage of its economic output to the military than the North, in absolute terms ROK military spending began outpacing that of the North in the mid-1970s, according to estimates of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Although military spending on both sides was rising, the South’s by the end of the decade was more than double that of the North’s.

Following the fall of Saigon, Park gave high priority to his Heavy and Chemical Industries Promotion Plan, which had been initiated earlier to provide the sinews of enhanced military power. Between 1975 and 1980, more than 75 percent of all manufacturing investment in South Korea was committed to this industrial base. With these resources, Park created a mechanized army division and five special forces brigades for mobile
warfare, doubled the size of his navy, and modernized his air force with faster, deadlier US jets and missiles.

North Korea could not keep up with the South’s rapidly rising military expenditures or its increasing lead in military technology. On the other hand, North Korea continued to increase the numbers of its troops and to move more forces closer to the DMZ and therefore closer to Seoul, the fast-growing South Korean capital only thirty miles south of the dividing line. Increasingly, parts of Seoul were within range of North Korean heavy artillery and rockets. The upshot of all this was to heighten the military tension on the divided peninsula.

THE SOUTH KOREAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM

Park’s ultimate effort to secure the country’s future was to launch a secret and serious effort to develop a South Korean nuclear bomb. According to Oh Won Chol, a senior adviser to Park on nuclear and military production programs, Park created an Agency for Defense Development, which included a clandestine Weapons Exploitation Committee, answerable only to the Blue House, after faster and better-armed North Korean speedboats overwhelmed a South Korean patrol boat in June 1970 and forced it to the North. Only weeks later, Park was shocked by the decision of the Nixon administration to withdraw the US Seventh Division from Korea, despite his vehement protests. Park believed that the South Korean army was simply incapable of defending the country by itself with its outmoded arms and equipment, according to Oh. His nuclear adviser said that Park had not decided actually to produce a South Korean bomb, but that he was determined to acquire the technology and capability to do so on a few months’ notice, as he and many others believed the Japanese could do. “Park wished to have the [nuclear] card to deal with other governments,” Oh told me in 1996. In this field, the capability to produce nuclear weapons is almost as potent as possession of the bomb itself.

A major element in Park’s effort was to acquire a reprocessing facility to extract plutonium from the irradiated uranium fuel produced in civilian power plants. Although most of South Korea’s ambitious civil nuclear power program was based on American equipment and technology, Park steered clear of Washington in seeking reprocessing equipment and technology, and in 1972 he began working with France in this high-priority effort. By 1974 the Korean-French collaboration produced the technical design of a plant to manufacture about twenty kilograms of plutonium per year, enough for two nuclear weapons with the explosive power of the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima.

Work on an independent South Korean nuclear program and the rest of Park’s defense development was centered in Taeduk, a science center south of Seoul. In 1973 South Korea began a quiet drive to recruit ethnic Korean nuclear, chemical, and engineering specialists from the United States and Canada. It also began shopping abroad for exotic materials and equipment useful for nuclear weapons.

India’s nuclear test in 1974, the first by a developing nonaligned country, jolted the world awake to the dangers of the spread of nuclear weapons. Suddenly, nuclear proliferation became a high-priority concern in Washington. US intelligence officials began giving renewed scrutiny to import data on sensitive materials, and “when they got to Korea, everything snapped into place,” an American analyst recalled years later. Based on these telltale hints, according to Paul Cleveland, who was a political counselor of the US Embassy in Seoul, “people were sent to work, and in a relatively short period of time developed absolute confirmation from clandestine sources” that South Korea was secretly embarked on a program to build the bomb.