The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (40 page)

Chinese officials later claimed that flattery and saving face had been keys to obtaining North Korea’s acceptance of the change. According to this self-serving account, Beijing told the North Koreans that “we need your help, because China has to respond to Taiwan’s gaining recognition abroad.” The Chinese called on North Korea as old friends to magnanimously assist by permitting Beijing to recognize South Korea, thereby penalizing Taiwan for its actions. This account has elements of a put-down, underestimating the North’s ability to recognize its own predicament and to hold in their anger, especially after public venting in a similar situation with the Soviets had gained them nothing.

When the Beijing-Seoul rapprochement was announced, North Korea accepted the blow with official silence. A month later, at the United Nations, I asked North Korean foreign minister Kim Yong Nam about the switch; he replied that China’s new relationship with Seoul was “nothing
special . . . nothing [that] matters to us.” This posture of public nonchalance was belied by signals the North sent in September and October on the occasion of PRC National Day (October 1) and the anniversary of the Chinese People’s Volunteers into the Korea War (October 25), registering in subtle but clear ways Beijing would not miss that Pyongyang was furious. In North Korean eyes, the Chinese had again proved themselves unreliable and all too willing to sell out the North.

The newest change in the great power alignments around the peninsula mattered greatly to Pyongyang, which was seeking to establish relations with the United States and Japan and hoped that China would withhold its official ties with South Korea until a package deal could be arranged. Pyongyang had elaborate warning that the Chinese shift was coming, but the timing of it must have been galling, because it arose from Beijing’s desire to slap back at Taiwan rather than from any consideration of its impact on the Korean peninsula. North Korea’s realization of its true standing in the priorities of its giant neighbor, along with sharply rising international pressures to curb its nuclear program, contributed to its growing troubles. This realization may have contributed to Pyongyang’s decision in the summer of 1992 to explore steps in the nuclear arena that would result in an escalation of tensions early the following year.

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This was a point on which Kim had long been adamant. In November 1972, Kim told South Korean delegates to high-level talks taking place in Pyongyang, “Why should we, a homogeneous nation, enter the international arena as two states? I will not agree to the separate entry of north and south into the UN as long as our country remains divided.” See CWIHP, Document 35, “Conversations with the South Korean Delegates to the High-Level Political Talks Between North and South Korea,” November 3, 1972. When in a speech on June 23, 1973, South Korean president Park Chung Hee advocated such a course, Kim responded within hours with a five-point reunification proposal that marked the beginning of the end of the dialogue.

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The rumors of construction flaws were apparently unfounded. Construction resumed in 2009, and the building was being made ready for at least partial occupancy by 2012. In April 2013, however, in the middle of unusually high tensions on the peninsula, the company involved—Kempinski Hotels—backed away, artfully explaining it was “simply not possible at this time to enter the market and allow us to operate a hotel according to our standards.”

11

JOINING THE NUCLEAR ISSUE

I
N THE EARLY 1990s
, North Korea’s program to develop nuclear weapons concentrated the minds of many of the world’s political and military leaders and held their attention to an unprecedented degree. This frightening development was a potential threat not only to South Korea, the American troops on guard there, and the immediate Asian neighborhood; it was a threat as well to international stability and world order. A North Korean bomb, it seemed, could touch off a dangerous nuclear arms competition involving South Korea, Japan, and perhaps other industrialized nations and spread nuclear weapons materials to pariah nations in the Middle East through North Korean sales. More than that, an atomic weapon in the hands of an isolated and seemingly unpredictable regime with a record of terrorism would be a nightmare. It was, as South Korea’s presidential national security adviser, Kim Chong Whi, told me while he was in office, not an issue of normal politics but “a question of civilization.”

The more the outside world feared it, the more its nuclear program was a valuable asset to North Korea, which had few other resources of external worth after the decline of its alliances with the Soviet Union and China. There is no evidence that Pyongyang saw the nuclear program as a bargaining chip at its inception, but the record is clear that by the 1990s, it had learned the program’s value in relations with the world outside.

North Korea’s nuclear debut, in the eyes of outsiders, dated back to April 1982, when an American surveillance satellite whirring unseen in the skies photographed what appeared to be a nuclear reactor vessel under construction in the bend of a river at Yongbyon, sixty miles north of the capital. When the photographs were examined in Washington a few days later, they drew the intense interest of American intelligence analysts, who marked the spot for special attention. In March 1984, as construction proceeded, a satellite pass showed the outline of a cylindrical nuclear
smokestack rising from the site. Another set of photographs taken in June 1984 clearly showed the reactor, its cooling tower, and some limited power lines and electrical grid connections for local transmission of the energy to be produced.

Intelligence experts in Washington concluded from the photographs that the reactor utilized two minerals found in abundance in North Korea: natural uranium, to create an atomic reaction, and graphite, to moderate and control it. The layout was startlingly similar to old-model French and British reactors of the late 1950s, built to produce material for atomic weapons.

Taken alone, the North Korean reactor, while highly suspicious, was not conclusive evidence of a weapons program because it could also be the initial element of a civil nuclear power program. However, suspicions were heightened in March 1986, when satellite photographs of the Yongbyon area detected cylindrical craters in the sand of the nearby riverbank. Analysts believed they were the residue of experimental high-explosive detonations in a certain pattern familiar to nuclear weapons experts: the precisely simultaneous explosions that are basic to implosion, one of the standard means of detonating an atomic bomb. After this discovery, restudy of earlier photographs produced evidence of similar craters in the same area since 1983.

With a reactor set to burn uranium and the technique of finely honed explosions appearing to be under development, the principal missing element in a serious atomic weapons program was a reprocessing plant. Using a chemical process, such a plant can separate plutonium, the raw material for a nuclear weapon, from other by-products of spent uranium fuel. Starting in March 1986, satellite photographs detected the outlines of a huge oblong building, nearly the length of two football fields, under construction at Yongbyon. In February 1987 the US cameras looked down into the unroofed plant to see a long series of thick-walled cells in the typical configuration for separation of plutonium. A short time later, when the plant was roofed, US intelligence could only guess at what was going on inside.

The first indigenous reactor at Yongbyon was a relatively modest plant rated by the North Koreans as producing 5 megawatts of electric power. But in June 1988, construction for a much larger reactor, eventually described by the North Koreans as intended to produce 50 megawatts of power, was photographed at Yongbyon. Such a plant, in combination with the huge reprocessing facility under construction, convinced most Washington officials with access to the photography that North Korea was launched headlong on a drive to create its own nuclear weapons, and a highly ambitious drive at that. In what had been the middle of nowhere—a place famous in Korean poetry for its budding azaleas and little more—a stark and imposing industrial works of more than one hundred
buildings was rising, surrounded by double fences and antiaircraft weapons and heavily guarded. As these facilities progressed toward completion and North Korea moved closer to being able to produce weapons of immense destructive power, the busy construction site at Yongbyon became increasingly an international problem that could not be ignored.

THE ORIGINS OF THE NUCLEAR PROGRAM

Korea’s involvement with nuclear weapons goes back to the dawn of the nuclear age. During World War II, Japan was vigorously pursuing a nuclear weapons program, though it lagged behind the all-out campaigns of the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union. As US bombing of the home islands increased, Japan moved its secret weapons program to the northern part of its Korean colony to get away from the attacks and take advantage of the area’s undamaged electricity-generating capacity and abundance of useful minerals. After the division of Korea in 1945, the Soviet Union mined monazite and other materials in the North for use in its own atomic weapons program.

During the 1950–1953 Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur requested authority to use atomic weapons and submitted a list of targets, for which he would need twenty-six A-bombs. His successor, General Matthew Ridgway, renewed MacArthur’s request, but such weapons were never used. In early 1953, the newly inaugurated US president, Dwight Eisenhower, began dropping hints that the United States would use the atom bomb if the deadlock persisted in the negotiations to conclude an armistice ending the war. Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Vice President Richard Nixon all claimed later that the nuclear threats had played a major role in bringing about the truce, although revelations from Soviet archives cast doubt on that analysis.

Following the end of the war, the Soviet Union and North Korea signed two agreements on cooperation in nuclear research, and a small number of North Korean scientists began to arrive at the Soviet Union’s Dubna Nuclear Research Center near Moscow. The Soviet Union also provided a small experimental nuclear reactor, which was sited at Yongbyon. At Soviet insistence, the reactor was placed under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to ensure that material was not diverted to weapons, even though at that time North Korea was not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

In its own quest for nuclear weapons, North Korea had turned to China shortly after its giant neighbor detonated its first atomic blast in 1964. Kim Il Sung sent a delegation to Beijing, asking for assistance to mount a parallel program and, in a letter to Mao Tse-tung, declared that as brother countries who shared fighting and dying on the battlefield, China
and North Korea should also share the atomic secret. Two former Chinese officials and a Japanese expert familiar with Chinese affairs told me that Mao turned down the North Korean request. “Chinese leaders thought this was a very expensive project,” said an official who was in the Korea section of the Chinese Foreign Ministry at the time. “North Korea is a very small country. [Chinese leaders thought] it wasn’t needed.” Kim Il Sung is reported to have made another request for Chinese aid in 1974, when the South Korean nuclear weapons program was under way, a fact that may have influenced his thinking. Like the earlier appeal, this one was also unsuccessful.

When and why North Korea secretly launched its own program as a major enterprise is still the subject of speculation, in the absence of hard information. American experts believe site preparation for the first North Korean indigenous reactor began around 1979. In the late 1970s, according to an official of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Kim Il Sung authorized the North Korean Academy of Sciences, the army, and the Ministry of Public Security to begin implementation of a nuclear weapons program, including rapid expansion of existing facilities at Yongbyon. As early as February 1976, a Hungarian Embassy cable from Pyongyang reported that the North “wants to construct nuclear reactors, and is holding talks about this issue in order to become capable of producing atomic weapons in the future.” This was perhaps a gentle reply from the embassy to a message from Budapest a few days earlier, reporting that North Korean diplomats had claimed the North already had such weapons.

After a high-level delegation from the international department of the East German Communist Party visited Pyongyang in May 1981, it reported in a memorandum to its Politburo, “The DPRK is strongly interested in the importation of nuclear power stations. Here it is estimated that they do not by any means exclude the military use of the nuclear technology.” A former East German official said the cautiously worded report, which was written after extensive informal talks with North Korean officials, seriously understated Pyongyang’s ardor. “They said very frankly, ‘We need the atom bomb,’” according to this source.

North Korea’s nuclear weapons program from the first was very self-reliant. Its “godfather” was Dr. Lee Sung Ki, a Korean born in the South who had earned his PhD in engineering from Kyoto Imperial University in prewar Japan and served as dean of Seoul National University’s college of engineering before crossing to the northern side during the Korean War. Lee, who became Kim Il Sung’s intimate friend and closest scientific adviser, had won worldwide fame by developing vinalon, a synthetic fiber made from coal.

The indigenous nature of the program facilitated the extreme secretiveness in which it proceeded. Not even officials of the North Koreans’
close allies, the Soviet Union and China—both nuclear weapons powers—were permitted to visit the key facilities at Yongbyon once the nuclear program was under way.