The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (41 page)

In the 1980s, in addition to its clandestine program, North Korea sought to obtain civil nuclear power stations from the Soviet Union to alleviate its growing power shortages. Kim Il Sung took up the subject with Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko in his May 1984 visit to Moscow and won agreement to additional talks on the subject. The United States, which was watching the developments in Yongbyon with growing apprehension, urged Moscow to persuade North Korea to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, hoping this would lead to international inspection and control of Pyongyang’s nuclear facilities.

In December 1985, Moscow agreed to supply four light-water nuclear power reactors but only if North Korea would join the NPT. North Korea joined the treaty on December 12, and two weeks later the Soviet and North Korean prime ministers agreed in principle on the power-reactor deal.

It is unclear what significance North Korean leaders placed on joining the NPT, or what they expected its obligations would be, but it is unlikely that they understood the pressures that would eventually be brought to bear. Under provisions of the treaty, North Korea was allowed eighteen months to negotiate and sign a safeguards (inspection) agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which conducts the inspections. In mid-1987, near the end of the eighteen-month period, the IAEA discovered it had mistakenly sent Pyongyang the wrong kind of agreement document—one designed for individual sites rather than general inspections. Because of the error, the IAEA gave Pyongyang another eighteen months, but that deadline passed in December 1988 with no accord and no movement from Pyongyang. By then North Korea’s prospects for acquiring the Soviet-built power reactors—the reason it had joined the NPT in the first place—had sharply diminished with its declining relations with Moscow and the dwindling fortunes of the Soviet economy. Yet unless it was willing to make a big international stir by withdrawing from the pact, North Korea was stuck with the treaty commitments it had made. There was little indication then, however, that the IAEA’s inspections, even if North Korea submitted to them, would be very onerous.

NUCLEAR DIPLOMACY: THE AMERICAN WEAPONS

When the Bush administration took office in Washington in January 1989, information and concern about the North Korean nuclear program was limited to a small group of American officials with access to the
satellite photographs. Although most intelligence officials had no doubt about the seriousness of the danger, puzzling questions remained. Why, for example, was Yongbyon not better hidden? The flight path for airliners landing at Pyongyang went nearly right over the nuclear complex, making it easily visible to passengers. Such questions were excuses for inaction by a US governmental apparatus that was anything but eager to grapple with this complex and explosive topic. “The real problem was the policymakers’ reluctance to face the issue, an avoidance of reality that probably flowed from the realization of the scope and difficulty of the problem,” according to a former official who dealt with it in both the Reagan and the Bush administrations.

The first impulse of the Bush administration was to inform others with potential influence about what Washington’s space satellites were observing at Yongbyon. If the North Koreans were to be stopped or even slowed, it was clear that the United States would have to gain the cooperation of the other major powers with interests in the Korean peninsula. The chief of the State Department’s Korea Desk, Harry Dunlop, briefed Soviet and Chinese officials in February 1989 about the North Korean nuclear program during visits to their capitals. Later Secretary of State James Baker took up the issue repeatedly with senior officials of the two communist giants. According to Baker, “Our diplomatic strategy was designed to build international pressure against North Korea to force them to live up to their agreement to sign a safeguards agreement permitting inspections.”

In May a US team of experts traveled to Seoul and Tokyo to provide the first extensive briefing for those governments. By then word of the American findings was trickling out, and the State Department feared that failure to provide information could be a blow to South Korean confidence in the United States. Washington was also eager to put its own spin on the news it was imparting.

Before the briefing, an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency official wrote to her superiors, “I think the South Koreans need to be convinced that their interests would not be served by embarking on a weapons program of their own, or allowing our conclusions to become public.” The second of those concerns turned out to be well taken. The highly classified briefing in Seoul, with its gripping conclusion that North Korea might be able to produce atomic bombs by the mid-1990s, leaked almost immediately to the South Korean press, and from there to US and international news media.

After an article that I wrote about the briefing appeared in the
Washington Post
, the North Korea Mission to the United Nations issued a press release, denying any nuclear weapons activity and calling my report “an utterly groundless lie.” Despite the denial, the intelligence briefing and the notoriety it attained launched the public and political tumult over the North Korean nuclear program.

The issue was to dominate US policy regarding the divided peninsula for decades to come, at times to the exclusion of almost anything else.

FIRST STEPS

The North Korean response to growing pressure to permit IAEA inspections was to insist it would never agree while being threatened by American nuclear weapons, especially those based in South Korea. The argument had undeniable logic and appeal. As officials in Washington studied the issue, they also realized it would be difficult to organize an international coalition to oppose North Korean nuclear weapons activity as long as American nuclear weapons were in place on the divided peninsula. A Bush administration interagency committee on the North Korean nuclear issue kept coming back to whether the American nuclear deployments should be removed but was unable to reach a decision.

American nuclear weapons had been stationed on the territory of South Korea for more than three decades, since President Eisenhower authorized the deployment of nuclear warheads on Honest John missiles and 280-millimeter long-range artillery in December 1957. As South Vietnam was faltering in the early 1970s, creating fears about South Korea’s future, American deployments became notably more prominent. By 1972, according to US documents obtained by nuclear researcher William Arkin, 763 nuclear warheads were deployed in South Korea, the peak number ever recorded.

In 1974 congressional committees began raising questions in public about the security and usefulness of the atomic weapons. As a correspondent who often visited Korea, I learned and reported at that time that American nuclear weapons were stationed uncomfortably close to the DMZ and that nuclear warheads had been flown by helicopter almost routinely to the edge of the DMZ in training exercises.

Public threats to use nuclear weapons were part of the US response to nervousness in Seoul following the fall of Saigon. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, publicly acknowledging the presence of American atomic weapons in Korea, declared in June 1975 that “if circumstances were to require the use of tactical nuclear weapons . . . I think that that would be carefully considered.” He added, “I do not think it would be wise to test [American] reactions.” A year later, well-publicized temporary deployments of nuclear-capable US warplanes to Korea in February 1976 and the first of the annual US-ROK Team Spirit military maneuvers that June involved large-scale movements of troops and practice for use of nuclear weapons. In August 1976, nuclear-capable air and naval assets were massively deployed to Korea after the killing of the two American officers in the DMZ tree-cutting episode.

Thereafter, the trend reversed. The Carter administration reduced the number of American nuclear weapons deployed in Korea to about 250 warheads, a reduction due in part to Carter’s withdrawal policies and part to the replacement of some obsolete nuclear weapons by highly accurate conventional weapons. By the onset of the Bush administration in 1989, the Korean deployments had been reduced to about 100 warheads. The cutbacks had been made without public notice, in keeping with the long-standing US policy to “neither confirm nor deny” deployments of nuclear weapons.

American military commanders saw little practical requirement in Korea for the remaining weapons, which were artillery warheads and gravity bombs stored at Kunsan Air Base on the west coast, south of Seoul. In October 1990, US ambassador Donald Gregg, after consulting General Robert RisCassi, the US military commander in Korea, and also the general’s two immediate predecessors, recommended to Washington that the weapons be removed to facilitate the negotiations with the North and to avoid their emergence as a serious political issue in the South. The following spring, Admiral William J. Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an Asia expert, publicly recommended that the nuclear weapons be withdrawn as part of a deal with North Korea. Crowe spelled out in public what others were saying in private, that due to the mobility of US forces, “the actual presence of any nuclear weapons in South Korea is not necessary to maintain a nuclear umbrella over the R.O.K.”

These recommendations, however, ran into deep reservations in Washington. President Bush’s national security adviser, retired lieutenant general Brent Scowcroft, was strongly opposed to removing the American weapons as a concession to the North on the grounds that Pyongyang had done nothing to earn this reward. Equally serious was concern that removal of the weapons would be seen by the South, and especially by its military, as weakening both the US deterrent against the North and the US commitment to defense of the South.

In the spring of 1991, the topic of the nuclear weapons was broached, gingerly at first, in a series of intimate meetings in Seoul involving Gregg, RisCassi, and several senior officials of the Blue House and ROK Defense and Foreign Ministries. Under previous US practice, only the South Korean president—with no aides present—had been briefed on the nature and location of American nuclear weapons in the country. Until the highly confidential “inner-circle meetings” began in Seoul, a Korean civilian participant recalled, “it was taboo even to talk about the American tactical nuclear weapons; for us, they were shocking to consider.”

The discussions deepened in a two-day meeting of American and South Korean military and civilian officials at US Pacific Command
headquarters at Honolulu, Hawaii, in early August. While other issues were mentioned, Washington’s real purpose was to be sure that the Koreans would be comfortable with removal of the remaining American nuclear weapons. At the high point of the sessions, the representative of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff announced the Pentagon’s conclusion that the nuclear deployments in South Korea were not necessary for the country’s defense. Although no strong objections to removal of the weapons were raised by the Koreans, some suggested that they be used as a bargaining chip for concessions from Pyongyang. The meeting concluded without formal agreement.

What finally broke through the inertia in Washington was a dramatic and unexpected development in a different part of the world: the coup attempt in mid-August 1991 by hard-liners against Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Although it failed, the coup marked the transfer of real power from Gorbachev to his rival, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and the beginning of the rapid move toward dissolution of the Soviet Union. On September 27, in an initiative calculated to bring forth reciprocal steps from Moscow, Bush announced the removal of all ground-based and sea-based tactical nuclear weapons from US forces worldwide. The withdrawal of the nuclear artillery from South Korea would leave in place there only some sixty nuclear warheads for air-delivered gravity bombs.

After consulting his advisers, Bush secretly decided to remove these last American nuclear deployments on the peninsula. He also decided in principle to permit North Koreans to inspect the US base at Kunsan where the nuclear weapons had been stored, to meet another of North Korea’s demands. “We were able to hook a ride on a Soviet-related decision,” said Richard Solomon, who as assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs had tried unsuccessfully for many months to deal with the issue of the American nuclear weapons in Korea.

Before making his formal decisions, Bush privately informed South Korean president Roh Tae Woo in a meeting at the United Nations that the United States would continue to provide the nuclear umbrella—that is, nuclear protection against threats to South Korea’s security—whether or not American nuclear weapons were in place on the peninsula.

In December, when the last of the nuclear bombs had been removed, Roh was permitted to announce officially that “as I speak, there do not exist any nuclear weapons whatsoever, anywhere in the Republic of Korea.” Roh’s announcement signaling the withdrawal of the American nuclear weapons had a powerful—seemingly immediate—effect in North Korea, contributing in important fashion to an era of compromise and conciliation.

THE DECEMBER ACCORDS

The winter of 1991 inaugurated a period of unusual progress in North-South relations and in North Korea’s relations with the United States. It was one of those rare periods when the policies of the two Koreas were in alignment for conciliation and agreement, with all the major outside powers either neutral or supportive.

Economically and politically, 1991 had been a very bad year for Kim Il Sung. His estrangement from the Soviet Union the previous year had cost him a crucial alliance and left him with a painful energy shortage and worsening economic problems. North Korean leaders were briefly cheered in August 1991 by the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, and they quickly made it known they hoped it would succeed. However, when the coup failed and Russian president Yeltsin became the de facto leader of the failing Soviet Union, Kim could expect no help or even sympathy from Moscow.