The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (50 page)

At the same time, Luck was impressed with the fundamental weakness of the North Korean capacity to sustain a long war. Privation was taking a serious toll on its military, despite the fact that Pyongyang was estimated to be spending about 25 percent of its GNP on maintaining its huge force of 1.1 million troops. North Korean military pilots had long been able to fly only a few hours a year because of the desperate shortage of fuel. Food was scarce, even for the military. Luck was particularly struck with the condition of two Korean People’s Army soldiers, nineteen and twenty-three years old, who had been captured in the South earlier in the year when their small boat had drifted across the sea border. The North Koreans were barely five feet tall and weighed only about a hundred pounds each, which appeared to be typical of KPA regular troops. They were much smaller than average South Koreans of their age group. As they recuperated in the ROK military hospital before being sent back home at their own request, one of the North Koreans was overheard to say to the other that he could never marry a South Korean woman—“they’re too big for us.”

While fighting a war was never far from Luck’s mind, he told me, “my job is deterrence,” to make sure it does not happen. He acknowledged that his was a delicate balancing act, to improve the capabilities of US and ROK forces in a very tense situation without the improvements themselves causing the explosion they were intended to deter. What he wanted to avoid, Luck said, was anything that could “spook” the North Koreans and cause them to react by striking out in a “cornered rat syndrome.” For this reason, he said, it was not helpful for them to believe that the military balance on the peninsula was turning against them—as demonstrably it was. As I prepared to leave Luck’s office, he paused and said gravely, “I just want you to know I’m comfortable in this job. I can do the job. If things go bad, I’m ready. I can handle it.”

As North Korea began defueling its reactor and storm clouds darkened, Luck flew to Washington to join an extraordinary military meeting to prepare to fight in Korea. Secretary of Defense Perry and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General John Shalikashvili summoned every active four-star general and admiral in the US military, including several brought from
commands across the world, to a Pentagon conference room on May 18. The subject was how the entire US military would support Luck’s war plan for Korea, with troops, matériel, and logistics. Among other things, the top military brass went over details of preparatory deployments of troops and transport from other commands, the shifting of US aircraft carriers and land-based warplanes closer to the Korean coast, and plans for massive reinforcement—deployment of roughly half of all US major combat forces—if hostilities actually got under way. Everyone was conscious that this was no paper exercise but “a real meeting of real war fighters to decide how they were going to fight a war,” according to US Navy captain Thomas Flanigan, an officer on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff who helped to set it up. Flanigan described it as “extremely sobering.”

The following day, Perry, Shalikashvili, and Luck took the results of the meeting to the White House and informed President Clinton of the gravity and consequences of the conflict shaping up in Asia. If war broke out in Korea, they estimated it would cost 52,000 US military casualties, killed or wounded, and 490,000 South Korean military casualties in the first ninety days, plus an enormous number of North Korean and civilian lives, at a financial outlay exceeding $61 billion, very little of which could be recouped from US allies. This horrendous tragedy would be by far the gravest crisis of Clinton’s sixteen-month-old presidency, overwhelming nearly everything else he had planned or dreamed of doing at home or abroad.

As the enormity of the consequences sank in, Clinton summoned a meeting of his senior foreign-policy advisers the next day, May 20, to discuss the Korean confrontation. To the surprise of most journalists and experts who had been following the crisis—but who did not know about the nature or conclusions of the military meetings—the administration suddenly veered back toward diplomatic efforts, offering to convene its long-postponed third round of high-level negotiations with Pyongyang despite the unloading of the nuclear reactor.

North Korea signaled its interest in the US offer by resuming working-level meetings in New York with State Department officials on May 23 to plan for the third round. But before progress could be made, the IAEA declared on June 2 that its ability to verify the reactor’s past history had been “lost” due to the faster-than-expected defueling. After receiving the IAEA assessment, the administration decided to seek UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea. “They have triggered this, not the United States or anyone else,” Clinton told reporters. “I just don’t think we can walk away from this.”

Looking back on the crisis, Perry identified the defueling of the North Korean reactor as the turning point, when it appeared that dialogue and “preventive diplomacy” had failed and when US strategy shifted to “coercive diplomacy,” involving sanctions. In the view of American military
planners, the unloaded fuel rods represented a tangible and physical threat that the DPRK could move ahead to manufacture nuclear weapons. If not stopped near the beginning, they believed, North Korea could eventually possess an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons, which it could use for threats and blackmail and even to sell to high bidders in the Middle East. That simply could not be permitted to happen. Thus, despite the serious risk of war, “we believed that it was even more dangerous to allow North Korea to proceed with a large-scale nuclear weapons program,” according to the secretary of defense.

From the American perspective, the unloaded fuel rods were a potential threat—once reprocessed, the North would possess a lot of plutonium. But it is not clear that the North intended to proceed with reprocessing. Rather, all along it may have intended to stop at unloading. That would have served two purposes: first, the North might have hoped, to destroy the history of the reactor’s operations and, second, to be in a better position to move on to reprocessing more quickly when and if the situation warranted. If eight thousand irradiated fuel rods sitting in the reactor were good, having those rods out of the reactor and in a cooling pond was even better.

To prepare for the potential storm, the Pentagon moved full steam ahead on its plans for additional US military deployments. Simultaneously, the State Department launched a new round of talks about the nature and timing of international sanctions in the capitals of major powers and at the United Nations.

THE DEEPENING CONFLICT

The devastating possibilities of the deepening conflict were alarming to many of those most familiar with North Korea. Even administration officials conceded that sanctions were unlikely to force Pyongyang to reverse course: the isolated country was relatively invulnerable to outside pressures, since it had so little international commerce and few important international connections of any sort. Moreover, if it felt backed into a corner, it might actually follow through with its threats and fight rather than capitulate.

A gaping omission in all that had been said and done was the absence of direct communication between the US administration and the one person whose decisions were law in Pyongyang. Early in 1993, Les Aspin, Clinton’s original secretary of defense, had proposed bringing the nuclear issue to a head by sending a delegation to make a bold and direct appeal to Kim Il Sung, but this was turned down as too risky. Under Perry, Aspin’s successor, the Pentagon continued to urge direct contacts with Kim, but high-level dialogue by then had been identified by the State Department
as a principal reward for good behavior, not to be permitted until North Korea earned it with agreements and performance.

However, in late-May 1994, when the defueling crisis worsened and the Pentagon presented its alarming war plan, Clinton, at the urging of Perry and Ambassador Laney, asked Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) to fly to Pyongyang to see Kim Il Sung. North Korea turned down the hastily prepared visit at the last minute, apparently because of a conflict with the Great Leader’s schedule.

In early June, as Clinton opted for sanctions, former president Jimmy Carter reentered the Korea saga to play another historic role. Having been defeated for reelection in 1980, the successful broker of the Camp David accords in the Middle East carved out for himself a mission of promoting peaceful resolution of conflicts through his Atlanta-based Carter Center. At sixty-nine years of age, the vigorous former president had already played a postpresidential intermediary role in the Middle East, Ethiopia, the Sudan, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia.

Carter had received invitations from Kim Il Sung in 1991, 1992, and 1993 to visit Pyongyang, but each time he had been asked by the State Department not to go on the grounds that his trip would complicate the Korean problem rather than help to resolve it. The ROK government, mindful of Carter’s abortive efforts as president to withdraw US troops, opposed Carter’s return to Korean affairs.

As the sanctions drive got under way, Carter expressed his growing anxiety in a telephone call to Clinton. Briefed on June 5 by Gallucci, who was sent to Plains for that purpose, Carter learned to his dismay that there was no American plan for direct contact with Kim Il Sung. He immediately dispatched a letter to Clinton, telling him he had decided to go to Pyongyang in view of the dangers at hand. Clinton, on the advice of Vice President Gore, interposed no objection to the trip as long as Carter clearly stated that he was acting as a private citizen rather than as an official US envoy. As Carter was launching his initiative and proceeding to Seoul en route to Pyongyang, a series of new developments added to the importance of his mission.

In the diplomatic field, the administration drew up a program of gradually enforced sanctions against North Korea for refusing to cooperate with the IAEA. As prepared for the Security Council, the sanctions resolution would have given North Korea a thirty-day grace period to change its policies, after which such relatively lightweight measures as a ban on arms sales and transfers of nuclear technology to Pyongyang would take effect. This would be followed, if necessary, by a second group of more painful sanctions, including a ban on remittances from abroad, such as those from pro–North Korean groups in Japan, and a cutoff of the vital oil supplies furnished by China and others. A potential third
stage, if the others failed, was a blockade of shipping to and from North Korean ports.

Among the other major powers directly involved—Russia, Japan, and China—there was little enthusiasm for even the mildest set of sanctions.

Russia was in the process of attempting to rebuild relations with North Korea, which had nearly been destroyed in the abrupt 1990 Soviet turn toward South Korea. In March, in an effort to find a role for itself in the crisis, the Russian Foreign Ministry had proposed an international conference of the two Koreas, the four major outside powers, the UN, and the IAEA to resolve the nuclear issue. None of the other parties had accepted it, but Russia continued to advocate such a meeting prior to any UN sanctions.

For Japan, the crisis on the Korean peninsula was serious and close to home. Tokyo had been severely criticized in the West for failing to assist the American effort in the 1991 Gulf War, despite its dependence on Gulf oil. To fail to do its part to back up sanctions and assist the US military where its own security was potentially at stake would be far more damaging to its reputation and self-esteem and could have been devastating to the US-Japanese alliance. Yet the difficulties were great.

The Japanese political system was in an especially volatile and vulnerable state. At the time of the crisis, the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party had splintered and lost power, and the eight-party coalition government of Prime Minister Tsutomu Hata was in danger of collapsing. Its continuation in office depended on the acquiescence of the Japan Socialist Party, which had historically close relations with Pyongyang and was reluctant to take action against it.

If full-scale sanctions were to be voted by the UN Security Council, the Japanese government believed it would have no choice but to enforce a cutoff of the remittances from Koreans in Japan to North Korea, which were estimated at about $600 million annually. After extensive study, however, Japanese officials told their American counterparts it was unlikely they would be able to cut this off completely, since there were many ways beyond its control by which such money could flow, ranging from the transfer of suitcases full of currency to electronic transfers through Switzerland, Hong Kong, and other financial capitals. In a secret report, a government task force expressed concern that in case of such a crackdown, pro-Pyongyang residents of Japan would mount “severe protest activities” against Japanese government and UN offices in Japan and the US Embassy, possibly involving violence and the destruction of property, verging on civil war.

An even more vexing problem was what Japan could or could not do to assist the US military in a blockade or shooting war within the bounds of General Douglas MacArthur’s post–World War II “no war” constitution,
which sharply limits Japanese military actions outside its home islands. As its military buildup neared, US Forces Japan drew up a planning list of nineteen hundred items of potentially needed assistance, ranging from cutting the grass at US bases to supplying fuel, matériel, and weapons and using Japanese ships and planes for sweeping mines and gathering intelligence. The Japanese government, concerned that it might be unable to meet US requests, set up a special headquarters to define what it would be able to do and was preparing short-term legislation to permit military cooperation. Had this been put to the test, said a Japanese diplomat who was deeply involved, it would have been “a nightmare.” As a result of this experience, Japan and the United States began an extensive review of Japanese guidelines for military-crisis cooperation.