The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (87 page)

Ironically, a serious blow to the diplomacy began with an attempt by the North Koreans to assuage American fears that they had a hidden enrichment program. In 2002 Washington had charged that the North Koreans had imported large numbers of aluminum tubes that, some analysts argued, were perfectly suited as parts for centrifuges needed in a uranium enrichment facility. In November 2007, the North Koreans took a US diplomat to a facility outside of Pyongyang and handed over what they said was aluminum from the imported tubes, which they claimed were not for enrichment but for another purpose. Testing of the aluminum in US laboratories, however, revealed a few minute particles of highly enriched uranium. The results leaked to the press in December, setting off accusations that the North had been lying all along about its HEU program and had still not stopped. Even if the tubes themselves had nothing to do with HEU, the particles had to come from somewhere. Speculation ranged
from the obvious possibility that the HEU was on the tubes because they really had been used in an enrichment program to the chance that it had migrated from other sources in the North to hypotheses that the amount of the particles was so minuscule as to be inconclusive.

Meanwhile, the North had slowed one of the agreed-to disablement measures—the discharge of fuel rods from the 5-megawatt reactor—probably partly in response to the fact that the Japanese were not delivering their portion of the promised HFO.
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In a statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 6, 2008, Ambassador Hill put the best face on the situation, but not everyone—including the North Koreans—shared his sunniness. A few weeks later, at the time of the Philharmonic’s concert in Pyongyang, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan told an American attending the performance that the six-party process had run into serious problems and that the situation was “bad.”

In May 2008, the North turned over to the Americans around nineteen thousand pages of documents related to its plutonium program—and minute traces of HEU were reportedly detected on the paper. Paper is clearly not a dual-use or proscribed item, but again the argument was that the HEU had to come from somewhere.

The skies cleared momentarily in late June, when on the twenty-sixth the North Koreans delivered (six months late) to the Chinese a “declaration” of their past nuclear activities, as required by the February and October 2007 implementation agreements. Playing its part, Washington responded the same day. The president announced that the United States was lifting provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act applied to North Korea and that he was starting the forty-five-day notification clock required to remove the North from the terrorism list. The following day, with CNN cameras and Ambassador Hill’s deputy, Sung Kim, looking on, the North took another step toward disablement and blew up the cooling tower for the 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon.

An airplane gathering speed on the runway usually lifts off. This one did not. The situation deteriorated again on August 11, when Washington informed the North Koreans that they would not be removed from the terrorism list until, in the words of the State Department spokesman, there was a “strong verification regime” in place to ensure Pyongyang would fulfill its commitment to give up nuclear weapons and all of its nuclear programs. North Korean diplomats complained that the United States had “moved the goal posts” and that the two issues had not previously been linked. Some American negotiators privately agreed.

A few days later, the disablement at Yongbyon stopped, though a public announcement would wait until August 26, when the North Korean Foreign Ministry issued a statement accusing Washington of violating the six-party implementation agreements. As a result, the statement said, the North had decided “to immediately suspend the work of neutralizing our nuclear facilities,” a measure that, it revealed, had come into effect on August 14—three days after Washington announced it was not taking the North off the terrorism list, and very possibly the same day as Kim Jong Il’s stroke.
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The statement said the North would “consider soon the measure of restoring the Yongbyon nuclear facilities to their original state, per our relevant agencies’ strong demand.”

In September 2008, the North announced it was “restoring” the facilities at Yongbyon—that is, reversing the disabling measures. Pyongyang told the IAEA to remove its seals and surveillance from the reprocessing plant and informed the inspectors that they would no longer have access to the facility. Although Washington did not sense it at the time, this move signaled a North Korean decision to undertake a major reversal in approach toward the United States, one that would last for the next nine months.

Events had already started drifting in a negative direction in July, and assuming Kim was healthy on August 12 (when word was flashed to Pyongyang from the North’s UN Mission in New York that the United States was linking the terrorism list to verification), Kim may have quickly decided to counter what would have been seen as Washington’s perfidy. After Kim’s stroke, no one in North Korea, at whatever level, was going to fiddle with that decision. Certainly until Kim recovered, no official would have advocated a course that might be seen as betrayal of a policy formulated when the Supreme Leader was still fully in charge.

At the beginning of October, Ambassador Christopher Hill drove across the DMZ to Pyongyang to see if it would be possible to put the six-party process back on track. In the weeks since Kim’s stroke, Washington had put together a clearer picture of the North Korean leader’s condition, but the Americans had no idea whether there was anyone in Pyongyang who could reverse the August decision to abandon the disablement measures at Yongbyon. Although Kim was slowly recovering, decision making in Pyongyang was likely still paralyzed.

Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan’s opening statements to Hill were blunt. “Mutual cooperation has collapsed,” he said. The deal they had previously reached was “over.” The die, Kim said, “has been cast.” Pyongyang had been testing US intentions, Kim warned, watching how
Washington followed through on the question of removing the North from the terrorism list. Because the US had backed away, it was clear that Washington was not serious and that the only thing left for the North was to “strengthen our deterrent.” By the end of the visit, after several more meetings, Hill thought he had worked the North Koreans out of the corner, but the question of who was leading whom at that point seems open to debate.

At the time of Hill’s trip, no one in Washington or Pyongyang had to look at a calendar to know that the US elections were only four weeks away and that the Bush administration was running out of time. A month later, Barack Obama was elected president. The change of administrations would make no difference to Pyongyang’s plans, however, which were already in motion. In an early warning of what was to come, one ranking North Korean official told an American in a private conversation soon after the US elections that the situation was already out of the hands of the diplomats. Similar warnings would come from other North Korean officials a few months later—all to the effect that decisions sure to cause serious problems with the United States had been reached at the top levels in Pyongyang, and there was nothing that could be done about it.

When the Obama administration took office, the six-party talks were as good as dead, though no one in Washington seemed to notice. Kim Jong Il’s stroke and the succession already had a significant influence on decision making in Pyongyang, but again Washington did not seem to notice or to understand how to factor that into its approach. The Obama administration was new and needed to set its image. Through its early actions, the North challenged the new president, and the administration never found its balance after that.

A TERRIBLE START

One of President Obama’s signature lines in his January 20,2009, inaugural address was aimed at America’s enemies: “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Soon after the inauguration, it became clear that North Korea was not prepared to take up the offer.

In February, according to press reports, US intelligence saw unmistakable signs that North Korea was planning a long-range ballistic missile test. Several nonofficial American delegations were in Pyongyang that month, and they all received the same message—nothing would stop Pyongyang from conducting another launch. In fact, one of the delegations was told by a Foreign Ministry official, “You have no idea how bad things are about to get.” Arguments that the North needed to give the new administration some breathing room were rebuffed out of hand. In late February, the North formally announced plans to launch a satellite; in
March, as a defensive maneuver, it signed the international Outer Space Treaty and gave the requisite notice to mariners and airmen of the impending launch.
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Newly appointed US negotiator Stephen Bosworth, who had been in Pyongyang with a private group in February, was sent out to the region in early March, prepared to go to Pyongyang for talks if the North Koreans guaranteed there would be no missile launch around the time of the visit. The North was not interested in even the appearance of compromise, and after hearing all of the threats and blandishments from the United States, the international community, and most of all China, Pyongyang went ahead with the launch on April 5, 2009.

The first and second stages of the U’nha-2 rocket performed successfully, but as happened in the 1998 attempt, the third stage malfunctioned and the satellite plunged back into the Pacific. Pyongyang television aired pictures of Kim watching the launch and celebrating with the technicians at the control center not far from Pyongyang; yet unless the large screen at the front of the control center depicting the flight’s progress was preprogrammed to show success, Kim would have known within minutes that the attempt had failed. Nevertheless, he posed for a picture with the control center’s personnel, and North Korean media announced that the satellite had entered orbit. Years later more pictures of the event were released that showed Kim’s son Kim Jong Un had been present as well.

A few days before the launch, a statement issued in the name of the KPA General Staff warned that if Japanese or US Navy ships in the sea off the launch area “show even the slightest move for interception regarding our peaceful satellite, our revolutionary armed force will unhesitatingly deal a retaliatory strike of justice.” At the time, that seemed like routine North Korean bluster, but when the subject came up later that year, a KPA general told a visiting group of Americans that KPA air force fighters had been standing by with orders to attack enemy vessels if they interfered with the launch.

The missile launch was followed a week later by a UN Security Council statement of condemnation. The North responded the next day (April 14) with a statement announcing it was withdrawing from the six-party talks and restarting the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. (This was a step beyond Pyongyang’s September 2008 announcement that it was “restoring” the nuclear center.) Once again, the IAEA inspectors were told to pack their bags, and two days later, on April 16, they were on a plane out of the country.

In rapid-fire succession, the UN announced details of new sanctions measures, and the North released another statement, warning that if the Security Council did not issue an apology (which Pyongyang knew would never happen), it would take further, even more provocative, action. “Firstly,” it warned,

the DPRK will be compelled to take additional self-defensive measures in order to defend its supreme interests. The measures will include nuclear tests and test-firings of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Secondly, the DPRK will make a decision to build a light water reactor power plant and start the technological development for ensuring self-production of nuclear fuel as its first process without delay.

The reference to an “intercontinental ballistic missile” deliberately took the North’s missile program out of the “space launch” box into the military sphere, while the reference to producing fuel for an LWR was a blatant signal about development of a uranium enrichment program.
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The warning of measures to defend the country’s “supreme interests” was followed by the North’s second nuclear test, on May 25. This explosion, unlike the first, was large enough (estimates ranged from two to six kilotons) to convince skeptics that the North could make a nuclear weapon. The science of estimating yield from afar is not exact, and much depends on knowing where the actual explosion takes place in order to refine the calculations. After reexamining the data, some experts concluded that the yield for the second test was at the upper end of the calculations and might even have exceeded six kilotons. Unlike the first test, no particles from the nuclear explosion vented into the air, making it impossible to determine certain characteristics of the device. That ability to seal the underground test tunnel became of crucial importance after the third test, in February 2013.

After the North tested a nuclear device early in Obama’s presidency, there was little chance of getting the White House to take seriously the possibility of negotiations with Pyongyang. The Obama administration took the missile and nuclear tests almost as a personal affront, and certainly as confirmation that the most important US goal should be to alter North Korea’s “behavior,” as administration spokesmen constantly repeated, or, in another favorite phrase, to break a cycle of “provocation and reward.” Some members of the administration said they were prepared to
pick up where the Bush administration’s North Korea policy had left off if Pyongyang had kept the six-party talks on track. But those talks were already moribund when the Obama administration took office, and there was not much left in terms of policy to pick up.