Sleepwalking With the Bomb (15 page)

Less than six months after America’s all-but-engraved invitation, on June 25, 1950, Kim Il-Sung’s Soviet-equipped troops crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. The attack caught the United States flat-footed.

Acheson alerted President Truman, at home in Missouri, and the UN Secretary-General, Trygvye Lie, who immediately convened the Security Council. Charged at the end of World War II with the ambitious goal of maintaining international peace, the Security Council faced a major test. Of its five permanent members with the power of veto—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Nationalist China, and the USSR—one had encouraged North Korea’s aggression and would likely veto any effort to help South Korea. Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist China, the loser of China’s quarter century of intermittent civil war, had retreated to the island of Taiwan the year before. This left the mainland—and the Korean border—to Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party.

Less than 24 hours after the North Korean attack, the Security Council met in New York City to discuss the crisis. In a diplomatic blunder they did not repeat until 2011 (as to intervention in Libya), the Russians boycotted the meeting and lost their chance to veto. President Truman assembled a 16-nation coalition under the auspices of the United Nations, and American soldiers soon were fighting what became officially known as a “police action” under the UN aegis.

General Douglas MacArthur—who himself had publicly excluded South Korea from the sphere of vital American interests on March 14, 1949—took back the southern half of the peninsula and decided to press onward, crossing the 38th parallel and eventually reaching the North Korea–China border. MacArthur, who viewed nuclear weapons as a legitimate military option, calculated that a nuclear-armed United States need not fear Chinese intervention. Paul Nitze, then President Truman’s national security adviser, saw cable traffic indicating that Mac-Arthur’s goal was to invade China, overthrow Mao Zedong, and restore Chiang Kai-Shek to power. Nitze noted that MacArthur had no idea how small the U.S. nuclear arsenal was in 1950.
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On October 7 the UN authorized combat operations inside North Korea, as the Truman administration adopted reunification of North and South as a war aim. But catching MacArthur by surprise, the People’s Republic of China (like North Korea, neither a true people’s government nor a republic) entered the war on October 23. Its confrontation with the UN-led army was the first direct military engagement between American and Communist troops, an initially disastrous one for the Americans. China had 4 million men under arms, dwarfing the UN forces.

It is a common misperception that MacArthur’s decision to go to the Yalu River was the reason that China entered the war. In fact, Henry Kissinger writes, the triggers were American forces becoming engaged in combat on July 5, plus the Seventh Fleet’s “neutralizing” the Taiwan Strait, a move designed to preclude a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. For Mao, any American presence in the Korean Peninsula was an intolerable provocation, engendering Chinese historical fears of encirclement.

In Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, MacArthur faced a ruthless adversary utterly indifferent to massive loss of life. In discussing the prospect of a nuclear war, Mao remarked: “We may lose more than 300 million people. So what? War is war.” Although America’s nuclear weapons status did not deter Chinese aggression, the existence of nuclear weapons was not without strategic weight during the conflict. On August 5, after only six weeks of war, Truman had approved sending 10 B-29s armed with A-bombs to Guam for possible use in Korea. (Only nine planes made it, one having crashed.)

Chinese leaders knew of the American cache of atomic weapons stored on Okinawa. On November 30, 1950—a month after American forces were attacked by Chinese “volunteers” and shortly before the American retreat began—President Truman refused to rule out use of the atomic bomb in Korea. Yet Truman announced just eight days later that he would not use atomic weapons without first consulting with Great Britain, a key partner in the Korean War coalition. Then on April 6, 1951, Truman authorized General Hoyt Vandenberg to be his deputy, and at his discretion to order release of the A-bombs for use in Korea.

In 1951 MacArthur, invited to address Congress after President Truman had fired him, explained: “But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war there is no substitute for victory.” The Korean War ended two years later, on July 27, 1953, with an armistice but no formal peace treaty. Thus, a technical legal state of war persists to this day.

Kissinger argues that in 1950 the U.S. missed a potentially great strategic opportunity. Had MacArthur not advanced all the way to the Chinese border, but only 100 miles into North Korea, he would have taken the North’s capital, Pyongyang, and also its prime port, Wonsan; and the South would have had a 100-mile wide front to defend against Mao’s troops, instead of 400 miles along the Yalu River; the current front along the 38th parallel is 151 miles. Had that line been held it would have placed Seoul out of range of the North’s artillery, and thus made South Korea far more secure than it is today. Had the boundary been drawn there in 1945, war would have been less likely.

For his part President Eisenhower, sworn in on January 20, 1953, never intended to use the atomic bomb in the last months of the Korean War, or on any other occasion thereafter. Proof of that came on May 1, 1954, when he rejected a request from France for help in the last days of France’s war with the North Vietnamese, telling his National Security Adviser, Robert Cutler:

I certainly do not think that the atom bomb can be used by the United States unilaterally. You boys must be crazy. We cannot use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God.

Thus did Eisenhower simultaneously affirm Western values and separate them from Mao’s. Later, in 1956, Eisenhower read a report estimating that in a superpower all-out nuclear exchange America would suffer at least 65 percent casualties—some 110 million out of America’s then-170 million population—and wrote in his diary: “Even if the United States were ‘victorious,’ it would literally be a business of digging ourselves out of ashes, starting again.”

North Korea’s place on the geostrategic chessboard, long underwritten by the former Soviet Union, survived the end of the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet evil empire, because China stepped in as big-power sponsor of the North. For the first 40 years after the 1953 armistice North Korea was rarely a prime focus of concern. Periodically it would threaten its southern neighbor, and from time to time precipitate border incidents by acts of low-grade aggression.

The U.S., UK, and USSR signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT) in 1970. Grandfathering in the five self-proclaimed nuclear powers (Israel was silent)—the U.S., United Kingdom, France, USSR, and China—the treaty requires that other countries surrender the right to build nuclear weapons in return for the right to gain access to and to use nuclear materials solely for peaceful purposes. The five declared powers are eventually to totally disarm, fulfilling the treaty’s final goal of a nuclear-free world. North Korea signed this treaty in 1985.

But sometime in the early 1980s the North began a nuclear program, and in 1994 this came to the outside world’s attention. First, an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection of Pyongyang’s nuclear power facilities discovered illegally diverted plutonium from the Yongbyon plant, in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty. Former President Jimmy Carter went to Pyongyang on his own to maneuver the Clinton administration into a negotiation, emerging with a preliminary bargain that froze alternate diplomatic options. That July, Kim Il-Sung died and his despot son, Kim Jong-Il, succeeded him as head of state.

In the resultant Agreed Framework accord of October 21, 1994, the United States agreed to replace the North’s graphite-moderated reactors with light-water reactor power plants, intended solely for commercial use. The U.S. hoped to move the North Korean regime towards peaceful reconciliation with South Korea and finally towards officially settling the Korean War. The spent fuel from the graphite plants was to be turned over to the IAEA and not reprocessed to extract plutonium from the nuclear waste. The U.S. agreed to ship crude oil in sufficient quantity to replace energy loss from closing the graphite plants, and to formally assure the North against U.S. nuclear threats or actual use.

The North, for its part, committed to (1) remain within the regulatory regime of the treaty, (2) allow inspections of its nuclear plants pursuant to the treaty’s rules, (3) implement jointly with South Korea denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and (4) participate in a North-South dialogue.

The North, needless to say, did not do any of these things. In October 2002 it told U.S. negotiators that it had a nuclear weapon (the North denies having said this). In December, it expelled inspectors, and two weeks later announced it was withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In August 2003, after the North’s withdrawal became effective, the UN Security Council tried to calm the situation by convening six-party talks with the United States, Russia, China, and Japan, in addition to the two Koreas. In October 2006 North Korea exploded its first nuclear weapon in an underground test. The only known route to produce a North Korean bomb was to reprocess spent fuel from a commercial uranium reactor and extract the plutonium by-product. But in May 2010 Pyongyang revealed a previously undisclosed uranium enrichment plant. This plant gave the country a direct route to uranium nuclear bombs, easier to make than plutonium ones.

As former vice president Dick Cheney notes in his memoir,
In My Time,
U.S. intelligence concluded that North Korea likely had begun cooperating with Syria in nuclear matters as early as 1997. This is further evidence that the North had violated its 1994 Agreed Framework deal with the United States. Cheney notes that Pyongyang followed a pattern of making, then breaking deals; of threatening dire consequences if not offered more concessions, then winning more concessions—all without moderating its behavior. At a January 16, 2007, meeting, Cheney reports, American diplomats treated their North Korean counterparts to a lavish dinner and offered concessions. One delegation member summed it up perfectly: “We pulled out all the stops because we wanted to demonstrate that we were serious and sincere.” That the United States proceeded this way without asking similar proof of North Korea’s sincerity speaks volumes about the effectiveness of the “negotiations.”

Attempts to coerce the North into ending its nuclear program—the Security Council’s resolutions, the United States’ targeting of North Korean trade and finances (including restrictions on trade in embargoed goods and freezing of key officials’ assets)—have all failed. Meanwhile, the North seriously escalated the Korean Peninsula crisis in 2010, sinking a South Korean ship without provocation and shelling a small island controlled by the South, equally without provocation. However, when South Korea responded with military moves and threatened to use force, the North retreated.

The North did not simply pursue its own nuclear program. It entered into the shadowy network set up by renegade Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, which distributed nuclear technology until Khan’s cover was blown and it was shut down. It has closely cooperated with Iran, helped the now defunct Libyan program, and built the partially completed nuclear plant in the Syrian Desert that Israel destroyed on September 6, 2007. Its latest effort, according to some Western intelligence sources, is a venture with Burma to build a nuclear plant to make fuel for either North Korean or Burmese bombs. Burma also reportedly plans to ship yellowcake uranium—a powdered, partially processed uranium ore—to Iran, which has the facilities to further enrich the yellow-cake.

Not stopping there, the North is working on its ballistic missiles. In 2009, it fired a test shot in the direction of Hawaii, passing over Japan en route. One North Korean model, the TD-2, reportedly has a planned design range of 9,300 miles when operational. At that distance it could hit anywhere in the 50 states. Recent large-rocket test failures suggest, however, that it could be several years before the U.S. will be in range of the North’s operational rocketry.

T
HE DECEMBER
2011 death of Kim Jong-Il creates new uncertainty about the North’s future. The North Korean people surely want change, but they face a heavily armed police state. Western sanctions are riddled with loopholes. Can positive regime change happen?

Third son Kim Jong-Eun, designated “Great Successor,” is apparently but a figurehead, with one or more relatives ruling as regents, so to speak. He is young (about 28) and has lived much of his life in Japan—not a plus to Koreans, whose national memory includes a brutal Japanese occupation of the Peninsula from 1910 to 1945 and especially brutal treatment during World War II. Lacking the careful grooming the regime’s founding ruler gave his son, Kim Jong-Eun depends upon the loyalty of his Praetorian Guard. The
praetors
—elite guards of the Roman Emperor—were known at times to turn on their ruler. Modern editions can play much the same role; should inner-circle loyalties shift, regime change could come from within. While Kim Jong-Il took steps to purge possibly disloyal elements, there is no assurance that such steps will succeed in protecting his son. With neither his grandfather’s charismatic authority nor the training his grandfather gave his father, Kim Jong-Eun is vulnerable. That Kim Jong-Il designated his successor only in September 2010, two years after he had suffered a major debilitating stroke, made his pick less likely to be accepted. Successors in dictatorial regimes must be chosen when the leader in place has full power to command allegiance from potential rivals. Callow youth is moreover hardly likely to be trusted as sole custodian of the nuclear car keys.