Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
In what seemed only a minor piece of business at the end of the June 11 session, the American side suggested that follow-up communications take place through the North Korean UN Mission in New York. This move, which the DPRK officials immediately understood and accepted, gave the two countries a direct, authorized, and far more workable conduit for exchanges than the rigidly structured diplomatic talks in Beijing that had taken place periodically since 1988. If North Korea’s objective had been to seize the attention of Washington and force it to negotiate seriously on a bilateral basis, its strategy had succeeded brilliantly. Undoubtedly, it enhanced Kang’s standing with Kim Jong Il, no small achievement that would be important for the years of negotiations that were to follow.
On July 1, as Washington officials prepared for the next round of talks with Pyongyang on the nuclear issue, the new South Korean president, Kim Young Sam, voiced harsh criticisms of the negotiations in separate interviews with the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) and the
New York Times
. In the
Times
interview, which drew the most attention in the US capital, Kim charged that the North Koreans were manipulating the negotiations “to buy time to finish their project,” and he expressed hope that the United States would “not continue to be led on by North Korea.” American officials, who had undertaken the negotiations at the suggestion of the South and had kept the South informed step by step, reacted with shock and anger.
This was only the first in a series of surprises from Kim Young Sam. Like much of the Korean public, whose feelings about the North are a complicated mixture of kinship, disdain, and fear, Kim’s views on North Korea were replete with inconsistency.
Kim had had little to do with North Korea issues during most of his career as an opposition political leader. Except for his strong prodemocracy stands, he was considered moderate to conservative on most political issues. As noted in Chapter 6, his mother had been murdered in 1960 by a North Korean agent who had invaded his parents’ home. In 1992 his successful campaign for president featured anticommunist attacks on his longtime adversary, Kim Dae Jung, whom he falsely accused of being endorsed by Pyongyang. On the other hand, in his February 1993 inaugural address, Kim Young Sam offered to meet his North Korean counterpart “at any time and any place,” and he declared that as members of the same Korean family, “no ally can be more valuable than national kinship.” The latter remark, implying a higher priority for reconciliation with the North than alliance with the United States, created something of a sensation on both sides of the DMZ.
What drove Kim Young Sam’s northern policies above all were the tides of domestic public opinion. Unlike his military predecessors, Kim was a professional politician with a keen interest in the shifting views of the public. Known for relying more on his feel for the political aspects of issues than any overall strategy, he cited newspaper headlines or television broadcasts more often in internal discussions than official papers, which aides complained he did not read. According to a White House official, Kim constantly referred to polling data, public opinion, and political positioning in discussing his reactions to events, even in meetings and telephone calls with the US president.
In mid-July, just prior to the second round of US–North Korean negotiations, Kim was personally reassured about American policy by President Clinton, who came to Korea for a brief visit following the Group of Seven summit conference in Tokyo. Traveling to the DMZ for the traditional meeting with American troops, the US president, clad in a fatigue jacket and “U.S. Forces Korea” cap, was taken to the very edge of the Bridge of No Return—close to where the two American officers had been beaten to death in 1976 and much closer to the border with North Korea than his predecessors had come during their visits to Korea. Turning to a press pool accompanying him, Clinton held forth on the issue of the day: due to US security commitments, he said, “it is pointless for [North Koreans] to try to develop nuclear weapons because if they ever use them it would be the end of their country.”
Clinton’s remarks went over well in South Korea and at home, where he was considered suspect among many military-oriented people for evading the draft during the Vietnam War, but they were unwelcome in Pyongyang, where Foreign Ministry officials were preparing for the talks with the Americans. When the negotiations convened on July 14 in Geneva, Kang protested that the United States had promised in June not to
threaten the DPRK, yet Clinton had publicly threatened them with annihilation while standing in military garb on their very border. The Americans responded that when it came to bellicose language, Pyongyang had few peers. “The President of the United States went to South Korea. What did you expect him to say there?” Gallucci retorted. It soon became clear that Kang had been obliged to respond with tough rhetoric but had no intention of breaking off the negotiations.
The second day of negotiations took place in the North Korean Mission in Geneva, the first time they had been on North Korea’s home turf; all the meetings in New York and the first one in Geneva had been in American buildings. The DPRK Mission had been polished up for the occasion, complete with gleaming silver trays on which were arrayed delicate Swiss pastries. This was in startling contrast to the minimal hospitality of the rich Americans, whose entertainment budget was limited to coffee and rolls served on paper plates.
With appropriate fanfare, North Korea put forward an initiative that would change the nature of the negotiations. The DPRK had undertaken a peaceful nuclear program in good faith, Kang Sok Ju began, using natural uranium, of which the North had an abundance, and gas-graphite technology, which was widely available. Although it had no intention of producing nuclear weapons, he insisted, other nations were concerned that the facilities had a big potential for weapons production. The DPRK, he announced, was willing to shift its entire nuclear development program to more up-to-date, less proliferation-prone light-water reactors (LWRs) to fill its energy needs, if these could be supplied by the international community.
Light-water reactors are much more complex than the gas-graphite reactors then in service or under construction in the North. Virtually all the key LWR components were beyond North Korea’s technological or industrial capability and would have to be imported from abroad. The Americans at the conference table with technical expertise were unimpressed with what one called a “totally hare-brained” scheme, because of the expense and complexity involved. Energy experts realized that North Korea’s electricity requirements could be met much more easily and cheaply with nonnuclear fuels and that large nuclear reactors would actually be a threat to the North’s fragile electric grid.
But other members of the US team immediately saw Pyongyang’s offer as a face-saving way to resolve the proliferation and inspection questions. It could modernize its nuclear power production without ever admitting it had been seeking to make atomic weapons. As soon as Kang announced his offer, Robert Carlin, the senior North Korea watcher in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, wrote on his note pad, “They want out of this issue.”
Gallucci was skeptical at first that North Korea was serious about trading in its indigenous nuclear program, but he quickly saw the positive possibilities for international control of the North Korean program. He also saw the immense difficulties, especially the high costs involved. “The last time I looked, such reactors cost about $1 billion per copy,” he told the North Koreans.
North Korea’s quest for light-water reactors, although new to most of the Americans at the conference table, actually had a long history, including, as noted above, the deal with Moscow. Although that deal fell apart after the collapse of the USSR, the allure of more modern nuclear facilities remained undimmed in leadership circles in Pyongyang, which saw nuclear power as a way out of what it worried was a persistent and worsening energy crisis. When IAEA director general Hans Blix visited North Korea in May 1992, he was asked to help North Korea acquire light-water reactors and to guarantee a secure supply from abroad of the enriched uranium fuel they would require. Blix promised to try to help. Two months later, DPRK deputy premier Kim Dal Hyon, on a visit to Seoul, proposed that the two Koreas cooperate on an LWR plant, to be built in the North close to the DMZ, to provide power to both economies. Under this plan, South Korea would provide most of the capital and technology. The proposal, which was kept secret at the time, was shoved aside during the deterioration of North-South relations later in the year and went nowhere. Kim Dal Hyon was demoted, as were others seen as “pragmatists.”
When the LWR proposal was resurrected in the Geneva negotiations with the United States, Gallucci was warned by senior State and Defense Department officials against making any commitment, especially a financial commitment, to the proposal. On July 19, at the end of six days of talks, Gallucci agreed in a formal statement that the United States would “support the introduction of LWRs and . . . explore with the DPRK ways in which LWRs could be obtained,” but only as part of a “final resolution” of nuclear issues. Gallucci later said this gauzy statement was “seven times removed from any commitment” to provide LWRs. The July announcement was issued as two “unilateral” but identical statements. After the beating it took from the South in June, Washington was not interested in another “joint” statement with the North.
The negotiations adjourned without progress on the contentious issue of permitting IAEA “special inspections” of the two suspected nuclear waste sites. The sides agreed to continue meeting, but in a separate “explanatory” statement Gallucci underlined that the United States would not begin the third round of negotiations until “serious discussions” were under way on nuclear issues in North-South channels and between North Korea and the IAEA.
KIM YOUNG SAM BLOWS THE WHISTLE
The American–North Korean negotiations in June had had the limited objective of persuading Pyongyang not to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Washington had offered limited benefits in return. Privately, Gallucci characterized his initial negotiating posture as, “If they do everything we want, we send them a box of oranges.” The North Korean offer in July, to give up its entire indigenous nuclear program in favor of the proliferation-resistant light-water reactors, had dramatically changed the bidding. Now the objective in view was much more ambitious—but it was also clear that Pyongyang would demand more extensive benefits in return. While American officials were intrigued and some elated, many in Seoul were unhappy with the shift from limited to virtually unlimited US-DPRK talks.
As it turned out, progress toward meeting the American conditions for convening the third round of US-DPRK talks, in which broader issues were to be discussed, was excruciatingly slow, so slow that the third round almost never happened. Talks between North Korea and the Vienna-based IAEA quickly sank into exasperating arguments over the DPRK’s obligations. As the IAEA saw it, North Korea was still required by treaty to comply with all nuclear inspection requirements that had been or would be imposed on it, like any other signatory, as long as it had not officially left the NPT. Pyongyang, however, insisted that in suspending its withdrawal from the treaty, it had entered a “special” and “unique” category in which it alone would determine what inspection requirements to accept. It was ready to accept very few.
To keep check on the North Korean program while the arguments continued, Washington invented an interim concept called “continuity of safeguards,” which it insisted was essential. This required that agency inspectors be admitted to the Yongbyon site to replace films and batteries in monitoring equipment and to make other nonintrusive tests to check that no diversion of nuclear materials was taking place. The IAEA was uncomfortable with this ad hoc concept—insisting that North Korea should comply in the fullest with its requirements—but reluctantly went along. With film and batteries running down or even running out from time to time, the IAEA repeatedly threatened to declare that “continuity of safeguards” had been lost. It was clear that such a declaration would trigger an immediate demand for UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea.
IAEA inspectors were permitted to return to Yongbyon in August (as they had been in mid-May) but only to replace the film and batteries in the monitoring equipment. The IAEA protested vigorously that this was not enough and publicly criticized North Korea. Pyongyang reacted with bitter rhetoric. Under pressure, North Korea in September and October
offered to accept another visit for film and battery replacement, but the IAEA rejected the conditions, declaring them to be insufficient. And so it went.
Action on the North-South front, the other prerequisite for convening the third round of US–North Korean negotiations, was even less productive. In May South Korea proposed meetings between the two sides to work on the nuclear issues, and North Korea counterproposed an exchange of “special envoys” to deal with unification issues and prepare a North-South summit. Despite a series of exchanges over the summer and fall, the two sides could not even agree to convene working-level meetings at Panmunjom to prepare for more important meetings. Working-level contacts were finally convened for three days in October but without results.
In early-October 1993, with no progress being made on any front, Representative Gary Ackerman, the ebullient and earthy Democratic lawmaker from New York City, traveled to Pyongyang on a get-acquainted mission. Earlier in the year, Ackerman had succeeded Stephen Solarz as chairman of the Asia-Pacific Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and thus he carried considerable weight in Congress. He bore a message from the administration, which he delivered in person to Kim Il Sung, that the United States wished to resolve its issues with the DPRK through dialogue and negotiations and wished to resume the bilateral engagement at the political level.