Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
As Graham was en route, a development in the United States had made North Korea’s mood much less conciliatory. On January 26, the day before he arrived, the
New York Times
reported preparations for highly visible reinforcement of American forces in the Korean peninsula: deployment of Patriot missiles, the antimissile weapons used by American forces in the Gulf War. When Graham and his party landed in Pyongyang, antiaircraft missiles could be seen moving into place around the airport. Troops could be seen digging trenches in the capital, even in the subzero cold of the depth of winter. “The tension crackled,” observed a Graham aide.
Deploying the Patriots had been under consideration since December, when they had been requested by the US military commander in Korea,
General Gary Luck, as a precautionary measure in case war broke out. Luck’s December request had been temporarily shelved because of State Department objections that the deployments could affect the negotiations with North Korea over resuming international inspections. But when Michael Gordon, the
Times
Pentagon correspondent, returned from a reporting trip to the South with information about the potential Patriot deployment, “the White House went into a panic,” Gordon recalled later. Fearful that the administration would be charged with withholding vital military equipment from American troops—as had been the case when a US unit had been overwhelmed in Somalia the previous October—the White House immediately began briefing members of Congress on the Patriot request, and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake telephoned Gordon to tell him that Luck’s request was in the process of being approved—giving rise to an exclusive story in the
Times
.
News stories and commentaries about the likely Patriot deployments were replete with references to their use by US forces in Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf. While North Korea was absorbing this decision, the South Korean Defense Ministry announced that the Team Spirit military exercise, which had been a factor in the breakdown of negotiations the previous year, would be held again in 1994 unless North Korea agreed to pending proposals for resumption of international nuclear inspections.
At this point, the tone of North Korean statements shifted from optimistic about the outcome of US-DPRK talks to bitterly accusatory. American experts believed this reflected a shift in the preponderance of opinion among the North Korean leadership. “United States Must Be Held Totally Responsible for Catastrophic Consequences Arising from Its Perfidy” was the headline on the English-language version of a statement issued January 31 by the North Korean Foreign Ministry. The statement cited the decision on the Patriots and reports of the impending decision on Team Spirit as “new war maneuvers the United States has been pursuing behind the screen of the DPRK-USA talks.” North Korea threatened to break off the talks, pull out of the NPT, and accelerate its nuclear program—threats that were repeated in a letter to Gallucci from DPRK chief negotiator Kang Sok Ju, one of a series of missives that had been going back and forth in private between Washington and Pyongyang.
The negotiations had been difficult enough without additional complications. Throughout the fall and winter, the main venue of US-DPRK communications had been a dingy basement room at UN headquarters in New York, where Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Tom Hubbard had been meeting North Korean ambassador Ho Jong, with one or two aides on each side. Each time the Americans felt they had reached an agreement with the North Koreans on resumption of IAEA inspections and North-South negotiations, it collapsed, sometimes because the IAEA or South
Korea refused to compromise its position, sometimes because Pyongyang pulled back from a seemingly agreed position.
After a new round of abortive negotiations, the IAEA established a February 21 deadline for continuing its inspections of the Yongbyon nuclear facilities. Unless an agreement could be reached by then, the international agency said, it would turn the stalemate over to the UN Security Council for action. In advance of the deadline, US diplomats began informal discussions with the four other permanent members of the Security Council about economic and political sanctions to be levied against North Korea, and the Pentagon began preparations to order more than a thousand additional troops to South Korea for the Team Spirit exercise.
At this point in mid-February, the US ambassador to South Korea, James Laney, came to Washington deeply concerned and angry that nobody seemed to be in charge of administration strategy as the situation veered toward conflict with North Korea. Laney, former president of Emory University and, in earlier days, an army enlisted man and later a theology teacher in Korea, made the rounds of senior officials at the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon, and reported that Seoul was calm, but that the ROK government was worried—more about overheated rhetoric and brinksmanship in Washington than about a potential nuclear threat from North Korea. Laney expressed worry about the potential for “accidental war” on the peninsula as the United States unnecessarily “ratcheted up” the IAEA inspection issues and seemed to be pushing North Korea to violent action rather than relying primarily on deterrence, as in the past. General Luck, he reported, agreed with his view. Above all, he insisted, the matter demanded far greater priority and coordination in Washington. Referring to US military and civilian casualties in a new Korean war, Laney warned the White House, “You could have 50,000 body bags coming home.”
The ambassador’s pleas were sobering for Vice President A1 Gore and others in Washington. Partly as a result, Gallucci eventually was named as overall coordinator of US policy toward North Korea, with the rank of ambassador and a charter to coordinate or at least rationalize the disparate views of the White House, State Department, Defense Department, CIA, and various officials and offices within them. Nonetheless, disagreements continued within the executive branch and also in Congress and in the press.
On February 15, North Korea accepted minimum conditions for resumption of IAEA inspections but then, characteristically, refused to issue visas to the inspectors until a number of preconditions were met. Finally, in a renewed set of Hubbard–Ho Jong talks in New York—the twenty-second in a series that had begun the previous September—the two sides agreed on a broad set of measures to take effect simultaneously. On
March 1, which American negotiators dubbed Super Tuesday, everything was to be settled at once: international inspectors were to return to Yongbyon to ensure “continuity of safeguards,” the United States and South Korea were to announce cancellation of the 1994 Team Spirit exercise, working-level North-South contacts were to be launched at Panmunjom in preparation for the exchange of “special envoys,” and the United States and North Korea were to announce that they would convene their long-awaited third round of high-level negotiations on March 21.
By this time, however, the US government and public were thoroughly exasperated by North Korean foot-dragging and reversals. Under pressure from Congress and editorial columnists not to reward Pyongyang prematurely, American officials announced that the third round of negotiations would not start until the IAEA inspections and now-contentious exchange of North-South envoys had been successfully accomplished.
Not surprisingly, both proved problematic. North-South working-level meetings began at Panmunjom but quickly deadlocked over a series of North Korean demands and a stiffening of South Korean positions. At Yongbyon, while IAEA inspectors were permitted to carry out their maintenance and inspection activities at six sites, they were barred from taking sophisticated measurements at key points in the seventh and most sensitive site, the plutonium reprocessing plant. While the North Koreans produced legalistic justifications for its refusal to permit the measurements, IAEA officials concluded that its real purpose was to apply pressure in connection with its dispute with the South over the exchange of envoys. Tom Hubbard, the deputy assistant secretary of state who was heavily involved in the issue on the Washington end, noted the negative feedback loop: “The international need of the IAEA was linked to North-South dialogue where the two Koreas play games.”
From that point on, it was all down hill. On March 15, the international agency ordered its inspectors home, announcing that because they had failed to complete their work, the agency could not verify that there had been no diversion of nuclear materials to bomb production. In a special meeting, the IAEA board finally voted to turn the matter over to the UN Security Council. “The general mood is that the IAEA has really been jerked around long enough,” an administration official told the
Washington Post
.
The US military immediately began consulting Seoul about rescheduling the Team Spirit military exercise. Washington canceled its plans for the third round of US-DPRK negotiations and once again resumed preparations to seek UN sanctions.
On March 19, at a final North-South working-level meeting at Panmunjom to discuss the deadlocked exchange-of-envoys issue, North Korean negotiator Park Yong Su dramatically worsened the explosive atmosphere. After harsh words had flowed back and forth across the table,
Park threatened his southern counterpart, Song Young Dae: “Seoul is not far from here. If a war breaks out, it will be a sea of fire. Mr. Song, it will probably be difficult for you to survive.” Shortly after that, the northern team walked out of the meeting.
South Korean officials watched the exchange on closed-circuit television, which was rigged up to allow a select group in each capital to observe the Panmunjom meetings, even meetings such as this one that were not open to the press. In an unprecedented move, the Blue House, with the approval of Kim Young Sam himself, ordered release of the videotape of the closed meeting to television stations, alarming the South Korean public.
After the breakdown of IAEA inspections and the “sea of fire” remark, Kim Young Sam summoned an emergency meeting of his national security cabinet to approve deployment of the US Patriot missiles, which had been in limbo while the nuclear negotiations held promise of results. The South’s action, in turn, inflamed leadership and military circles in Pyongyang. Suddenly, the Korean situation was headed into a new downward spiral, with potentially calamitous consequences.
T
HE CRISIS OVER
N
ORTH
Korea’s nuclear program that gripped the peninsula and engaged the major powers in the spring of 1994 had much in common with the confrontation a year earlier over North Korea’s threat to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. As before, the North-South dialogue had broken down, pressures from all sides were building up against Pyongyang, and the International Atomic Energy Agency touched off the crisis by publicly declaring North Korea to be in violation of its international obligations.
Since the early-1993 encounter, Pyongyang had been using its nuclear program as a bargaining chip to trade for recognition, security assurances, and economic benefits from the United States. A failing and isolated regime with few other cards to play, Pyongyang enhanced its bargaining power whenever its cooperation with the IAEA diminished and the threat increased that it might proceed to manufacture nuclear weapons. At the same time, such troublemaking actions, if they went too far, also increased the risk of being confronted and possibly overwhelmed by external forces. By this time, North Korea had become skilled at brinksmanship, increasing its leverage by playing close to the edge of the precipice; the problem was that it wasn’t always clear just where the edge was.
In 1994 the crisis intensified, taking on serious military dimensions and falling into a nearly catastrophic action-reaction cycle. As the United States and its allies pushed for UN Security Council sanctions against Pyongyang, North Korea repeatedly declared that “sanctions are a declaration of war.” In response, the Pentagon accelerated a US military buildup in and around Korea that had quietly begun several months earlier. Preparations were being made in Washington for a much more powerful buildup of men and matériel, with great potential for precipitating a military clash on the divided peninsula.
For Robert Gallucci, the spring of 1994 had an eerie and disturbing resemblance to historian Barbara Tuchman’s account of “the guns of August,” when, in the summer of 1914, World War I began in cross-purposes, misunderstanding, and inadvertence. As he and other policy makers moved toward a confrontation with North Korea, Gallucci was conscious that “this had an escalatory quality that could deteriorate not only into a war but into a big war.” Secretary of Defense William Perry, looking back on the events, concluded that the course he was on “had a real risk of war associated with it.” Commanders in the field were even more convinced. Lieutenant General Howell Estes, the senior US Air Force officer in Korea, recalled later that although neither he nor other commanders said so out loud, not even in private conversations with one another, “inside we all thought we were going to war.”
The issue that precipitated this showdown was the unloading of the irradiated fuel rods from the 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon. Such rods, each a yard long and about two inches wide, could be dissolved and chemically treated in the reprocessing plant at Yongbyon to obtain plutonium for atomic weapons.
Based on satellite surveillance of vapor coming from the cooling tower of the reactor—a technique that came to be known as “plumeology”—the CIA estimated that the reactor had been shut down for up to 110 days in 1989, during which period it was assumed about half of its eight thousand irradiated fuel rods could have been removed from the reactor core and reprocessed to produce plutonium. North Korea had told the IAEA the reactor had been down only about 60 days and that only a few rods had been removed because they were damaged. Based on the higher figure, the CIA calculated at the end of 1993 that North Korea might have enough plutonium for one or two bombs of about ten kilotons of explosive power each, similar to those exploded by the United States at Hiroshima in 1945. This CIA estimate was the basis for a 1993 National Intelligence Estimate that there was a “better than even” chance that North Korea already had the makings of a bomb. In the words of a November 2002 unclassified CIA report to Congress, “The US has been concerned about North Korea’s desire for nuclear weapons and has assessed since the early 1990s that the North has one or possibly two weapons using plutonium it produced prior to 1992.”