Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
From the beginning, six-party talks faced several serious obstacles. The theory behind them contained a major flaw. Multiparty negotiations were conceived by Washington as a way to avoid US-DPRK bilateral talks, out of the mistaken belief that direct negotiations had worked to North Korea’s advantage. Yet, in practice, as long as Washington stuck
to its resistance to bilateral talks, the six-party arrangement never worked. The North Koreans controlled the pace of the multilateral forum, and they would not relent until they regained serious bilateral contact with the United States. Moreover, the first three years (2003–2005) of six-party talks were mostly wasted as the American side fought endless internal bureaucratic battles to ensure that the US position did not in any way resemble the approach of the Clinton administration. Any description of meetings with the North as “negotiations” set off frenzied denials. The word
freeze
was considered poisonous, even though, as the North pointed out, a freeze of the facilities at Yongbyon was logically the first step in any new deal. Perhaps the most deadly taboo for the Americans was any hint that the North had a right to civilian nuclear power. That position put the United States at odds with Beijing, Moscow, and even Seoul, helping ensure that the hoped-for phalanx of five-against-one never materialized.
All the while, the North’s nuclear weapons program moved ahead without hindrance. In early-October 2003, barely a month after the first round of six-party talks ended, Pyongyang announced that it was changing the purpose of reprocessing the spent fuel rods from civilian needs to building a “nuclear deterrent,” terminology the North had introduced a few months earlier as part of the slow buildup to explicitly acknowledging its weapons program. Later that month, Pyongyang announced that at “the appropriate time,” it would display its nuclear deterrence to the skeptics. It turned out to be not too long of a wait.
In January 2004, in a calculated gesture of “transparency” to demonstrate how far its nuclear program had progressed while the diplomatic front was stalled, Pyongyang opened the nuclear center at Yongbyon to a visiting American delegation led by Stanford professor John Lewis. North Korean technicians handed to one of the Americans—Dr. Siegfried Hecker, a plutonium specialist who was formerly the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory—two sealed glass jars, one containing a greenish plutonium compound and the other a thin-walled metal funnel. The North Koreans claimed these were the products of the previous year’s reprocessing campaign. From their appearance, Hecker concluded that both jars might well contain forms of processed plutonium. If so, it would mean the North was indeed on its way to producing a bomb.
Once back in the United States, in order to provide a factual basis for evaluating progress in the North’s nuclear program, Hecker presented his observations as widely but as carefully as possible, without creating undue alarm. It made no difference to US policy. The Bush administration was determined not to give the North Koreans what it thought they were
after—a flustered reaction from the United States and its allies. Secretary Colin Powell made sure to appear unflappable in public when questioned about the North’s nuclear capabilities. Early in the crisis, he emphasized that the North Koreans needed to concentrate on their economy. They couldn’t, Powell said, eat plutonium.
The North would invite American delegations back to Yongbyon several more times over the next six years, on each occasion attempting to demonstrate that what it was claiming in public about its nuclear program reflected reality on the ground. As of this writing, the last visit took place in mid-November 2010, when Lewis, Hecker, and Robert Carlin were given a quick tour of a new modern uranium enrichment facility (the North Koreans referred to it as a uranium enrichment “workshop”) at Yongbyon containing around two thousand centrifuges.
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Why the North chose that moment to show this critical development in its program was as unclear then as it is now. The day after the tour, one of the group’s Foreign Ministry escorts said to Carlin, “You weren’t happy with what you saw, were you?” Asked why he thought so, the official knitted his brows into a mask of unhappy concern and said, “Because you looked like this afterwards.”
Through both official and unofficial channels, and at almost every step of the way, Pyongyang privately advised the United States ahead of time what it planned to do next, or what it had just done, in the nuclear program. In 2004, explaining the rationale for bringing the Americans to Yongbyon, a North Korean Foreign Ministry statement argued that “transparency serves as a basis of realistic thinking and, at the same time, a basis for solving the issue.” The statement went on to say, “We never employ a sleight of hand. Whenever an opportunity presented itself, we opened to the public our fair and aboveboard nuclear activities as they were and informed the U.S. side of them through a diplomatic channel.”
Some observers viewed these notifications of what was widely considered provocative actions not as transparency but as “blackmail,” an effort to strengthen the North’s bargaining position and extract maximum concessions from Washington. A few saw it as a sign that Kim Jong Il continued to seek ways to put back on track the process of improving ties with the United States, something that he had come tantalizingly close to achieving in October 2000. There is no way of knowing, however, if Kim
would really have slowed his nuclear program, much less reversed it, once he put Yongbyon into operation again in 2003. It was four years before Washington made a serious effort to find out.
The failure of the negotiations to move off dead center, and the persistent evidence that open warfare in the US administration over North Korea policy was blocking effective diplomacy, helped convince Seoul and Tokyo of the need to redouble their own efforts to engage Pyongyang. The North Koreans probably would have been happy to oblige, but the unexpected, as often happens, interfered.
Although inter-Korean relations appeared to be on track for noticeable progress through the first part of 2004, the process was suddenly interrupted in March by the ROK National Assembly’s impeachment of President Roh for a minor election-law violation. Pyongyang characterized the development as reflecting “chaos” in the South, but rather than take advantage of the situation, the worst the North did was to propose that the next round of inter-Korean talks, scheduled to take place in the South, be moved to the North. When Seoul protested that the North was interfering in its internal affairs, Pyongyang reacted with barely concealed contempt, noting that the South’s chief executive was, in effect, the North’s interlocutor in the talks, and if his removal from office did not constitute an issue that affected the North Koreans, they didn’t know what did.
The South Korean Constitutional Court ruled in Roh’s favor in May, putting him back in charge of the country’s affairs—but then inter-Korean relations hit another bump, this time a big one. In July 2004, a group of more than four hundred North Korean refugees, who had made their way across China to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, arrived at an airfield south of Seoul. China was an inhospitable place for North Korean refugees, and so those who could undertook the difficult journey across China to relatively safer havens in Southeast Asia and Mongolia, where they could apply for entry into South Korea. In early 2004, the numbers in Ho Chi Minh City had swelled to such an extent that emergency measures were necessary to move them to South Korea.
The Roh government had been trying to maintain a low profile for its refugee program, and now it was in a bind. Not to accept the refugees would be inhumane, as well as a sure way to generate bad publicity, but to bring in such a large number would risk a negative reaction from Pyongyang. Seoul wanted to keep the transfer low-key, but that proved unrealistic in South Korea’s hothouse media environment. Once the news leaked, it attracted considerable attention in the South Korean and international press. The North Koreans reacted even more negatively than
had been feared, somewhat surprising given how much progress there had otherwise been in North-South engagement. One explanation for that unusually tough response is that it reflected an effort by the Workers Party section tasked with dealing with South Korea, the United Front Department, to shield itself against criticism from Kim Jong Il for not doing a better job with Seoul. In any case, inter-Korean relations went into the tank for nearly a year, a delay with serious consequences down the line.
While progress slowed the inter-Korean front, Pyongyang made yet another try at improving relations with Tokyo. Kim Jong Il had a second summit meeting with Japanese prime minister Koizumi on May 22. This second Japan–North Korea summit, lasting ninety minutes, was largely consumed in discussing the still-festering problem of the North Korean abductions, an issue that the first summit in 2002 had not resolved, despite Kim Jong Il’s admission and quasi apology. When Koizumi, reiterating a favorite line in Washington, suggested that the North follow Libya’s example in giving up its nuclear weapons program, Kim reportedly replied, “We are no Libya,” a position Pyongyang was subsequently to reemphasize many times, most especially after March 2011, when the UN Security Council approved the use of force against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.
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Kim went on to tell Koizumi, according to one account, that he wanted improved relations with the United States and hoped to “sing and dance with Bush until I lose my voice.”
Unhappy that Washington, by refusing contact with the North, was creating an atmosphere that undercut their own efforts, both the South Korean and the Japanese leaders urged Washington to modify its opposition to bilateral talks with North Korea. At a Group of 8 meeting in the United States in July, Koizumi made the case to Bush once again. The president liked Koizumi and he listened, but listening and dancing were separate things, and US opposition to bilateral talks with the North remained firm.
In more ways than one, 2004 was an explosive year. In April a powerful blast at the Ryongchong rail station in North Pyongan, not far from the border with China, leveled buildings and tore through a nearby schoolyard filled with students. There was no way to hide the event from the outside world, and the North did not seem inclined to try. It quickly invited foreign aid workers to view the damage and arrange for relief supplies and construction materials for a major rebuilding effort. North Korean television showed scenes of wounded children and their parents being helicoptered to hospitals. Rumors made the rounds that the explosion had been
a bomb meant for Kim Jong Il, whose train returning from China had passed through the station a few hours earlier, but this theory appears to have no basis. Soon after the explosion, the authorities banned cell phones, which had started appearing in the North not long before. Although the connection between the ban and the explosion at Ryongchong was never clear, the move helped feed speculation about an assassination plot. Other rumors pinned the explosion on a shipment of fuel bound for the Syrian missile program. These rumors, too, apparently had no basis.
The North’s official version was that the disaster was the result of “electrical contact caused by carelessness during the shunting of wagons loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer and tank wagons.” According to a report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the explosion came from the “contact of two train wagons carrying ammonium nitrate with a wagon containing fuel oil. Each wagon contained 40 MT [metric tons] of ammonium nitrate enroute to a construction site for the Pakma-cheol san irrigation project. This resulted in a massive explosion creating a large crater and leveling everything in a 500 m [meter] radius.”
A few months later, South Korean sensors picked up another explosion in the North, this one fairly large. Immediately, South Korean and Western media were filled with stories that it might be a nuclear test. Pyongyang announced the explosion was connected with blasting for a large hydroelectric project in Ryanggang Province and invited diplomats to take a look. The real test site, as became clear a few years later when the North exploded its first nuclear device, was about a hundred kilometers away to the southeast, in the rugged mountains of North Hamgyong Province.
As the US presidential campaign swung into gear in the summer of 2004, the North Koreans observed it with great interest. Much as they might have hoped for a victory by the Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry, the America specialists in the Foreign Ministry understood that an incumbent, even one facing an uphill battle as President Bush seemed to be, had numerous advantages in an election. In late September, in remarks that do not appear to have been made with the US elections in mind, a DPRK Foreign Ministry official attending the annual UN General Assembly session in New York told reporters that the North had “made clear that we have already reprocessed 8,000 fuel rods and transformed them into arms.” Pyongyang did not report the remarks in its own media, and South Korean officials nervously dismissed them as similar to what the North had said before. In fact, this was a new North Korean position, one that flew in the face of the guarded optimism in some quarters that the fourth session of the six-party talks, held in June 2004, had made progress. The remarks implied that a decision had been made in Pyongyang to cross the nuclear threshold publicly, and soon. There would be no turning back.
Once the US election was over, with George Bush returned to office for a second term, the North Koreans apparently saw no reason to suppose the administration’s next four years would be any different from the first four, and so they moved to put on the record a new, tougher public position on their nuclear program. On February 10, Pyongyang made clear in a high-level Foreign Ministry statement that North Korea had manufactured nuclear weapons. For good measure, the statement added that the North was “indefinitely” suspending participation in the six-party talks. A month later, the Foreign Ministry released a lengthy memorandum providing detailed justification for the new position. The memorandum also included the news that the North’s 1999 unilateral missile moratorium was no longer valid.