The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (84 page)

TRACTION, AT LAST

With personnel changes in the Bush administration’s second term, and especially after the midterm elections in November 2006 in which the Republicans lost majorities in both the House and the Senate, US policy toward North Korea was refined. The State Department regained some of its footing under Condoleezza Rice, the Department of Defense under Robert Gates ceased to be an obstacle, and the vice president’s office lost much of its ability to influence the policy. Even so, fully half the second term was wasted in trying to recover diplomatic ground squandered in the first four years and in digging out from under the unexpected consequences of the Treasury’s action against the North. What the administration eventually saw as the high-water mark of its policy—agreement and partial implementation by the North of concrete steps toward disabling its nuclear program in 2007—in the end did not lead to sustained progress.

In late-May 2006, the first signs appeared of possible preparations for a North Korean missile test at the launch site near the coast in South Hamgyong Province. The preparations had to have been the result of careful, long-term planning by Pyongyang. Decisions to conduct missile launches are made months in advance of activity that eventually becomes visible to reconnaissance satellites; in this case, Kim Jong Il may have given approval to proceed with the test sometime in the early winter, in response to Washington’s applying Section 311 and derailing the September 19 joint statement. In fact, if the message the North Koreans passed to Donald Gregg in March 2003 was serious, plans had existed even then for eventually launching a “multistage” rocket.

Almost immediately after its preparations for a missile test were detected, in a Foreign Ministry spokesman’s statement on June 1 “reclarifying” the North’s position on the six-party talks, Pyongyang “kindly” invited Ambassador Christopher Hill to visit. The purpose, the statement said, was for the United States to explain directly that it had “true political intention” to implement the September 19 joint statement. The invitation, released just after the DPRK foreign minister held talks in Beijing with his Chinese counterpart, was a typical move on the North’s part, possibly as much to appease the Chinese as a genuine offer. Even so, if Hill had been allowed to go, it might well have broken the North’s momentum toward launching a missile. At this point, North Korea was under growing international pressure not to proceed with the test. Having Hill in Pyongyang could have provided a graceful excuse to delay the launch. Washington did not even pause to consider. The same day the North announced its invitation, the White House press spokesman rejected it. A few weeks later, the North finished the preparations, and in the early-morning darkness of July 5 (July 4 in the United States), it launched the first of seven missiles fired off that day.

Because this would be the maiden launch of the missile that was the focus of so much attention—an intermediate-range Taep’o-dong II—no one (including the North Koreans) knew how far it could fly. Some estimates were that it could hit Alaska or Hawaii, and US officials at first braced themselves for the possibility that they would have to use the country’s still developing antimissile defenses. In his memoirs, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld describes the missile interceptors as being on “high alert” and preparations for him to give the order to launch them if it was determined the Taep’o-dong was heading toward the United States. As it turned out, the North Korean missile failed less than a minute into flight, allowing Rumsfeld to enjoy the rest of the July 4 weekend and NORTHCOM—in charge of missile defense for the United States—to use the opportunity for a real-life dry run of its operational readiness. It seems unlikely that the North meant for the missile to go anywhere near
the continental United States. Most probably, the plans were for this first attempt to end up in the mid-Pacific.

Even so, it appears the North wanted this Taep’o-dong launch to be seen as menacing. Unlike a previous missile launch in August 1998, and subsequent ones (once in 2009, twice in 2012), the North did not claim the July launch as part of its space program. In fact, a statement released after the tests portrayed the activity as “missile launches by the Korean People’s Army.” The six other missiles—a combination of short- and medium-range missiles—had more success, splashing down in the Sea of Japan off the Russian coast.

In response to the missile launches, Washington and Tokyo pushed for a tough UN Security Council sanctions resolution that included reference to Chapter Seven, authorizing the use of force. China and Russia, not surprisingly, balked. The final Security Council resolution (1695) called for member states to prevent “missile and missile-related items, materials, goods and technology” from being transferred to or from the DPRK. The resolution also demanded that the North “re-establish its pre-existing commitment to a moratorium on missile launching.”

In Pyongyang the idea that the international community thought that the 1999 launch moratorium had any validity in the current circumstances, or that the UN had any standing to tell the DPRK when it should or should not implement its own unilaterally declared moratorium, must have seemed astounding. In a Foreign Ministry statement on July 6, the North went to considerable lengths to make the point that its launch moratorium had been conditional, that the relevant conditions no longer existed, and that, in fact, Pyongyang had already announced in March 2005 that the 1999 moratorium was no longer valid.

At the time, no one realized that perhaps the most important result of the UN resolution was to lock Washington into an escalating series of responses. Each time the North launched another ballistic missile, which it proceeded to do three more times over the next seven years, the United States felt obliged to ratchet up the pressure in the form of new sanctions resolutions, which in turn sparked new North Korean countermoves. Whether there was anything to Pyongyang’s persistent claims that what it was really after was establishing its right to the peaceful use of outer space—comparable to that of South Korea and Japan—no one could tell because no one probed. It was not even possible to determine if there was any negotiated basis at all for dealing with the North Korean missile issue because the only arrow in the international community’s quiver was sanctions.

Immediately after the July missile launches, Ambassador Hill was sent to Asia to discuss a coordinated response to the North’s move. Before Hill’s departure, President Bush told him, “You tell the Chinese I can’t
solve this—they need to solve this.” By this time, Kim Jong Il’s October 2000 offer to negotiate with the United States on the missile issue had been long forgotten by Washington; the North Koreans apparently did not think it worth raising again, either. As Washington would soon discover, Pyongyang had already decided to follow up its missile salvo with action on the nuclear front, crossing the nuclear threshold in a way that would complicate US efforts to achieve the denuclearization of North Korea and would rattle capitals around the region.

RUMBLE IN PUNGGYE

The first signs that the North would test a nuclear device appeared in August, only a month after the missile barrage. The evidence of preparations set off increasingly shrill—and to some extent bombastic—warnings in the press from officials in the various concerned capitals, making the remainder of the summer and the early fall a repeat, in many respects, of what had occurred prior to the July missile launches. At times it was hard be sure which were stronger, the pressures on the North not to test or those on Washington to talk to Pyongyang. Washington was at its worst, blustering about what would happen to the North if it went through with the test. The North Koreans either did not believe the threats or did not care.

On October 3, the DPRK Foreign Ministry ended the uncertainty with a statement announcing that Pyongyang had decided it had no choice but to conduct a test. Six days later, on the morning of October 9, it did exactly that. The North Koreans informed the Chinese a few hours ahead of the time, location, and expected yield—around four kilotons. Such prenotification of a first nuclear test was an unusual move—no other country is known to have done so. Presumably, the North Koreans wanted to be able counter what they knew would be complaints from Beijing by saying they had given advance warning. In terms of actual yield, this first test was judged by outside experts to be only partially successful and not very impressive, in the neighborhood of one kiloton. When a small group of Americans—including former US negotiator Jack Pritchard, Sig Hecker, John Lewis, and Robert Carlin were in Pyongyang at the end of October, they asked a North Korean military official, Colonel General Ri Chan Bok, about the reports of the small yield.
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General Ri did not miss a beat. “You should know,” he said, “that it is easier to test a larger device than a smaller one.” After discussions with officials from the Foreign Ministry and the Yongbyon nuclear center, the Americans came away with the
strong impression that the test had marked a turning point, that the North Koreans were heartened by what they had accomplished, whether it was fully successfully or not, and that Pyongyang would be less likely than ever before to give up its nuclear weapons program.

Whatever the failure in physics, the test’s political ramifications were significant. Even a small yield demonstrated that what the North had announced in February 2005—that it had developed a nuclear weapon—was a fact. The second thing it demonstrated, most of all to Washington, was that the US policy of the past four years on North Korea had failed.

Nevertheless, according to Secretary of State Rice, there was actually a silver lining. In her view, the test finally gave Washington the opportunity to put into practice important decisions, reached in April 2006, that would significantly alter the US approach to North Korea.

In her memoirs, Rice portrays this new approach as a “strategic leap” in the president’s thinking on North Korea and says it had been communicated to Chinese leader Hu Jintao during his April 2006 visit to Washington. Others in the NSC at the time explain the change in US policy somewhat differently. They suggest that the North’s test created the opportunity not to uncork decisions already in place but finally to make the argument to the president that previous US policy had not worked and that it was time to remove the restraints on diplomatic engagement with the North that the administration had imposed since coming to office in 2001.

Either way, the test triggered a response from Washington that one can only imagine was greeted by the North Korean Foreign Ministry with grim satisfaction. Three weeks after the test, Ambassador Hill was in Beijing for what turned out to be bilateral discussions with his DPRK counterpart, Kim Gye Gwan. This was not exactly the script that Washington had approved for Hill, who was supposed to engage in tripartite sessions that included the Chinese. Hill’s action caused a mini storm in Washington, but one that blew over in only a few weeks. The administration—minus the vice president—was now too interested in engaging the North Koreans to let an ambassador’s sidestepping his instructions get in the way.

A six-party meeting convened in December in Beijing, and in January 2007 Hill again met Kim Gye Gwan, this time in Berlin for an approved bilateral discussion—approved, anyway, by Secretary Rice, who had not consulted the US interagency, thereby obviating the chance that contrary instructions might get in the way of Hill’s talks with the North Koreans. The two negotiators quickly agreed on concrete steps for implementing the September 2005 joint statement. The North Koreans apparently also came away from the meeting with the impression that Washington would move to release the twenty-five million dollars that was frozen in its BDA accounts. Finally undoing the consequences of the Treasury action turned out to be more difficult than Washington had imagined, however. It would
probably have seemed to suspicious minds in Pyongyang that the delay was one more example of bad faith on the part of the Americans, all too similar to the constantly late HFO deliveries in the 1990s.

Rice says the United States wanted to get the North back to six-party talks and used the political fallout from the nuclear test as an opportunity to pressure Pyongyang. Others contend that the financial and banking squeeze was having an effect on the North Korean leadership. The NSC director for Asian affairs at the time, Victor Cha, says that a tipsy DPRK official admitted at a dinner in Beijing in November 2005 that the Americans had finally found a way to hurt North Korea. Neither of those explanations seems adequate to explain Pyongyang’s willingness to return to the talks.

In retrospect, the year following the October 2006 nuclear test bore the hallmarks of considered North Korean strategy rather than a sudden shift in direction by a leadership caught off balance. Rice’s interpretation that Pyongyang worried it had gone too far by carrying out the first test underestimated the North’s commitment to its nuclear program. The contention that the Treasury’s financial measures had really begun to “bite,” and that the North Korean leadership was desperate to end them, appears similarly off the mark. More likely, the North Koreans were surprised by the Bush administration’s decision, in the wake of the test, not to increase pressure but to quickly agree to ease off and move even further into bilateral talks.
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Later in 2007, Pyongyang may have concluded that its estimates of US policy were confirmed when, after the Israeli Air Force destroyed a nuclear reactor in Syria (a reactor widely reported to have been under construction with North Korean assistance), Washington barely broke stride in pushing ahead its own agenda with the North. In fact, the low-key US reaction to the discovery that the North was proliferating its nuclear technology may, in the long run, have strengthened Pyongyang in its calculations that there was almost nothing it might do on the nuclear front that would trigger a forceful response from Washington. To the contrary, to the North it may well have seemed that its demonstrated nuclear capability was providing a degree of diplomatic leverage and, more than that, a modicum of respect that it had long sought.