Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (157 page)

91.
“WASHINGTON (AP)—The United States had explicit plans for dropping the atomic bomb on mainland China in 1954 if the Chinese violated the tenuous truce that had brought the Korean War to an inconclusive end, according to a newly declassified Pentagon document. The April 17, 1954 memo, signed by Brig. Gen. Edwin H. J. Carns, who was secretary to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, showed the extent to which the Eisenhower administration was ready to use nuclear weapons in enforcing Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ Cold War policy of ‘massive retaliation.’

“ In light of the enemy capability to launch a massive ground offensive, U.S. air support operations, including use of atomic weapons, will be employed to inflict maximum destruction of enemy forces,’ the memo said, detailing the U.S. response for the war’s resumption with Chinese forces again massively involved. The document also showed that the United States planned to blockade China’s coasts, seize offshore islands and use Chinese Nationalist forces to stage raids on the mainland in the event of renewed hostilities. The memo—of which only 30 copies were made, each numbered—was among 44 million documents from World War II and the postwar years and from the Korean and Vietnam wars that were declassified in a blanket order signed by President Clinton last month” (from an Associated Press dispatch,
Korea Times,
December 14, 1994).

92.
See James R. Lilley “U.S. Security Policy and the Korean Peninsula,” in Christopher J. Sigur, ed.,
Korea’s New Challenges and Kim Young Sam
(New York: Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 1993), pp. 129–130.

93.
Halliday and Cumings
(Korea,
p. 215) note, “In 1957 the USA announced that it would no longer recognize the authority of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, which had been set up to supervise compliance with the armistice, and that it regarded itself as at liberty to bring in new armaments, including nuclear weapons.” As of 1987–1988, they add, there were “approximately 41,000 US military personnel in South Korea, with nuclear weapons. South Korea is the only place in the world where nuclear weapons are used to deter a non-nuclear force. … There are no … nuclear weapons in the North.”

94.
See, e.g., items 204–209 in U.S. Department of State,
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960,
vol. XVIII:
Japan and Korea
(Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1994), pp. 424–432. Also see “Telegram from the Commander in Chief, United Nations Command (Decker) to the Department of State, Seoul, April 4, 1958,” item 220, for a U.S.–South Korean agreement that yields insight into the extent of American attempts to exert budgetary controls over the South Korean military. “Republic of Korea forces construction projects will be limited to essential requirements approved by CINCUNC [commander in chief United Nations Command, an American general],” it states. “The Republic of Korea military budget will be jointly reviewed and analyzed by the Republic of Korea and CINCUNC in order to assure that the military program will produce the most effective forces at minimum cost. … No Republic of Korea Force asset shall be expended for any project which is not clearly and directly a military requirement unless specific concurrence for such diversion shall have been granted by CINCUNC.”

A formerly top secret memorandum of a meeting of the U.S. National Security Council paraphrases the remark of President Eisenhower that “some of those at the meeting apparently did not know Rhee. Difficulties had been experienced for many years with Rhee, who was so emotional he had once proposed sending ROK forces up to the Yalu River. The situation became worse as Rhee became senile. But we must persuade him or lose prestige” (“Memorandum of Discussion at the 375th .Meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, August 7, 1958,” item 236,
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960,
vol. XVIII, p. 482).

It was November of 1958 before the American negotiators finally persuaded Rhee to agree to maintain a maximum eighteen-division army, with total armed forces numbering no more than 630,000 men. See footnote 3,
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960,
vol. XVIII, p. 507.

95.
See “Memorandum from the Director of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs (Parsons) to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Jones), Washington, February 8, 1958,” item 213 in
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960,
vol. XVIII, p. 436.

96.
“Memorandum from the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Robertson) to Secretary of State Dulles, Washington, February 28, 1958,” item 215 in
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960,
vol. XVIII, pp. 440–441.

Another U.S. State Department memorandum of 1958, formerly secret, refers to “the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 1949 and the
resultant
Communist invasion” (italics are mine). See “Memorandum from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Parsons) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Policy Planning (Smith), Washington, July 11, 1958,” item 231 in
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960,
vol. XVIII, p. 472.

97.
Judging partly on the basis of a rosy evaluation of the May 2, 1958, National Assembly elections, a State Department “Progress Report on Korea” claimed, “Gradual but tangible progress has been made in the development of democratic institutions and political stability in the ROK.” But the report listed a slew of economic problems yet to be solved—and its optimistic prognosis on the political side was to prove premature by decades. See “Memorandum from the Director of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs (Parsons) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Robertson), Washington, June 4, 1958,” item 225 in
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960,
vol. XVIII, p. 460. Also see item 215 (n. 96)

98.
In a conversation with the South Korean vice-president on June 19, 1958, the American ambassador expressed his personal opinion that “the Communist Chinese would have to follow the Soviet Union’s policy” regarding Korean unification. “Memorandum for the Record, Seoul, June 27, 1958,” item 228,
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960,
vol. XVIII, p.
464.

The image of monolithic communism was to prove, for a time, impervious even to the contortions that some communist countries such as North Korea went through once the Sino-Soviet split became apparent. America’s leaders during that period
’were
simply unable to understand nationalism’s offsetting power against direction of other communist countries from Moscow or Beijing—as the escalation of involvement in Vietnam showed clearly. Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, in a regretful memoir of his involvement in the Vietnam War writes that “the top East Asian
and China experts in the State Department—John Paton Davies Jr., John Stewart Service and John Carter Vincent—had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we—certainly I—badly misread China’s objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony. We also totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh’s movement. We saw him first as a Communist and only second as a Vietnamese nationalist.” President Lyndon Johnson was “convinced that the Soviet Union and China
’were
bent on achieving hegemony. He saw the takeover of South Vietnam as a step toward that objective” (Robert S. McNamara, “We Were Wrong, Terribly WRONG,”
Newsweek,
April 17, 1995, pp. 46, 48). (The article is a pre-publication excerpt from McNamara’s book,
In Retrospect
[New York: Times Books, 1995].)

99.
A once top-secret 1958 U.S. policy statement says, in part, that “U.S. interests are deeply involved in Korea. Unless the United States continues to provide strong political, military and economic support to the Republic of Korea, the Communist bloc probably will ultimately succeed in extending its control over the whole of Korea. Such a development would undermine Free World security in the Northeast Asia area” (“National Security Council Report NSC 5817, Washington, August 11, 1958,”
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960,
vol. XVIII, p. 486).

100.
Pyongyang fueled such fears with apocalyptic propaganda. In 1965 North Korea “called upon the Koreans in the South to ‘throw their bodies in front of the frenzied drive of the American imperialists, the Pak Chong-hi puppets and the Japanese reactionaries.’ The treaty between Japan and South Korea was ratified. Japanese investment began to flow into Korea, and this development, along with others, stimulated the first sustained high-level growth in the south. From this point on, North Korean spokesmen were to regard the menace of Japanese militarism’ as second only to ‘the threat of American imperialism.’ ” In an October 1966 major address Kim Il-sung charged that “Japan’s Sato government, with the active support of U.S. imperialism, has not only mapped out the plans of war to invade Korea and other Asian nations but has already started stretching its tentacles of aggression into Korea” (Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea,
p. 536).

101.
A senior State Department official characterized the Japanese unwillingness to take Beijing’s and Pyongyang’s bait as “a most encouraging development.” See “Memorandum on the Substance of Discussion at a Department of State–Joint Chiefs of Staff Meeting, Washington, February 28, 1958,” item 216 in
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960,
vol. XVIII, pp.
443–444.
The memorandum also quotes Adm. Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations, as mentioning “that the Chinese Communist troops
’were
apparently having difficulties with the local population (marriages, food) which may have been one reason
’why
it was decided to effect the withdrawal.”

102.
Editorial Note, item 221,
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960,
vol. XVIII, pp. 455–456.

103.
See “Memorandum from the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Robertson) to Secretary of State Dulles, Washington, November 18, 1958,” item 247 in
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960,
vol. XVIII, p. 504.

104.
Hwang Jang-yop,
The Problems of Human Rights in North Korea (2),
trans. Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights (Seoul: NKnet, 2002), http://nknet.org/en/keys/lastkeys/2002/8/04.php.

105.
Baik II, p. 449.

106.
Ibid., pp. 457–459.

107.
Ibid., pp. 460–461.

108.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 3, pp. 431–433.

7. When He Hugged Us Still Damp from the Sea.

1.
“The same Confucian value system held by the two Koreas has produced two fundamentally different outlooks toward development. Korea, generally speaking, has traditionally emphasized the importance of the Confucian belief in scholarship over commerce and material things. The Korean
yangban
[nobles, gentry], for example,
’were
clearly not commercially minded. Confucian ideology disdains commercial activities, resulting in the economic stagnation of the Yi dynasty. This tradition was easily carried on in North Korea where communism disdained commercial and service activities. People
’were
mobilized not by material incentives but by moral exhortation. In a
’way,
Korean Confucianism was strengthened by communism in North Korea. This particularly explains the lack of development of the service sector and consumer goods in North Korea. … Pluralistic values help explain the extraordinary commercial bustle, the materialism, and conspicuous consumption of the people in South Korea. Christians are somewhat overrepresented in the entrepreneurial population in South Korea …. This is particularly helped by a Weberian ‘spirit of capitalism’ abetted by aspects of Protestant dogma thought to encourage commercial activities as a means of achieving personal salvation” (Byoung-Lo Philo Kim,
Two Koreas in Development
[see chap. 1, n. 2], pp. 179–180).

2.
Baik II, p. 528 (see chap. 4, n. 24).

3.
“Central planning was highly effective and capable of developing the North Korean economy at the beginning stage—the first seven or fifteen years—relying on mobilization measures. As the size of the economy grew, the complexity of planning and choice-making multiplied, making the central decision-making process more inefficient and wasteful than in the formative and reconstruction period” (Kim,
Two Koreas in Development,
p. 123).

Andrei Lankov
(From Stalin to Kim Il Sung
[see chap. 4, note 45], p. 135) points additionally to unintended aftereffects of the purge of Soviet-Koreans, who had comprised a large percentage of North Korea’s best-trained officials: “The mass exodus of Soviet Koreans in the late 1950s and early 1960s became one of the factors contributing to the deceleration of the country’s economic development.”

4.
Hwang Jang-yop,
Problems of Human Rights (1)
(see chap. 2, n. 1).

5.
Byoung-Lo Philo Kim, citing a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency report among other sources, observes
(Two Koreas in Development,
p.
66),
“Although a GNP comparison is hard to draw because of the lack of reliable data and differences in measurement, several estimates agree on the suggestion that the North had a higher per capita output than the South at least until the mid-1970s.”