Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (89 page)

As Kang Myong-do suggested, the nuclear weapons issue needed to be seen against a background of a generally perceived lessening of the North Korean military threat. It was not that Pyongyang’s military was shrinking. Rather, Seoul increasingly had the resources to counter it. By the time the project to build A-bombs at Yongbyon began in earnest in the 1980s, it was becoming clear that South Korea’s economy-was growing so fast that the North’s military superiority soon would be a thing of the past. The Kims evidently thought they needed nuclear weapons for a variety of purposes: to keep alive the possibility of reuniting the peninsula by force, on their terms; to deter South Korea and its American ally from trying to reunify on
their
terms; and to force concessions from the United States and other countries. Even with a nuclear
equalizer, the Kims were confronted with more and more compelling evidence that they could not win a second Korean war. Everybody “would lose grievously not least the North. Perhaps the most daunting evidence was Operation Desert Storm, in which American equipment like what the Americans and South Koreans were deploying south of the Demilitarized Zone was credited “with having chewed up Soviet-supplied Iraqi equipment similar to what North Korea had bought.

Some observers still worried that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait proved that irrational or foolhardy dictators do start wars, even when it should be obvious they will lose. The question often asked was whether Kim Il-sung was rational. Certainly there was plenty of evidence suggesting megalomania in the giant statues and portraits of the Great Leader everywhere in Pyongyang. Like Saddam, Kim wanted to hear nothing but good news from his minions and consequently was given a distorted version of events. But, reassuringly, in the four decades since he had started the immensely destructive Korean War, Kim had not started another one—although there could be little doubt he had been tempted several times.

At the beginning of the crisis North Korea’s suspected bomb-building capability was less a military threat than a threat to the concept and practice of nuclear non-proliferation. “North Korean nuclear weapons are for deterrence, not offense,” Kang Myong-do told me. “They don’t have enough strength to strike.” But the lessons of China, India and Pakistan strongly suggested that if North Korea were allowed to get away with refusing to allow inspection of Yongbyon, then both South Korea and Japan would feel strong pressure to acquire their own nukes. Neither would have much trouble with the technical aspects if they went ahead, and the chain reaction might not end with them.

Kim’s challenge to the non-proliferation regime was not merely an implied one. His regime launched an uncharacteristically sophisticated public relations campaign against the NPT, blasting the treaty as partial to nuclear powers such as the United States and unfair to have-not, non-nuclear nations. Indeed, even if the NPT was all that stood between the world and Armageddon, it never could stand close scrutiny in terms of equity. If Pyongyang should persist in its refusal to admit inspectors and halt any bomb development, the whole non-proliferation structure might start to unravel.

The preferred means to move Pyongyang were diplomatic. But in case diplomacy should fail, a slip of the tongue by South Korea’s defense minister in April of 1991 offered one clue that at least some thought had been given to a preemptive strike to take out the Yongbyon facility, as Israel had done to Iraq’s Osirak facility in 1981.

The nuclear issue remained obscure until a bungled diplomatic foray by a Japanese politician forced Washington to turn up the heat.
⁴
In September
1990, Shin Kanemaru visited Pyongyang as co-leader of a political parties’ delegation that also included a Japanese socialist leader. A master of domestic politics, a powerful behind-the-scenes elder in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Kanemaru was a diplomatic tyro. Kim Il-sung by all accounts charmed his pants off, inviting him for repeated tête-à-têtes and pushing a sudden campaign for normalization of diplomatic relations. Kim hoped to counter the forays of South Korean President Roh Tae-woo into the communist bloc, where Roh was establishing diplomatic relations with Moscow and trade relations with Beijing. Western policy basically favored “cross-recognition” in which the respective allies of each of the two Koreas would recognize the other Korea as a means of increasing contact and reducing tensions. But Kanemaru was too eager and just about gave away the store. He agreed to normalize quickly and, in the process, to “compensate” the North for the effects of Japan’s 1910–1945 colonization of the Korean peninsula. In fact he spoke in favor of generous “reparations” for the damage Japan had inflicted on North Korea not only during but also
after
its time as colonial overlord there.

In the West, Kim Il-sung was seen as a fearsome dictator, but in person by all accounts he was charismatic. Kanemaru was so moved by all of Kim’s attentions and, presumably, by lingering Japanese national guilt over the treatment of the Koreans that at one point during a press conference in Pyongyang he wept.
⁵
It was in that atmosphere that Kanemaru, at the behest of his accompanying Foreign Ministry advisors and only perfunctorily, raised the issue of North Korean nuclear weapons development. Kim denied everything, insisting that all he had at Yongbyon was a research facility. He said he would accept inspection if U.S. nuclear weapons in the South would also be inspected. He literally asked Kanemaru to “trust me.” That pretty much disposed of the nuclear issue for the time being. It wasn’t even mentioned in the joint communiqué issued at the close of the meetings.

Kanemaru’s diplomatic foray enraged South Korea, which he had not consulted ahead of time. In Seoul it quickly aroused suspicions of an ulterior motive: Tokyo, fearing a united Korea next door, was trying to prop up Kim’s regime with cash so that Japan could play a divide-and-conquer role on the Korean peninsula and reap the commercial advantages of being seen as a North Korean friend. One South Korean official, speaking privately to me after several glasses of Scotch whiskey in the Oak Room of Seoul’s Hilton Hotel, raged, “North Korea was almost on the brink of going down the drain! And these Japanese coming into the picture, they are willing to provide more than five billion dollars—goddammit!—thereby making it difficult for the country to be unified!”
⁶

Embarrassed over Kanemaru’s commitment to a sudden policy shift that did not accord with their plans, Japanese foreign policy professionals sought to restore bureaucratic control over foreign policy. They emphasized that this
had been only a political party delegation, not an official one, and therefore Kanemaru’s promise was not binding. To provide them the needed ammunition, Washington, according to an account that first appeared from Japan’s Jiji Press wire service, sent in an intelligence delegation led by a high-ranking military officer to brief officials of the Japanese Foreign Ministry Defense Agency and Cabinet Research Agency—the main civilian intelligence organization—for three days from October 31.
⁷

The Jiji account was the first detailed report made public on what the North Koreans had at Yongbyon as shown in the U.S. KH11 satellite photos and the American intelligence people’s briefing. Jiji cataloged: (1) a research reactor built by the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, and given to North Korea, mainly used for basic research; (2) a small reactor, of 1950s Soviet technology, in use at Yongbyon since 1987, capable of producing seven kilograms of plutonium per year—enough for one bomb—although it was not known if it had been used to do that; (3) a larger reactor in the 50–200 mega-watt range, of French 1950s technology, under construction in Yongbyon since 1984 and expected to be completed in 1994, which would be capable of producing 18 to 50 kilograms of plutonium a year or enough for two to five Nagasaki-sized bombs; (4) a factory to produce enriched uranium (North Korea mined natural uranium); (5) a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant with high chimneys and meter-thick walls to keep radioactivity from escaping, almost completed and expected to be in full use in 1995; (6) remains of a pre-1988 low-level explosion experiment; (7) Kim Il-sung’s mountain resort villa nearby. The bottom line: Jiji quoted the U.S. briefer as telling his Japanese listeners that North Korea would be able to develop nuclear weapons by 1995.

Although the world still had both eyes on the Persian Gulf, specialists involved were in earnest by then about doing something to stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons development. Various approaches began to get considerable attention. One of the more promising was to use Pyongyang-Tokyo normalization and the money North Korea would get from Tokyo as the carrot. After Kanemaru flew to Seoul to apologize to an angry President Roh Tae-woo for his hasty approach, the professional diplomats again took the driver’s seat in Tokyo and parked Japan on that firm, quid-pro-quo approach. The first rounds of government-to-government normalization talks, in Pyongyang in February 1991 and in Tokyo a little later, made clear that signing the IAEA safeguards agreement was a precondition Tokyo had set for normalization.

The carrot was thought potentially effective because the North Korean economy-was in serious trouble. Kim Chang-soon, an early defector from the North who presided over Seoul’s Institute of North Korean Studies, told me that during 1991’s opening months there had been some 150 reports of crowds—perhaps 200 people at a time—gathering to protest food shortages in various parts of North Korea. He cited reports from Korean residents of
Japan whose relatives had moved back to North Korea some years previously. The country had not had a bumper harvest since the 1970s, Kim noted, and grain rations often had been arriving late or not at all. This also affected what on the surface appeared to be good military morale, he said: “Naturally some of the soldiers sneak into farm villages and steal food.” Kim Chang-soon told me it would be very difficult for the low-level protests he cited to grow larger and coordinated. North Koreans were kept to their work groups and locales; they lacked the freedom of movement and communication it would take to develop a mass movement. But although the North Korean leadership was not in imminent danger of overthrow by the masses, he said, “they are in a very difficult position and they have to compromise with the Japanese. … They really are badly in need of Japanese money.”

A deal with North Korea would involve Tokyo’s payment of the equivalent of billions of dollars. Tokyo knew how much clout it had acquired. I spoke with Katsumi Sato, editor of
Gendai Korea
and a leading Japanese Pyongyang-watcher. Because of fuel shortages that resulted from a Soviet decision to move away from bartering oil on favorable terms to Pyongyang, Sato noted, factories were closed and ships could not sail. With its zero credit rating, when Pyongyang looked around for a quick financial fix the only possibility in sight was Japan and the aid and, perhaps, trade that normalization would bring. “Japan is actually the casting vote,” said Sato. “Whether they live or die is up to Japan.”

Pyongyang wanted more than just Tokyo’s diplomatic recognition and aid, though. It wanted development of higher-level relations with the United States—to counter Seoul’s approach to Moscow and Beijing and bypass Seoul. If it should succeed in getting all of those in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons card, its ploy would have to be counted as successful.

One diplomatic approach that was mainly stick, favored by Seoul, was to line up international support for demands that Pyongyang cease and desist. The nuclear powers were on board for that. Moscow had abandoned its agreement to export reactors, by most accounts in order to back its demand that Pyongyang sign the safeguards agreement and admit inspectors. (Some said the export halt was merely a sort of factory recall: Moscow wanted to fix the flaws in the Chernobyl-type reactor before proceeding with exports.) In reality, if Pyongyang was already past the point of needing help to continue its weapons program, Moscow’s embargo would have little more than political effect. Even that could be important, though, as Moscow was such an old ally of Pyongyang’s and the growing estrangement between them was painful.

Several things occurred to heat up the North Korean nuclear issue further. In February 1991, a bilateral committee set up by the East-West Center in
Honolulu and the Seoul Forum for International Affairs issued a recommendation that U.S. nuclear weapons could be removed from South Korea without endangering that country’s security. Members of the group included former high officials from both countries: a former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, a former South Korean defense minister, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for Asia and the Pacific and a former South Korean ambassador to the United States. Their argument was that South Korea could remain under the American nuclear umbrella without having the weapons physically in South Korea, thanks to the development of longer-range, precision weapons. They also argued that there would be political advantages for the South in being able to say the weapons were not present. The United States, for its part, could continue its not always followed “NCND” (neither confirm nor deny) policy regarding the presence of nuclear weapons in South Korea. North Korea had been seeking to link the demands for IAEA inspection of its facilities to its own demand that U.S. nukes be withdrawn or inspected. The committee rejected that as an apples-and-oranges linkage, but at the same time appeared to recognize the public relations reality: it would be just as well not to have to try to explain to non-specialists why Kim’s proposal was off the mark if indeed there was no compelling military reason to keep the U.S. nukes on Korean soil.

To learn that public relations reality, one had only to visit a South Korean campus and talk to just about any student. The presence of U.S. troops, and their nuclear weapons, was a hot-button issue with them, but most knew or cared little about North Korean nukes. South Korea’s government had cried wolf so often about North Korean schemes for imminent conquest that young South Koreans simply ignored reports of North Korean nuclear weapons production. North Korea, long known for its heavy-handed propaganda, had learned to play skillfully on the nationalistic sentiments of South Korea’s young.