B00BY4HXME EBOK

by Lankov, Andrei

  Nonetheless, Pyongyang tried hard. As Walter Clemens writes in his research on the history of the North Korean nuclear program:

  [S]everal features of its diplomatic behavior are of more than historical interest. First, Pyongyang was aggressive and insistent in seeking foreign aid and assistance for nuclear purposes [….] Second, […] North Korea’s leadership consistently evaded commitments to allies on nuclear matters, particularly constraints on its nuclear ambitions or even the provision of information. Third, North Korea’s words and deeds evoked substantial concerns in Moscow and other Communist capitals.4

  The Soviets made their continuing cooperation conditional on North Korea’s participation in the non-proliferation regime. In exchange for compliance, North Korea was promised technical assistance in building a nuclear power station of its own. Pyongyang bowed to Soviet pressure and in 1985 signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.5

  But the world changed. The Communist bloc that both controlled Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions and provided it with aid collapsed and the North Korean economy nose-dived immediately. North Korea also ceased to be a part of the uncomfortable but sometimes reassuring Cold War alliance system, so it had to take security far more seriously. To meet the new challenges, the nuclear program had to be sped up.

  When promoting their nuclear program, North Korean leaders essentially had two main goals in mind.

  First, the North Korean nuclear program serves military purposes. Nuclear weapons can be seen as the ultimate deterrent, so North Korean leaders believe that as long as they have a credible nuclear potential they are unlikely to be attacked by any foreign power, above all the United States. Theoretically, it could be argued that an alliance with China would provide North Korea with a measure of security. However, the Pyongyang leaders might be afraid that China would not be willing to get into a major confrontation in order to save the Kim family from annihilation—the world has changed much since 1950, when Chinese forces had crossed the Yalu.

  Needless to say, this fear of being attacked was amplified by the experiences of the 1990s and 2000s, when a number of states were the subject of US military actions. After the Iraq War, North Korean diplomats and politicians frequently said to their foreigner interlocutors: “Had Saddam Hussein really had nukes he would probably still be in his palace.” This opinion was further reinforced by events in Libya—after all, Colonel Gadaffi’s willingness to surrender nukes did not prevent the West from a military intervention when Gadaffi’s regime was challenged by the local opposition forces.

  Second, Pyongyang requires nuclear weapons for diplomatic purposes—frankly, as an efficient tool for diplomatic blackmail. On balance, this goal seems to be even more important than using the nukes as a strategic deterrent.

  Indeed, they do in fact necessitate such a blackmail tool. If we look at the geographic and macroeconomic indicators, the one of closest similarity to North Korea is Ghana. If the CIA Factbook is to be believed, in 2010 North Korea’s and Ghana’s populations were 24.4 and 24.7 million, respectively, while their per capita GDP were $1,800 and $1,700, respectively. Still, North Korea is light years ahead of Ghana when it comes to international attention and ability to manipulate the external environment. In terms of aid volume, North Korea punches above its weight.

  The aid-monitoring regime in North Korea is remarkably lax by any accepted international standard. It has to be lax, since North Korea does not merely need foreign aid: it needs the aid that will come without too many conditions, and whose distribution the donors will not monitor too carefully. Contrary to what some extreme critics of the regime say, it does not want to starve its population to death. Kim Jong Il and his son Kim Jong Un, as well as their advisers, would probably much prefer to see North Korean farmers alive and well (and extolling the leadership’s wisdom and benevolence), but their survival is not very high on the regime’s political agenda. Thus, uncontrolled aid can be distributed to the chosen groups of the population whose support or, at least, docility is vital for the political stability—above all, to the military, police, officials, and the population of Pyongyang and other major cities. Therefore, the irritating presence of foreign monitors is not welcomed. Needless to say, political demands of the donors—like, say, a suggestion of changes to the economic management—are not acceptable, either.

  So far, North Korean diplomats have been remarkably successful in getting aid on conditions that would be seen as unacceptable from another country—and there is little doubt that the nuclear program played a key role in this success.

  AID-MAXIMIZING DIPLOMACY

  The first nuclear blackmail campaign (aka, “the first nuclear crisis”) was launched around 1990. Evidence of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program began to surface, despite the fact that North Korean officials denied the very existence of such a program. Nonetheless, the evidence mounted, and North Korean diplomats did not really mind: the growing unease served their interests quite well (one cannot rule out that some leaks were even arranged by the North). As tensions mounted, North Korea threatened to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and at one point Pyongyang diplomats even promised to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire” if the necessary concessions were not made.

  The blackmail brought success. After much saber rattling and diplomatic maneuvering, in 1994 the oddly named “Agreed Framework” treaty was signed in Geneva. According to the Agreed Framework, North Korea promised to freeze its military nuclear program and accept international monitoring of its nuclear facilities. North Korea also agreed to suspend construction of two additional nuclear reactors and ship some spent nuclear fuel rods out of the country.

  In exchange, it got hefty payments. To handle the issues, an international consortium known as KEDO was created (KEDO stands for “Korean Energy Development Organization”). By far the chief donors to the KEDO budget were South Korea, Japan, and the United States (in 1995–2005 they provided $1,450, $498, and $405 million, respectively).6 KEDO was to build in North Korea two light water reactors that are good for power generation but not particularly useful for production of weapons-grade plutonium. It was also promised that until the completion of the reactors, KEDO would regularly ship significant quantities of heavy fuel oil to North Korea, free of charge.7

  It is widely rumored that the US negotiators were ready to be so generous because at that time they assumed the North Korean regime would not last long and thus the promised aid and concessions would not need to be delivered. For example, in 1994 Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post quoted unnamed US officials who assured him that the implementation period of the Agreed Framework “is almost certainly a sufficient period of time for their regime to have collapsed.”8

  Apart from the light water reactors, North Korea also received a lot of foreign aid without too many conditions. To a large extent this reflected the mood that remained dominant during the Clinton administration. At the time, a number of US policy makers believed that by providing aid and pursuing the KEDO agreement, the United States might eventually build enough trust to persuade North Korean leaders to surrender their nuclear program completely—or at least keep the situation under control until the collapse of the Kim family regime, which they thought would happen soon.

  It was against such a backdrop that North Korea, then in the grip of a disastrous famine, became a major recipient of foreign aid beginning in 1995–1996. Most of the aid was presented as purely humanitarian in nature and unrelated to the ongoing crisis, but there are good reasons to think that North Korean officials saw the aid as a kind of tribute, an additional reward for their willingness to ostensibly freeze their nuclear program. This might be a cynical view, but a look at the statistics confirms that North Korean officials might have been right in their hard-nosed assessment. As we’ll see below, as soon as relations with the United States deteriorated in 2002, the American aid all but disappeared. The same thing happened to Japanese aid after a crisis in relations caused by revelations about the abduction of Japanese citizens. This ha
rdly supports the view that the aid was driven exclusively by lofty humanitarian considerations.

  Throughout the 1996–2001 period (the time when the food crisis was most acute) North Korea received a total of 5.94 million metric tons of food aid. Most of this aid came from countries described by Pyongyang’s official propaganda as the “mortal enemies of Korean people”—the United States, South Korea, and Japan. The United States provided 1.7 million metric tons (28.6 percent of the total), South Korea provided 0.67 million metric tons (11 percent), and Japan provided 0.81 million metric tons (13.6 percent). Of the ostensibly “friendly” countries, only China was a major provider of aid throughout the 1996–2001 period, with 1.3 million metric tons of food shipped to the North.9 The food shipments played a major role in mitigating the humanitarian disaster.

  North Korean diplomats not merely succeeded in acquiring a large amount of aid, but also ensured that the aid came without too much obtrusive control, and hence could be channeled to those people whose compliance and support were vital for the regime’s survival. Foreign monitors were denied any access to a significant part of the country, including areas that were hit hardest by the 1996–1999 famine. Even in the most permissive period, around 2004, the foreign monitors were allowed to supervise distribution only in 167 (of 201) counties.

  No Korean speakers were allowed into the country, and until 2004 the authorities even banned World Food Program (WFP) personnel from attending Korean language classes. Monitoring teams were always accompanied by the government-assigned interpreters who filtered all questions and answers. North Koreans often assumed—probably correctly—that these people were by default on the payroll of the political police, so they were unlikely to say anything dangerous in this menacing atmosphere. The number of WFP monitors was kept small, and their inspection trips had to be approved by the authorities well in advance—so everything could be arranged and monitors usually saw only what their handlers wanted them to see.10

  Things changed after the so-called second nuclear crisis. The crisis erupted in October 2002 when Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly was visiting Pyongyang. By that time the US government had acquired intelligence indicating that North Koreans were cheating, and that Pyongyang was secretly pursuing a uranium enrichment program. In Pyongyang, James Kelly confronted North Korean officials. What followed is not exactly clear: according to Kelly, the North Korean deputy foreign minister admitted the existence of the highly enriched uranium (HEU) program, but the North Koreans eventually denied that such admission had taken place. They came out with a different interpretation: according to Pyongyang’s version of the story, the North Korean diplomat in question merely said that North Korea was entitled to have an HEU program since it was facing a hostile superpower—implying that the entitlement was more or less theoretical. At any rate, this exchange was taken as proof of the clandestine HEU program. With the wisdom of hindsight, this seems to be a correct assumption, since in 2009, after years of denial, Pyongyang admitted that it had the HEU program. In November 2010 North Korean officials proudly showed off a huge uranium enrichment facility to visiting US nuclear scientists.

  It is possible that North Koreans hoped to acquire an additional source of income by negotiating a buyout of their HEU program for a hefty price—a scheme somewhat similar to the buyout of plutonium program in 1994. However, even if it was indeed the initial plan, it did not work as intended. With George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers in the White House, things took a different turn. Instead of bargaining for another buyout, the United States cited the HEU program as proof that North Koreans should not be trusted. Large-scale aid was discontinued. The KEDO project was closed down, with all personnel being withdrawn from the construction sites between 2005 and 2006. In 2003 North Korea formally withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, becoming the first state to ever do so (and, actually, creating a dangerous precedent).

  Obviously some Washington hard-liners assumed that without US aid North Korea would soon collapse. However, North Korean diplomats have been successful in finding substitutes for the US aid—from 2002 to 2010 aid shipments came from South Korea and, later, China compensated for the sudden halt of the US food and economic assistance. Indeed, the North Korean economy actually began its partial recovery right around the time when US aid was halted. At any rate, the Bush administration was not in the mood to talk to Kim Jong Il, whom Bush despised and once even described as a “pigmy” (North Korea itself was described as a part of the “axis of evil”).

  As an important part of efforts aimed at pressing the North Korean regime and driving it to denuclearization and/or collapse, the US government used Section 311 of the Patriot Act and targeted financial institutions it knew handled the money of the North Korean government and Kim family. They were accused of money laundering—an accusation not completely unfounded but perhaps exaggerated, as only a relatively small part of the Pyongyang income comes from illegal activities. In September 2005 a small bank in Macao, Banco Delta Asia (BDA), was singled out as a “money laundering outlet”—indeed, it was very involved in dubious transactions with Pyongyang. As a result, $25 million of North Korean funds were frozen and US banking institutions ended operations with the BDA.

  Obviously, the US government wanted to set a precedent by issuing a warning to all banks that might wish to become too cozy with the North Korean regime. When it comes to state finances, $25 million is not a large sum of money even for a poor state like North Korea, but the decision produced a surprisingly strong reaction from Pyongyang—perhaps because the funds seemed to be the private treasure of the Kim family. For a brief while, international bankers avoided any interaction with their North Korean peers, and in some cases large transactions had to be conducted in cash. It was argued that such measures interrupted the supply of perks to the Kim family and top North Korean bureaucrats, whose appreciation for Swiss cheese and French cognac is well known.

  An important byproduct of the “second nuclear crisis” was the launch of the six-party talks, which began in 2003 with the stated goal of laying the ground for the eventual denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. The talks were attended by the six powers involved in the ongoing nuclear crisis—the United States, China (the host of the talks), South Korea, Russia, Japan, and, of course, North Korea. From the very beginning there was little doubt that the talks were not going to achieve their stated goal, since the Kim family regime has never had the slightest intention to surrender its nuclear program. Nonetheless, the six-party talks were not useless: negotiations helped to ameliorate tensions and created a useful forum where Korea-related security issues could be discussed freely.

  However, because the United States provided so little aid to Pyongyang between 2002 and 2006, relations between North Korea and the United States remained very tense. North Korean leaders therefore decided that it was time to dramatically raise the stakes.

  By that time North Korea had amassed enough plutonium to produce a few crude nuclear devices. In early 2010 it was estimated that North Korea had manufactured 40 to 60 kg of weapons-grade plutonium, of which 24 to 42 kg was available for weapons production. Siegfried Hecker believes that North Korea is “most likely to possess a nuclear arsenal of four to eight primitive weapons,” even though it still “appears a long way from developing both a missile and a warhead to launch a nuclear weapon to great distance.”11

  What followed was yet another exercise of Pyongyang’s favorite tactics. When North Korean strategists are not happy about the situation and suspect that more aid and concessions can (and therefore should) be squeezed from the outside world, they follow the same routine. They first manufacture a crisis and drive tensions as high as possible. They launch missiles, test nukes, dispatch commandos, and drop all sorts of menacing hints. When tensions are sufficiently high, with newspaper headlines across the globe telling readers that the “Korean peninsula is on the brink of war,” and foreign diplomats feeling a bit uneasy, the North Korean government suggests negot
iations. The offer is accepted with a sigh of relief, giving North Korean diplomats the leverage to squeeze maximum concessions out of their negotiating partners as a reward for Pyongyang’s willingness to restore the precrisis status quo. Usually, they succeed.

  This policy was applied to Moscow and Beijing during the 1960s and 1970s (without missile launches, of course—but different and subtler ways were used to manipulate Moscow and Beijing). It also worked well during the first nuclear crisis of 1990–1994.

  Consequently, during October 2006, North Korean leaders decided to make a point by conducting their first nuclear test. The yield was surprisingly low and it is possible that the nuclear device did not work as intended, but the underground explosion in remote northern mountains was enough to demonstrate that North Korea was indeed moving toward creating an effective nuclear weapons capability.

  After the test, the UN Security Council immediately passed a properly stern Resolution 1718, which was supported by all permanent members (including Russia and China). At the time, optimists cheered the news and began to persuade themselves and everybody around that China had finally done the right thing and from now on would be in the same boat as the United States and major developed countries. This was not the case, of course: China was not in the same boat—and never will be. While unhappy about nuclear proliferation, China is not going to do anything that might trigger an acute domestic crisis in North Korea. Even though they professed to participate in the sanctions regime, the Chinese did not let it influence their position: on the contrary, 2006, the year of the first nuclear test, also marked an upsurge in the scale of Chinese aid to and economic cooperation with Pyongyang—and this scale has been increasing ever since.

  As we will see below, South Korea, with left-leaning administrations in control from 1998 to 2008, was even more willing to shower North Korea with aid without asking too many questions about aid use and distribution.