The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

by Oberdorfer, Don

  NUCLEAR DIPLOMACY: THE AMERICAN WEAPONS

  When the Bush administration took office in Washington in January 1989, information and concern about the North Korean nuclear program was limited to a small group of American officials with access to the satellite photographs. Although most intelligence officials had no doubt about the seriousness of the danger, puzzling questions remained. Why, for example, was Yongbyon not better hidden? The flight path for airliners landing at Pyongyang went nearly right over the nuclear complex, making it easily visible to passengers. Such questions were excuses for inaction by a US governmental apparatus that was anything but eager to grapple with this complex and explosive topic. “The real problem was the policymakers’ reluctance to face the issue, an avoidance of reality that probably flowed from the realization of the scope and difficulty of the problem,” according to a former official who dealt with it in both the Reagan and the Bush administrations.

  The first impulse of the Bush administration was to inform others with potential influence about what Washington’s space satellites were observing at Yongbyon. If the North Koreans were to be stopped or even slowed, it was clear that the United States would have to gain the cooperation of the other major powers with interests in the Korean peninsula. The chief of the State Department’s Korea Desk, Harry Dunlop, briefed Soviet and Chinese officials in February 1989 about the North Korean nuclear program during visits to their capitals. Later Secretary of State James Baker took up the issue repeatedly with senior officials of the two communist giants. According to Baker, “Our diplomatic strategy was designed to build international pressure against North Korea to force them to live up to their agreement to sign a safeguards agreement permitting inspections.”

  In May a US team of experts traveled to Seoul and Tokyo to provide the first extensive briefing for those governments. By then word of the American findings was trickling out, and the State Department feared that failure to provide information could be a blow to South Korean confidence in the United States. Washington was also eager to put its own spin on the news it was imparting.

  Before the briefing, an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency official wrote to her superiors, “I think the South Koreans need to be convinced that their interests would not be served by embarking on a weapons program of their own, or allowing our conclusions to become public.” The second of those concerns turned out to be well taken. The highly classified briefing in Seoul, with its gripping conclusion that North Korea might be able to produce atomic bombs by the mid-1990s, leaked almost immediately to the South Korean press, and from there to US and international news media.

  After an article that I wrote about the briefing appeared in the Washington Post, the North Korea Mission to the United Nations issued a press release, denying any nuclear weapons activity and calling my report “an utterly groundless lie.” Despite the denial, the intelligence briefing and the notoriety it attained launched the public and political tumult over the North Korean nuclear program.

  The issue was to dominate US policy regarding the divided peninsula for decades to come, at times to the exclusion of almost anything else.

  FIRST STEPS

  The North Korean response to growing pressure to permit IAEA inspections was to insist it would never agree while being threatened by American nuclear weapons, especially those based in South Korea. The argument had undeniable logic and appeal. As officials in Washington studied the issue, they also realized it would be difficult to organize an international coalition to oppose North Korean nuclear weapons activity as long as American nuclear weapons were in place on the divided peninsula. A Bush administration interagency committee on the North Korean nuclear issue kept coming back to whether the American nuclear deployments should be removed but was unable to reach a decision.

  American nuclear weapons had been stationed on the territory of South Korea for more than three decades, since President Eisenhower authorized the deployment of nuclear warheads on Honest John missiles and 280-millimeter long-range artillery in December 1957. As South Vietnam was faltering in the early 1970s, creating fears about South Korea’s future, American deployments became notably more prominent. By 1972, according to US documents obtained by nuclear researcher William Arkin, 763 nuclear warheads were deployed in South Korea, the peak number ever recorded.

  In 1974 congressional committees began raising questions in public about the security and usefulness of the atomic weapons. As a correspondent who often visited Korea, I learned and reported at that time that American nuclear weapons were stationed uncomfortably close to the DMZ and that nuclear warheads had been flown by helicopter almost routinely to the edge of the DMZ in training exercises.

  Public threats to use nuclear weapons were part of the US response to nervousness in Seoul following the fall of Saigon. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, publicly acknowledging the presence of American atomic weapons in Korea, declared in June 1975 that “if circumstances were to require the use of tactical nuclear weapons . . . I think that that would be carefully considered.” He added, “I do not think it would be wise to test [American] reactions.” A year later, well-publicized temporary deployments of nuclear-capable US warplanes to Korea in February 1976 and the first of the annual US-ROK Team Spirit military maneuvers that June involved large-scale movements of troops and practice for use of nuclear weapons. In August 1976, nuclear-capable air and naval assets were massively deployed to Korea after the killing of the two American officers in the DMZ tree-cutting episode.

  Thereafter, the trend reversed. The Carter administration reduced the number of American nuclear weapons deployed in Korea to about 250 warheads, a reduction due in part to Carter’s withdrawal policies and part to the replacement of some obsolete nuclear weapons by highly accurate conventional weapons. By the onset of the Bush administration in 1989, the Korean deployments had been reduced to about 100 warheads. The cutbacks had been made without public notice, in keeping with the long-standing US policy to “neither confirm nor deny” deployments of nuclear weapons.

  American military commanders saw little practical requirement in Korea for the remaining weapons, which were artillery warheads and gravity bombs stored at Kunsan Air Base on the west coast, south of Seoul. In October 1990, US ambassador Donald Gregg, after consulting General Robert RisCassi, the US military commander in Korea, and also the general’s two immediate predecessors, recommended to Washington that the weapons be removed to facilitate the negotiations with the North and to avoid their emergence as a serious political issue in the South. The following spring, Admiral William J. Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an Asia expert, publicly recommended that the nuclear weapons be withdrawn as part of a deal with North Korea. Crowe spelled out in public what others were saying in private, that due to the mobility of US forces, “the actual presence of any nuclear weapons in South Korea is not necessary to maintain a nuclear umbrella over the R.O.K.”

  These recommendations, however, ran into deep reservations in Washington. President Bush’s national security adviser, retired lieutenant general Brent Scowcroft, was strongly opposed to removing the American weapons as a concession to the North on the grounds that Pyongyang had done nothing to earn this reward. Equally serious was concern that removal of the weapons would be seen by the South, and especially by its military, as weakening both the US deterrent against the North and the US commitment to defense of the South.

  In the spring of 1991, the topic of the nuclear weapons was broached, gingerly at first, in a series of intimate meetings in Seoul involving Gregg, RisCassi, and several senior officials of the Blue House and ROK Defense and Foreign Ministries. Under previous US practice, only the South Korean president—with no aides present—had been briefed on the nature and location of American nuclear weapons in the country. Until the highly confidential “inner-circle meetings” began in Seoul, a Korean civilian participant recalled, “it was taboo even to talk about the American tactical nuclear weapons; for us, they were shoc
king to consider.”

  The discussions deepened in a two-day meeting of American and South Korean military and civilian officials at US Pacific Command headquarters at Honolulu, Hawaii, in early August. While other issues were mentioned, Washington’s real purpose was to be sure that the Koreans would be comfortable with removal of the remaining American nuclear weapons. At the high point of the sessions, the representative of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff announced the Pentagon’s conclusion that the nuclear deployments in South Korea were not necessary for the country’s defense. Although no strong objections to removal of the weapons were raised by the Koreans, some suggested that they be used as a bargaining chip for concessions from Pyongyang. The meeting concluded without formal agreement.

  What finally broke through the inertia in Washington was a dramatic and unexpected development in a different part of the world: the coup attempt in mid-August 1991 by hard-liners against Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Although it failed, the coup marked the transfer of real power from Gorbachev to his rival, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and the beginning of the rapid move toward dissolution of the Soviet Union. On September 27, in an initiative calculated to bring forth reciprocal steps from Moscow, Bush announced the removal of all ground-based and sea-based tactical nuclear weapons from US forces worldwide. The withdrawal of the nuclear artillery from South Korea would leave in place there only some sixty nuclear warheads for air-delivered gravity bombs.

  After consulting his advisers, Bush secretly decided to remove these last American nuclear deployments on the peninsula. He also decided in principle to permit North Koreans to inspect the US base at Kunsan where the nuclear weapons had been stored, to meet another of North Korea’s demands. “We were able to hook a ride on a Soviet-related decision,” said Richard Solomon, who as assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs had tried unsuccessfully for many months to deal with the issue of the American nuclear weapons in Korea.

  Before making his formal decisions, Bush privately informed South Korean president Roh Tae Woo in a meeting at the United Nations that the United States would continue to provide the nuclear umbrella—that is, nuclear protection against threats to South Korea’s security—whether or not American nuclear weapons were in place on the peninsula.

  In December, when the last of the nuclear bombs had been removed, Roh was permitted to announce officially that “as I speak, there do not exist any nuclear weapons whatsoever, anywhere in the Republic of Korea.” Roh’s announcement signaling the withdrawal of the American nuclear weapons had a powerful—seemingly immediate—effect in North Korea, contributing in important fashion to an era of compromise and conciliation.

  THE DECEMBER ACCORDS

  The winter of 1991 inaugurated a period of unusual progress in North-South relations and in North Korea’s relations with the United States. It was one of those rare periods when the policies of the two Koreas were in alignment for conciliation and agreement, with all the major outside powers either neutral or supportive.

  Economically and politically, 1991 had been a very bad year for Kim Il Sung. His estrangement from the Soviet Union the previous year had cost him a crucial alliance and left him with a painful energy shortage and worsening economic problems. North Korean leaders were briefly cheered in August 1991 by the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, and they quickly made it known they hoped it would succeed. However, when the coup failed and Russian president Yeltsin became the de facto leader of the failing Soviet Union, Kim could expect no help or even sympathy from Moscow.

  In the spring of 1991, Kim’s other major ally, China, had forced him to reverse his long-standing opposition to dual entry with South Korea to the United Nations. Now Beijing was moving toward normalization of relations with Seoul. When Kim visited China in October, he was advised to open up economically as China had done and to undertake a rapid settlement with South Korea in the interest of regional peace and stability. Chinese leaders also urged him to give credence to Bush’s announcement that American tactical nuclear weapons were being withdrawn and to resolve the concern over the North Korean nuclear program as soon as possible. Even while Kim was still in China, his Foreign Ministry issued a statement welcoming the US move. After returning from Beijing, Kim convened a Politburo meeting, from which emerged new efforts at reconciliation with the South and the world outside.

  Simultaneously, South Korea had been shifting toward a more conciliatory posture regarding the North in preparation for the final year of Roh Tae Woo’s presidency. High-level talks led by the two prime ministers visiting each other’s capitals had already begun in the fall of 1990. In a private conversation with the visiting North Korean prime minister in September 1990, Roh sent word to Kim Il Sung of his desire for a summit meeting as a step toward improved North-South relations. Kim responded, during the visit to Pyongyang of the South Korean prime minister the following month, that he was willing to meet if there was something important to be achieved, but not under other circumstances. After a year’s hiatus, which in the view of a senior South Korean participant, Lim Dong Won, was caused by the South’s tactical miscalculations, the talks resumed.

  Starting with the October 22–25, 1991, prime ministerial meeting in Pyongyang, there was rapid progress. Before the southerners went home, the two Koreas had agreed in principle to work out and adopt at their next meeting a single document setting the terms for broad-ranging accord. When the northern team came to Seoul on December 10, it was prepared to compromise and, as southern delegates saw it, ready to sign an agreement. “This time we brought the seal with us,” said a visitor from Pyongyang, referring to the official stamp used to authenticate documents in Asia. This was an astonishing change from the months and years of sterile negotiations in which both sides had refused to budge from fixed positions.

  The result of three days of intense bargaining was by far the most important document adopted by the two sides since the North-South joint statement of July 4, 1972. In the “Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression and Exchanges and Cooperation Between the South and the North,” adopted and initialed on December 13, 1991, the two Koreas came closer than ever before to accepting each other’s regime as a legitimate government with a right to exist. The document portrayed the two Koreas as “recognizing that their relations, not being a relationship between states, constitute a special interim relationship stemming from the process toward unification.” The guidelines of the “special interim relationship,” if implemented, would have meant a nearly complete cessation of the conflict on the peninsula and a reversal of decades of policy on both sides:

  •mutual recognition of each other’s systems and an end to interference, vilification, and subversion of each other

  •mutual efforts “to transform the present state of armistice into a solid state of peace,” with continued observance of the armistice until this was accomplished

  •nonuse of force against each other and implementation of confidence-building measures and large-scale arms reductions

  •economic, cultural, and scientific exchanges; free correspondence between divided families; and the reopening of roads and railroads that had been severed at the North-South dividing line

  Three separate subcommittees on political and military activities and on exchanges were authorized in the agreement, to work out the many details for implementing the accord.

  North Korea refused to deal with the issue of its nuclear program in the reconciliation agreement but promised to work on a separate North-South nuclear accord before the end of the year. This was facilitated on December 18, when Roh announced publicly that the American nuclear weapons had been withdrawn.

  On December 24, at a North Korean Workers Party Central Committee plenum, Kim Il Sung praised the recent North-South nonaggression pact as “the first epochal event” since the start of inter-Korean diplomacy in 1972. The meeting, the first party plenum centered on North-South issues in nine years, ended with a public report that contained no criticism of
South Korea or the United States.

  The party meeting was significant for two other reasons, which may have been connected. Kim Jong Il, the son and designated successor to the Great Leader, was named supreme commander of the DPRK armed forces. And in parallel moves that could not have been made without approval of Kim Jong Il and at least acquiescence by the armed forces commanders he now headed, the plenum apparently gave party clearance for international inspection of the country’s nuclear program and for a bilateral nuclear accord to be worked out with the South. Selig Harrison of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was later told by a variety of North Korean and foreign observers that the plenum marked a conditional victory for pragmatists who argued for making a deal—compromising the nuclear issues in return for economic benefits and normalization of relations with the United States and Japan. Hard-line elements, according to Harrison, agreed to suspend the weapons program, but not to terminate it—being confident that US and Japanese help would not be forthcoming.

  The promised nuclear negotiations between the two Koreas convened at Panmunjom on December 26. As with nonaggression accords, the North’s negotiators had instructions to make a deal. On the second day of the talks, they appeared with a written proposal incorporating most of the sweeping South Korean language and dropping several earlier propositions that were unacceptable to the South. At one point, the usually standoffish North Korean negotiators woke up their South Korean counterparts late at night for a series of one-on-one talks that made important progress. Some sensitive negotiations took place in whispered conversations in the corners of the meeting room, away from the formal conference table, with its microphones hooked up to offices in the two capitals.