The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

by Oberdorfer, Don

  A complicated issue for both Koreas was nuclear reprocessing. They were acutely conscious that nearby Japan operated reprocessing facilities for its civil nuclear program under arrangements with the United States that predate the time when Washington had focused on reprocessing as a proliferation risk. Some in the South were eager not to foreclose the option of a future reprocessing plant on economic grounds and, some Americans suspected, as a potential source of weapons material. However, Roh agreed under heavy US pressure to an unqualified commitment to forgo nuclear reprocessing, on the grounds that it would better position the South to bargain against the North’s then-suspected reprocessing capability. As for the North, the giant structure being built to house its reprocessing plant at Yongbyon was nearing completion—the most recent US intelligence estimate was that it could be producing plutonium by mid-1992—but this did not seem to faze Pyongyang’s negotiators when agreeing to ban reprocessing. When Representative Stephen Solarz (D-NY) met Kim Il Sung on December 18 in Pyongyang, the Great Leader declared, pounding the table at the end of a long and contentious meeting, “We have no nuclear reprocessing facilities!”

  Under the bilateral deal as negotiated, the South agreed to cancel the 1992 US-ROK Team Spirit military exercise in return for North Korean willingness to permit outside inspection of its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. In retrospect, cancellation of Team Spirit was an ROK concession of crucial importance to the North’s powerful military, which had consistently resisted compromises affecting the nuclear weapons program.

  In the final agreement signed on December 31, both North and South pledged not to “test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons” and not to “possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment facilities.” Moreover, they agreed to reciprocal inspections of facilities of the other side, to be arranged and implemented by a Joint Nuclear Control Commission.

  To achieve the agreement, North Korean negotiators were uncharacteristically willing to compromise, suggesting high-level instructions to do so. While the South was exultant at the results, some of its officials felt in retrospect they had pushed the North too hard. Riding together in a car from Pyongyang to Kaesong nine months later, after signing protocols flowing from the December accords, DPRK major general Kim Yong Chul (who remained one of the North’s key military negotiators into the mid-2000s, before being given an action-oriented assignment as head of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, charged with anti-ROK operations) complained to his counterpart, ROK major general Park Yong Ok, that 90 percent of the language originated on the southern side, and therefore “this is your agreement, not our agreement.” At that moment, the South Korean officer began to doubt whether the concessions that had been made could be actually implemented.

  At the time of the signing of the agreement on New Year’s Eve, however, Kim Il Sung portrayed the North-South nuclear pact as a great victory. In a display of his enthusiasm, he dispatched a helicopter to bring his negotiators home from Panmunjom to Pyongyang in triumphant style. At the dawn of 1992, the Economist, the British weekly on international affairs, proclaimed that “the Korean peninsula looked a little safer this week.”

  MEETING IN NEW YORK

  Three weeks into 1992, the United States rolled out its biggest contribution to the positive trend: a bilateral American–North Korean meeting at the political level. Pyongyang had long sought direct discussions with senior levels in Washington, seeing the United States as the heart and head of the West, the superpower overlord of South Korea and Japan. Pyongyang also saw relations with the United States as an important victory in its zero-sum game with the South. And most important, Kim Il Sung sought a relationship with Washington, hoping the United States would act as a balancer and protector against what he feared were potential threats to North Korean security from either China or Russia.

  In the fall of 1991, while exploring the range of incentives and disincentives that the United States could wield with the North, Washington officials had begun to discuss the possibility of a high-level meeting. The idea was highly contentious within the administration, but its advocates won approval to discuss it with the South Koreans, who approved it on the explicit condition that it would be only a onetime session that would not lead to further talks. Kim Chong Whi, Roh’s national security adviser, as well as State Department experts suggested that the meeting be with Kim Yong Sun, the relatively freewheeling Workers Party secretary for international affairs, who was close to Kim Jong Il.

  In December American officials informed the North Koreans, through the US-DPRK political counselor channel in Beijing, that a high-level meeting might be held if Pyongyang agreed to meet its nuclear inspection obligations. In the opinion of several US officials, the promise that such a meeting represented was an important factor in the North’s decision to conclude the nuclear accord with the South and in its preparations to sign a nuclear safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

  Shortly after 10:00 on January 21, 1992, Kim Yong Sun and several aides arrived at the US Mission to the United Nations to meet an American delegation headed by Arnold Kanter, the undersecretary of state for political affairs (and the third-ranking official in the State Department). Due to the intense antagonism to North Korea and the unprecedented nature of the meeting, there had been fierce debates within the administration not only about whether to have the meeting but also about what Kanter could say, and even whether he could host a lunch.* The bureaucratic compromise, according to Kanter, was that “the meeting would happen, but I would take a tough line.”

  Kanter’s “talking points”—normally stripped-down notes of the main lines of presentation—were reviewed and approved in advance by an interagency committee and then by the South Korean and Japanese governments. They became virtually a script he had to read, though he did so in the most conciliatory and inoffensive way possible. While urging North Korea to permit IAEA inspections and to give up the nuclear weapons option, Kanter was forbidden to spell out what North Korea could expect in return. He was specifically not permitted even to mention the word normalization of American–North Korean relations. Although he referred vaguely to future meetings between the two countries as the principal incentive for Pyongyang, Kanter was required by the arrangement with Seoul to rule out follow-up meetings of this group, making clear that the session itself was not the start of a negotiating process.

  The well-tailored Kim Yong Sun, who was wearing a more expensive suit than any of the Americans, impressed Kanter as shrewd and worldly, although he had never been in the United States before. Although North Korea might be a hermit kingdom, Kanter concluded, his interlocutor was no hermit. Referring repeatedly to his intimacy with the Dear Leader, Kim Yong Sun said Kim Jong Il was now in charge of North Korea’s foreign relations as well as the military. In the meeting and in a lengthy private talk with Kanter, Kim Yong Sun pushed hard for an agreement in principle to another meeting, or at least a joint statement at the conclusion of this one. When both were refused, he seemed disappointed but not angry. Later in the year, as tension mounted between Pyongyang and Washington, Kim sent a personal message to Kanter through the Beijing channel, appealing for another meeting—but in the midst of an election campaign, this was rejected by the administration.

  On January 30, eight days after the Kanter-Kim meeting, North Korea kept the promises it had made by signing the safeguards agreement with the IAEA in Vienna. The agreement was then ratified on April 9, in an unusual special meeting of the Supreme People’s Assembly. The following day, the accord was presented to IAEA director general Hans Blix at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna to bring it into force.

  THE COMING OF THE INSPECTORS

  This progress was not to be sustained, and after a few months of grace the situation rapidly headed downhill. Given later developments in the North’s nuclear weapons program, the story of the first North Korean nuclear crisis seems almost quaint by comparison. That is not to say that the intense focus on evidence of Nort
h Korean “cheating” was misplaced, only that it appears now like a Greek tragedy, with few actors realizing at the time where events were leading despite continuous warning signs and, true to form, with innocence, ignorance, and moral posturing playing equal parts in the drama.

  From its headquarters in the towers of the UN complex in Vienna, the International Atomic Energy Agency, created in 1957, runs the world’s early-warning system against the spread of nuclear weapons. Since the establishment of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, the most important task of the IAEA has been to send its multinational teams of inspectors to verify that nonnuclear weapon states are keeping their commitments not to manufacture or possess nuclear weapons.

  Until 1991 the IAEA limited itself to checking civilian nuclear facilities and materials that NPT signatories reported in voluntary declarations to the agency. The aftermath of the US-led Operation Desert Storm, however, disclosed that Iraq, an NPT signatory, had carried on a sophisticated nuclear weapons program at secret sites adjacent to those being inspected by the agency. The impact on the IAEA was profound.

  In the face of withering criticism for ineffectiveness and timidity, the IAEA under Hans Blix underwent an upheaval in personnel and a sea change in attitudes, from complacency to alertness about suspicious nuclear activities. Despite the misgivings of some third-world members of the IAEA board, Blix, a former Swedish foreign minister, established the right to accept intelligence information supplied by the United States and other member states in its investigations and the right to demand access to suspicious facilities through mandatory “special inspections.”

  Starting in September 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War, the United States began supplying intelligence information to Blix and senior aides at his Vienna headquarters, eventually including the services of its incomparably sophisticated national laboratories and supplied photos from US spy satellites that were rarely shown to outsiders. Armed for the first time with extensive independent information about the nuclear programs that they were checking, the IAEA’s leaders and its corps of international inspectors were determined not to be hoodwinked or embarrassed again. North Korea became the first test case of their new capabilities and attitudes. In this first blush of newfound resolve, the IAEA appeared not to realize that North Korea was not prepared to stand and salute.

  FIRST INSPECTIONS

  For six days in mid-May 1992, Blix led a team to North Korea to establish relations with the country’s leaders and prepare for full-scale IAEA inspections. After preliminary discussions in Pyongyang, Blix and his party were taken to the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. There, as far as is known, Blix and his three technically expert companions were the first outsiders ever to see, from ground level, what the American surveillance cameras had been peering down on for nearly a decade.

  Taking no chances that the IAEA chief would miss something of importance, US officials had provided intelligence briefings for Blix and his top aides in September 1991, March 1992, and on May 7, immediately before his departure. On the final occasion, Blix was given a “virtual reality” tour of Yongbyon, complete with ominous background music, using advanced computer modeling based on aerial photographs. Blix and his party were encouraged to memorize the shapes and relationships of the main facilities. The highlight of the intelligence tour was the reprocessing building. North Korea, after consistently denying that it had such a facility, listed the plant as a “radiochemical laboratory” in the declaration of its nuclear facilities provided a few days before Blix’s visit.

  When they were actually walking through this facility, Blix and his team had two surprises: first, that the six-story-high building was even more imposing than they had expected from the CIA briefings and, second, that the building was only about 80 percent complete, with the equipment inside only about 40 percent ready for full-scale production. An IAEA official described the works inside the giant building as “extremely primitive” and far from ready to produce the quantities of plutonium needed for a stockpile of atomic weapons. This conclusion contradicted worst-case US assessments, such as that by CIA director Robert Gates on March 27 that “we believe Pyongyang is close, perhaps very close, to having a nuclear weapon capability.”

  North Korea had reported to the IAEA in its initial declaration that in 1990, it had already produced about ninety grams of plutonium, roughly three ounces, on an experimental basis in the “radiochemical lab.” In a third surprise, the seemingly obliging North Koreans shocked Blix by proudly presenting him with a vial of the plutonium in powdered form, which is deadly when inhaled. This small amount was far short of the eight to sixteen pounds needed to produce a weapon. Nevertheless, if plutonium had been manufactured at all, it would be difficult to ascertain scientifically how much had been produced, raising the possibility that North Korea had squirreled some away.

  While very small quantities of plutonium could be separated using test methods in a laboratory, IAEA officials found it illogical that North Korea would have erected a huge and expensive facility without first building a pilot plant to test its procedures. North Korea denied that such a pilot plant existed, but doubts persisted.

  In late May, after Blix and his team returned to Vienna, the agency sent its first set of regular inspectors to Yongbyon. “The first inspection was just to get the picture,” said Olli Heinonen, a sandy-haired IAEA veteran who eventually became chief inspector of the North Korean program. “The second inspection [in July] saw something that didn’t fit the picture, the first signals that something was wrong.” More discrepancies appeared in September, with the third inspection.

  North Korea had reported that it had separated the three ounces of plutonium in an experimental procedure in 1990, when a small number of faulty fuel rods had been taken from its 5-megawatt indigenous reactor. To confirm what had been done, IAEA inspectors swabbed the inside of the steel tanks used to process the plutonium. The inspectors assumed that the North Koreans had previously scrubbed down the equipment, but the IAEA teams employed gamma-ray detectors and other gear capable of finding minute particles clinging to grooved surfaces. The IAEA also convinced the North Koreans to cut into a waste-storage pipe to obtain some of the highly radioactive waste that is a by-product of the plutonium production process.

  Tests on some of this material were run at the IAEA’s laboratory. Far more sophisticated tests were conducted for the IAEA in supporting laboratories run out of the US Air Force Technology Applications Center at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida. Much of the work of this laboratory, which had pioneered the analysis of Soviet nuclear tests, had been secret during the Cold War.

  Precise measurements of the samples indicated that three different episodes of plutonium separation could have taken place in 1989, 1990, and 1991—rather than the single operation in 1990 that North Korea had claimed. In another sophisticated set of tests, the isotopic signatures in the plutonium sample presented to Blix did not match those of the waste products that supposedly had been produced from the same operation. “It was like finding a left-hand glove of plutonium that is missing its right-hand glove, [and finding] a right-hand glove of nuclear waste that is missing its plutonium,” Blix said in an interview for this book. There had to be more plutonium, Blix and his experts reasoned, but “whether it is grams or kilograms, we don’t know.”

  Pyongyang’s expectations about the capabilities of the inspections probably had been shaped by the limited experiences of a North Korean who had worked as an IAEA inspector before the Gulf War and who in 1992 emerged as director of the safeguards liaison office of Pyongyang’s Ministry of Atomic Energy. “It’s hard to believe he had seen anything like this,” said Heinonen, speaking of the greatly enhanced scientific prowess that provided detailed test results from tiny samples of radioactive material. Said Willi Theis, initially the chief of the IAEA inspection team in North Korea, “North Korea grossly underestimated the agency’s measurement capability. . . . They never expected us to be able to perform isotopic analyses. They coul
d not understand this or explain the [test result] differences. The more they learned, the more they provided manufactured responses. We had to approach them harder and harder as they realized we were going to discover their wrongdoings.”

  FROM ACCOMMODATION TO CRISIS

  In the last half of 1992 and early 1993, the euphoria that had resulted from opening North Korea’s nuclear program to international inspection gave way to suspicion, antagonism, and, eventually, crisis. The rewards Pyongyang had expected from agreeing to nuclear inspections had not developed; instead, the presence of the inspectors provided the focal point for accusations of cheating and new international pressures. Contributing to the setback was a worsening political climate between the North and the South, brought about in part by preparations for ROK presidential elections in December 1992 as well as bitter personal rivalries within the South Korean bureaucracy over how to deal with the North. The United States, distracted and largely immobilized by its own November presidential balloting, did nothing to forestall the approaching storm.

  Since the signing of the unprecedented series of accords between North and South the previous December, negotiations over their implementation had gone slowly. In the North-South Joint Nuclear Control Commission meetings that were charged with preparing the bilateral nuclear inspections called for under the accords, Pyongyang resisted Seoul’s demands for short-notice “inspections with teeth” by South Koreans. This deadlock became more worrisome as the discrepancies in the IAEA data accumulated, and conflict grew between North Korea and the international inspectors, providing new ammunition for those who had believed all along that North Korea would never reveal crucial elements of its nuclear weapons activity.