The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History

by Oberdorfer, Don

  Light-water reactors are much more complex than the gas-graphite reactors then in service or under construction in the North. Virtually all the key LWR components were beyond North Korea’s technological or industrial capability and would have to be imported from abroad. The Americans at the conference table with technical expertise were unimpressed with what one called a “totally hare-brained” scheme, because of the expense and complexity involved. Energy experts realized that North Korea’s electricity requirements could be met much more easily and cheaply with nonnuclear fuels and that large nuclear reactors would actually be a threat to the North’s fragile electric grid.

  But other members of the US team immediately saw Pyongyang’s offer as a face-saving way to resolve the proliferation and inspection questions. It could modernize its nuclear power production without ever admitting it had been seeking to make atomic weapons. As soon as Kang announced his offer, Robert Carlin, the senior North Korea watcher in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, wrote on his note pad, “They want out of this issue.”

  Gallucci was skeptical at first that North Korea was serious about trading in its indigenous nuclear program, but he quickly saw the positive possibilities for international control of the North Korean program. He also saw the immense difficulties, especially the high costs involved. “The last time I looked, such reactors cost about $1 billion per copy,” he told the North Koreans.

  North Korea’s quest for light-water reactors, although new to most of the Americans at the conference table, actually had a long history, including, as noted above, the deal with Moscow. Although that deal fell apart after the collapse of the USSR, the allure of more modern nuclear facilities remained undimmed in leadership circles in Pyongyang, which saw nuclear power as a way out of what it worried was a persistent and worsening energy crisis. When IAEA director general Hans Blix visited North Korea in May 1992, he was asked to help North Korea acquire light-water reactors and to guarantee a secure supply from abroad of the enriched uranium fuel they would require. Blix promised to try to help. Two months later, DPRK deputy premier Kim Dal Hyon, on a visit to Seoul, proposed that the two Koreas cooperate on an LWR plant, to be built in the North close to the DMZ, to provide power to both economies. Under this plan, South Korea would provide most of the capital and technology. The proposal, which was kept secret at the time, was shoved aside during the deterioration of North-South relations later in the year and went nowhere. Kim Dal Hyon was demoted, as were others seen as “pragmatists.”

  When the LWR proposal was resurrected in the Geneva negotiations with the United States, Gallucci was warned by senior State and Defense Department officials against making any commitment, especially a financial commitment, to the proposal. On July 19, at the end of six days of talks, Gallucci agreed in a formal statement that the United States would “support the introduction of LWRs and . . . explore with the DPRK ways in which LWRs could be obtained,” but only as part of a “final resolution” of nuclear issues. Gallucci later said this gauzy statement was “seven times removed from any commitment” to provide LWRs. The July announcement was issued as two “unilateral” but identical statements. After the beating it took from the South in June, Washington was not interested in another “joint” statement with the North.

  The negotiations adjourned without progress on the contentious issue of permitting IAEA “special inspections” of the two suspected nuclear waste sites. The sides agreed to continue meeting, but in a separate “explanatory” statement Gallucci underlined that the United States would not begin the third round of negotiations until “serious discussions” were under way on nuclear issues in North-South channels and between North Korea and the IAEA.

  KIM YOUNG SAM BLOWS THE WHISTLE

  The American–North Korean negotiations in June had had the limited objective of persuading Pyongyang not to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Washington had offered limited benefits in return. Privately, Gallucci characterized his initial negotiating posture as, “If they do everything we want, we send them a box of oranges.” The North Korean offer in July, to give up its entire indigenous nuclear program in favor of the proliferation-resistant light-water reactors, had dramatically changed the bidding. Now the objective in view was much more ambitious—but it was also clear that Pyongyang would demand more extensive benefits in return. While American officials were intrigued and some elated, many in Seoul were unhappy with the shift from limited to virtually unlimited US-DPRK talks.

  As it turned out, progress toward meeting the American conditions for convening the third round of US-DPRK talks, in which broader issues were to be discussed, was excruciatingly slow, so slow that the third round almost never happened. Talks between North Korea and the Vienna-based IAEA quickly sank into exasperating arguments over the DPRK’s obligations. As the IAEA saw it, North Korea was still required by treaty to comply with all nuclear inspection requirements that had been or would be imposed on it, like any other signatory, as long as it had not officially left the NPT. Pyongyang, however, insisted that in suspending its withdrawal from the treaty, it had entered a “special” and “unique” category in which it alone would determine what inspection requirements to accept. It was ready to accept very few.

  To keep check on the North Korean program while the arguments continued, Washington invented an interim concept called “continuity of safeguards,” which it insisted was essential. This required that agency inspectors be admitted to the Yongbyon site to replace films and batteries in monitoring equipment and to make other nonintrusive tests to check that no diversion of nuclear materials was taking place. The IAEA was uncomfortable with this ad hoc concept—insisting that North Korea should comply in the fullest with its requirements—but reluctantly went along. With film and batteries running down or even running out from time to time, the IAEA repeatedly threatened to declare that “continuity of safeguards” had been lost. It was clear that such a declaration would trigger an immediate demand for UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea.

  IAEA inspectors were permitted to return to Yongbyon in August (as they had been in mid-May) but only to replace the film and batteries in the monitoring equipment. The IAEA protested vigorously that this was not enough and publicly criticized North Korea. Pyongyang reacted with bitter rhetoric. Under pressure, North Korea in September and October offered to accept another visit for film and battery replacement, but the IAEA rejected the conditions, declaring them to be insufficient. And so it went.

  Action on the North-South front, the other prerequisite for convening the third round of US–North Korean negotiations, was even less productive. In May South Korea proposed meetings between the two sides to work on the nuclear issues, and North Korea counterproposed an exchange of “special envoys” to deal with unification issues and prepare a North-South summit. Despite a series of exchanges over the summer and fall, the two sides could not even agree to convene working-level meetings at Panmunjom to prepare for more important meetings. Working-level contacts were finally convened for three days in October but without results.

  In early-October 1993, with no progress being made on any front, Representative Gary Ackerman, the ebullient and earthy Democratic lawmaker from New York City, traveled to Pyongyang on a get-acquainted mission. Earlier in the year, Ackerman had succeeded Stephen Solarz as chairman of the Asia-Pacific Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and thus he carried considerable weight in Congress. He bore a message from the administration, which he delivered in person to Kim Il Sung, that the United States wished to resolve its issues with the DPRK through dialogue and negotiations and wished to resume the bilateral engagement at the political level.

  Accompanying Ackerman was C. Kenneth Quinones, the Korean-speaking State Department desk officer for North Korea. After lengthy talks with Quinones on outstanding issues, Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry presented him with a paper proposing a series of trade-offs to settle the issues at stake with the United S
tates. In the paper, written in English in longhand, the North Koreans said they were ready to remain in the NPT and submit to regular IAEA inspections and to discuss the contentious issue of the “special inspections” that the IAEA had demanded, in return for an end to US-ROK Team Spirit military exercises, the lifting of American economic sanctions, and the convening of the long-delayed third round of US-DPRK negotiations to tackle broader issues. The proposal for tradeoffs, in retrospect, was a fundamental shift in the concept of the negotiations, which until that point had been based on making step-by-step progress toward accords rather than one simultaneous and comprehensive deal, later termed “a package solution.” The Foreign Ministry officials said the handwritten proposals had been cleared with the top leadership of their country, meaning Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

  When Quinones returned to Washington, he found a very skeptical group of US policy makers, who insisted that details of potential accords be hammered out before proceeding further at the political level. In New York, Quinones and Gary Samore, Gallucci’s top aide, engaged in a series of unannounced meetings with officials of the North Korean UN Mission to try to work out a detailed accord. When this effort ran into trouble, a more senior State Department official, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Hubbard, began making frequent trips to New York to see the North Koreans.

  With little progress being made, public as well as official frustration with the stalemate was soaring. On November 1, IAEA director general Hans Blix reported to the UN General Assembly in pessimistic terms on the agency’s standoff with Pyongyang, though he stopped just short of declaring the “continuity of safeguards” to be lost. The General Assembly reacted with a resounding 140-to-1 vote (with China abstaining and only Pyongyang dissenting), urging North Korea “to cooperate immediately” with the IAEA, a demonstration of how isolated Pyongyang had become.

  At a press conference in Seoul, the exasperated South Korean defense minister, Kwon Yong Hae, expressed concern about the North Korean nuclear program and mentioned the possibility of using military action to stop it. In a meeting with visiting Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, Kwon agreed to put off any decision about holding the Team Spirit exercise. Aspin said, “The ball is now in North Korea’s court. The world awaits.”

  On the way home from Seoul, Aspin gave a background briefing to journalists aboard his plane that inadvertently gave rise to alarmist reports that war was on the verge of breaking out. The news agency Reuters, which filed the most breathless dispatch, quoted a senior US defense official as saying, “We may be entering a kind of danger zone,” because North Korea had massed 70 percent of its military force near South Korea (which in fact was nothing new) and might launch a desperate conventional attack on the South, sparked by hunger and economic frustration in Pyongyang. In a precursor to concerns that later were to be widely discussed, Aspin told the reporters, “These guys are starving” and may feel that “you can either starve or get killed in a war.” The Aspin briefing gave rise to a full-scale journalistic war scare—to the surprise and dismay of most officials who had been following the situation.

  On November 5, a passionate column by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post demanded that Clinton “stop talking to the North Koreans—it is time for an economic blockade—and start talking to the American people” about a military emergency in Asia. The administration was so jarred by Krauthammer’s column that a State Department meeting was convened to discuss it. Two days later, President Clinton threw oil on the fire by warning on NBC’s Meet the Press that “North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb,” implying that the United States would take military action to stop it. Weeks later, after various US officials speculated that Pyongyang already had at least one bomb, the White House said Clinton had misspoken.

  Suddenly, North Korea was at the top of the news in the United States. An NBC/Wall Street Journal public opinion poll reported that North Korea’s development of a nuclear weapon was considered the nation’s most serious foreign policy problem by 31 percent of a nationwide sample—a larger proportion than any other single issue they picked.

  On November 11, amid the war scare and in the absence of diplomatic movement, the chief DPRK negotiator, Kang Sok Ju, made public the proposed “package solution” in Pyongyang. Without revealing its earlier history, he set out the main elements of the paper that had been given to Quinones a month earlier and discussed inconclusively ever since.

  On November 15, after fifteen midlevel meetings in New York and a host of letters back and forth to Pyongyang, the administration finally decided to put its own “package deal” on the table. The essence of the immediate bargain was North Korean resumption of regular IAEA inspections and a renewal of dialogue with the South, in return for cancellation of the 1994 Team Spirit military exercise and the convening of the long-delayed third round of US-DPRK negotiations. Phase two, to be bargained in detail when American and North Korean negotiators finally began their third round, would deal with IAEA inspections of the two disputed Yongbyon waste sites, diplomatic recognition of North Korea, and trade and investment concessions from the United States, South Korea, and Japan.

  The new administration proposal immediately leaked to the Washington Post’s R. Jeffrey Smith, who was following the maneuvering closely. The publicity was a bombshell in Seoul, which was always extremely sensitive to American concessions to North Korea, and especially to suggestions that South Korea was not the dominant force in policy toward Pyongyang. In addition, the proposal was anathema to President Kim Young Sam for another and highly personal reason: a “package deal” similar in name and concept had been publicly suggested in the spring by his longtime rival in domestic politics, Kim Dae Jung. If he was for it, Kim Young Sam was automatically against it.

  The South Korean president’s views surfaced dramatically and unexpectedly on November 23, at the start of his first official visit to Washington. Ushered into the Oval Office for what had been planned as a brief meeting to put a pro forma stamp of approval on the US proposal, Kim announced that it looked to him and his people as if the United States were accommodating North Korea without even giving Seoul a role in the decision process. His eyes flashing and his gestures emphatic, Kim insisted that he, not the Americans, would have the final say on whether to cancel the Team Spirit exercise and that he would be the one to announce the decision when the time came. He also demanded that the long-discussed “exchange of envoys” between North and South actually take place before the third round of US–North Korean negotiations begin.

  Clinton was startled and his senior aides mystified by the nature and the vehemence of Kim’s objections, as the various elements of the proposed offer had been discussed for months with officials of Kim’s government. As the “brief” Oval Office meeting stretched on to eighty minutes, with senior American and Korean officials waiting with growing apprehension in another room, the Americans realized that Kim’s objections had as much to do with appearance as with substance. A change in terminology to describe the proposal to North Korea as “thorough and broad” rather than as “comprehensive” or a “package” seemed to ease Kim’s concern substantially. The White House also agreed to permit Kim to announce the final decision on postponement of Team Spirit if it came to that and to make the exchange of North-South “special envoys” a prerequisite for the next round of US-DPRK talks. The latter requirement proved to be an important stumbling block: North Korea bitterly resented being required to give in to the South’s demand in order to deal with the Americans.

  By the end of the Kim Young Sam visit, the Americans understood, if they hadn’t before, the complexity and difficulty of negotiating with North Korea. The parties involved were arrayed in a series of overlapping circles: North Korea–International Atomic Energy Agency, North Korea–South Korea, and North Korea–United States. As in a combination lock, all three had to be in alignment simultaneously for the talks to succeed. Now a fourth circle of problems had been added: Washington-Seoul. As the
holiday season approached in 1993, negotiations with the DPRK seemed to portend more problems than progress.

  THE SEASON OF CRISIS BEGINS

  In Pyongyang in early-December 1993, the Workers Party Central Committee made a surprising admission. At a meeting marking the end of the country’s current seven-year economic plan, the party announced publicly that the major targets of the plan had not been met, and it warned that the economic situation was “grave.” Battered by the collapse of its allies and trading partners and by economic stagnation at home, the North was in its fourth consecutive year of economic decline. Its GNP, once on a par with that of the South, was estimated at one-sixteenth the size of the booming ROK economy, and the situation was worsening.

  Instead of adopting a new seven-year plan with the usual emphasis on heavy industry, the party decreed a three-year period of transition, with top priority to agriculture, light industry, and foreign trade. The meaning of the shift was clear: the North’s leaders had lowered their sights and were aiming at mere survival. They were failing to feed their people and to provide enough clothing and other consumer goods to avoid privation, hence the new emphasis on agriculture and light industry. In an attempt to ease the situation without making basic changes in its autarkic command economy, North Korea was looking to exports for salvation—but it had little to sell that the world wanted.