The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  * Heated to forty million degrees at the center of a nuclear explosion, tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, fuses into helium with the release of high-energy neutrons which greatly increase the efficiency of a nuclear chain reaction.

  TEN A MILLION AND A TRILLION

  REMEMBERING HANS BLIX’S hesitations in Iraq in 1991, Bob Gallucci was amazed at the IAEA director’s bulldog tenacity the following year in North Korea. Gallucci said it taught him that the IAEA “could dramatically adjust1 to new circumstances. It was just a cruel trick of fate that I should go through this experience with Iraq and then, just a very short period of time afterwards, be confronted with an IAEA that was over the top about a need for special inspections in North Korea.” The IAEA’s ability to learn and adapt has already become an important question in the context of nuclear elimination, since it is the likeliest candidate to serve as monitor and inspector against the risk of nuclear breakout in a world without nuclear weapons—the risk, that is, that a nation might attempt to rebuild its nuclear arsenal.

  The need for special inspections in North Korea arose in the second half of 1992. In April of that year, North Korea had ratified a safeguards agreement with the IAEA to complete its accession to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As part of the safeguards process it had submitted a nuclear-materials declaration—an account of its holdings of uranium and plutonium, if any. In May, Blix and three IAEA experts had traveled to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang and then fifty-two miles due north to Yongbyon, a nuclear-research complex set within a meander on a fork of the Chongchon River, to begin assessing the accuracy and completeness of the North Korean declaration. The discrepancies the IAEA inspectors gradually uncovered indicated that North Korea might be reprocessing spent reactor fuel to extract plutonium for atomic bombs.

  The North would not be the first of the two Koreas to pursue nuclear weapons. South Korea had studied going nuclear in the early 1970s, after Richard Nixon withdrew twenty thousand U.S. troops from the country—the entire 7th Infantry Division—as part of his plan to wind down the Vietnam War. Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s national security adviser, had to threaten president Park Chung Hee with U.S. withdrawal from the peninsula to force the South Korean government to give up its nuclear-weapons work.

  If the South felt vulnerable to a U.S. withdrawal, the North had felt continually threatened by the U.S. presence on the peninsula since the brutal years of the Korean War (1950–1953), a civil war between left- and right-wing dictatorships in an artificially divided country poisonously subrogated to early Cold War hostilities. Besides suffering the bloody back-and-forth of the three-year ground war, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea had been battered by the United States in a vast, unrelenting, but little-known campaign of strategic bombing. “The air war … leveled North Korea and killed millions of civilians before the war ended,”2 wrote the historian Bruce Cumings. “By 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea was completely leveled. What was left of the population survived in caves. The North Koreans created an entire life underground, in complexes of dwellings, schools, hospitals and factories.… Korean and Chinese forces built massive underground installations because they had lost control of the air and because of well-grounded fears of nuclear attack.”

  Cumings writes with a barely controlled sense of outrage at such indiscriminate mass destruction, but even a military historian, Conrad Crane, has concluded that with few North Korean military or industrial targets left in the third year of the war, the U.S. Far Eastern Air Force (FEAF) was reduced to bombing flood-control dams:

  Destroying the last major3 target system in North Korea would be hard to justify to world opinion as “solely military.” … In March 1953, the FEAF Formal Target Committee began to study the irrigation system for 422,000 acres of rice in the main agricultural complexes of South Pyongan and Hwanghae. The deployment of North Korean security units to protect key reservoirs from guerrillas during the growing season indicated the importance of those targets to [FEAF intelligence officer Gen. Charles] Banfill. His staff estimated that denying the enemy the rice crop from the area would cause a food shortage, tie up transportation routes with the necessity of importing rice from China, and require the diversion of troops for security and repair efforts. [Far East commanding general Mark] Clark advised the [U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff] that in case of a prolonged recess in the peace talks, he planned to breach twenty dams to inundate the two areas and destroy an estimated one-quarter million tons of rice, “thereby curtailing the enemy’s ability to live off the land and aggravating a reported Chinese rice shortage and logistic problem.”

  An odor of atrocity lingers to this day over these derelict plans to attempt once again to prove that wars could be won by air power alone, the U.S. Air Force’s perpetual Grail quest. FEAF’s commanding general Otto Weyland, a former fighter pilot, pronounced himself “skeptical of the feasibility4 and desirability” of the irrigation-system attacks, concerned that their brutality might alienate allies and compromise truce negotiations then under way, but he authorized dam bombings anyway, ostensibly to flood downstream airfields. “North Korea decried5 ‘barbarous raids on peaceful agricultural installations,’” Crane wrote, “or attacks on water reservoirs that were not military objectives, but no one seemed to notice.” One reason no one noticed was that targeting rice crops went unmentioned in FEAF dispatches, while “in accordance with Far East6 Command and JCS desires, the dam attacks were also not highlighted in UN communiqués.”

  The last meetings of the Formal Target Committee, Crane notes, “were dominated by discussion7 about how best to exploit the possibilities of the dam attacks.” Weyland and Clark rationalized them as interdiction raids—that is, raids intended to interrupt the delivery of supplies—but “neither their planners nor the Communists perceived them that way.” The attacks on the Toksan and Chasan Dams “did flood two key rail lines and many roads, but they also inundated nearby villages and rice fields. The flash flood from Toksan ‘scooped clean’ twenty-seven miles of river valley, and both raids sent water into the streets of Pyongyang.” People lived in that river valley, of course, but since they grew the rice that fed North Korea, Air Force doctrine counted them among the enemy.

  In the end, there was little left above ground in North Korea to target; “eighteen of twenty-two8 major cities had been at least half-obliterated,” Crane wrote, five of them above 90 percent. Pyongyang was 75 percent destroyed. In aerial photographs North Korea’s most damaged cities look like the burned and blasted landscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The armistice signed at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953 ended three years of hostilities but brought no peace. The United States froze the North Korean assets it held and placed embargoes on almost all commercial and financial transactions between the two countries. The North Korean people, whose leaders had fought a long guerrilla war with Japan through the 1930s and the Second World War, emerged from their caves and tunnels to rebuild their country. For the next forty years North Korea operated on the realistic assumption that it must remain perpetually alert for an attack from South Korea and the United States, with which it was technically still at war.

  “They are prepared for war,”9 a visiting Hungarian delegation heard from North Korean military and diplomatic briefers in 1976. “If a war occurs in Korea, it will be waged by nuclear weapons rather than by conventional ones. The DPRK is prepared for such a contingency as well. The country has been turned into a system of fortifications, important factories have been moved underground … and airfields, harbors and other military facilities were established in the subterranean cave networks. The Pyongyang subway is connected with several branch tunnels which are currently closed, but in case of emergency they are able to place the population there.” The briefers, unwilling to admit their vulnerability, also claimed that their country possessed nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them.

  It did not, but it wanted to. Documents found in Hungarian diplomatic archives from the 1960s rep
ort repeated North Korean requests to Soviet officials for information about and access to nuclear-weapons technology. Thus the Soviet ambassador to North Korea wrote his superiors in 1963, “Our specialists reported10 that the Korean uranium ore is not rich and is very scarce. The mining and processing of such ore will be extremely expensive for the Koreans. But from conversations with the Korean specialists they learned that the Koreans, despite all odds, want to develop the mining of uranium ore on a broad scale.” The Soviet Union provided the North with a small HEU-fueled research reactor in 1965. The next year the North Korean premier, Kim Il Sung, visited the U.S.S.R.11 incognito and met with Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, who rejected his request for a nuclear-power plant. They did so partly because the North Koreans had kept their Soviet benefactors in the dark about their research-reactor operations.

  Much of the North’s electrical generating capacity, about half of which was hydroelectric, had been destroyed by FEAF bombing attacks during the war; the Soviet ally therefore sought turnkey nuclear-power reactors to generate electricity even as it sent its young people off to East Germany and the Soviet Union to learn nuclear physics and engineering. For their part, Soviet leaders repeatedly pressed the Koreans to accede to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and conform to its requirements, pressure the Koreans resisted. “The Soviet side asked12 the Korean comrades,” a 1969 Hungarian report said, “whether they thought that it would be a good thing if, for instance, Japan—which possesses the required industrial and technical capacity—obtained nuclear weapons. In this concrete case the Korean comrades naturally acknowledged that nuclear nonproliferation was justified, but in general they did not (by which they actually give veiled support to the Chinese position).” The Chinese opposed the NPT, denouncing it when it was opened for signature in 1968 as a “conspiracy concocted by the USSR13 and the US to maintain their nuclear monopoly,” and resisted signing it until 1992.

  North Korea compromised in 1974 by joining the IAEA without acceding to the NPT. Having thus conformed to Soviet demands, in 1976 it again sought Soviet nuclear power technology, the Hungarians reported:

  The DPRK side … made a request14 for the construction of a nuclear power plant. For various reasons—primarily military considerations and the amount of the investment—the Soviet side declared that this [request] was now inopportune, and proposed to come back to it only in the course of the next [five-year] plan. The Korean side was very reluctant to accept this Soviet decision and the rejection of a few other investment demands.

  Particularly in the course of negotiations over credit, but also in other issues … the head of the Korean delegation—Deputy Premier Kang Chint’ae—behaved in an extremely aggressive way, definitely crude and insulting in certain statements vis-à-vis his Soviet counterpart.… He declared several times that if the Soviet Union was unwilling to make “appropriate” allowances for the “front-line situation” of the DPRK and did not comply entirely with the Korean requests, the DPRK would be compelled to suspend her economic relations with the Soviet Union.

  It was only after his visit to Comrade Kosygin that Kang Chin-t’ae changed his conduct.… Comrade Kosygin, among others, firmly rebuked him, declaring that the Soviet Union did not accept ultimatums from any country and did not let anyone behave in such a way.

  “Until the 1960s,”15 a Library of Congress country study reported, “North Korea’s economy grew much faster than South Korea’s. Although Pyongyang was behind in total national output, it was ahead of Seoul in per capita national output, because of its smaller population relative to South Korea. For example, in 1960 North Korea’s population was slightly over 10 million persons, while South Korea’s population was almost 25 million persons. Phenomenal annual economic growth rates of 30 percent and 21 percent during the Three-Year Plan of 1954–56 and the Five-Year Plan of 1957–60, respectively, were reported.” The reports were not fraudulent, the Library of Congress investigators explain; rather, “during the reconstruction period after the Korean War, there were opportunities for extensive economic growth—attainable through the communist regime’s ability to marshal idle resources and labor and to impose a low rate of consumption.” By the mid-1970s, however, the two Koreas were reversing positions economically, although their per capita incomes remained about equal up to 1976. After that time the North fell progressively further behind the rapidly industrializing South, particularly in fuel resources and transportation infrastructure, with the North diverting a crushing share of its income—above 30 percent—to defense.

  The North always counted electricity generation as a vital part of its nuclear-development program. In 1976, when the obstreperous Kang Chint’ae asked the Soviet Union for a nuclear-power plant, the Soviets denied the request on the grounds that they had long-term commitments to construct such plants elsewhere. Kang then asked for help enlarging one of his country’s thermal-power plants. That request was also denied. Kang withdrew, and the following day, according to a Hungarian observer, his replacement admitted “that the DPRK was in16 a difficult economic situation and needed immediate assistance from the socialist countries, including the Soviet Union. His concrete request was the following: 200,000 metric tons of oil and 150,000 metric tons of coking coal, as early as this year [in addition to more than a million metric tons of oil and 1.2 million metric tons of coal already supplied that year].… In the opinion of the Soviet diplomat who told me this information, there is very little likelihood of fulfilling the request. To his knowledge, in the case of Korea the Soviet Union will not satisfy unexpected demands in the future either.” The “difficult economic situation” that Kang’s replacement reported was partly the result of a prolonged drought, which had severely limited hydroelectric generation. Nevertheless, said the Hungarian informant, the Soviets took every opportunity to make the Koreans understand that the countries of its predominately Eastern European economic alliance, COMECON, had priority.

  The lesson of Soviet rejection of North Korea’s humiliating appeals cannot have been lost on the D.P.R.K. leadership: If you want something from someone and have nothing to trade in return, you may need a plausible and dangerous threat to force him to provide it.

  Failing to win Soviet support, in 1979 North Korea turned to Czechoslovakia for help, asking for uranium-mining equipment and a 440-megawatt nuclear-power plant. “If we compare the output17 of electric power generation that South Korea plans to reach by the end of 1986 with that of the DPRK,” the Hungarian ambassador Ferenc Szabó reported that year, “the South Korean output is about three times that of the DPRK. This may explain why from [1979] on, but also earlier, the DPRK strongly urged the socialist countries—for instance, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and China—to provide it with equipment for nuclear power plants or even to build a nuclear power plant. She tries to make up for her lag behind South Korea in this way, with the hidden intention that later she may become capable of producing an atomic bomb.”

  Szabó’s speculation about North Korea’s hidden intentions was timely. While seeking energy assistance throughout the Communist world, Kim Il Sung had also begun pursuing an indigenous nuclear-weapons capacity through the cadres of nuclear scientists and engineers he had sent abroad to be trained. A Russian historian named Alexandre Mansourov, who served in the Soviet Embassy in Pyongyang, wrote that in the late 1970s “Kim Il Sung is believed18 to have authorized the DPRK Academy of Sciences, the Korean People’s Army (KPA) and the Ministry of Public Security to begin the implementation of the North Korean nuclear program design, including rapid expansion of the nuclear-related facilities and development of the infrastructure for a nuclear weapon program in Yongbyon.” A uranium mine had been commissioned at Yongbyon, Mansourov adds, as well as “a mill for concentrating19 the uranium ore into ‘yellowcake,’ a plant to purify the material, a nuclear fuel rod fabrication plant and a storage site.”

  Deng Xiaoping, who emerged to power in China after Mao’s death in 1976, encouraged the proliferatio
n of nuclear-weapons technology to the Third World as a counterweight to Western dominance. “In the 1980s and with the coming20 of Deng Xiaoping in China,” wrote the American nuclear experts Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman, “serious nuclear weapon developments began to appear [in North Korea], such as high-explosive craters in the sand [from implosion experiments] and the construction of a [five-megawatt] nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.* The latter went critical in April 1986. Construction of a reprocessing facility began, in secret, in 1987.”

  North Korea lacked facilities for enriching uranium; the five-megawatt reactor, adapted from an early British design, graphite-moderated and air-cooled, worked with unenriched natural uranium metal. As it had been for the British, it was an ideal dual-use system, capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium as well as electricity. Yet when the East German chairman Erich Honecker visited North Korea in October 1986, the same month as the historic summit meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik, Kim Il Sung “affirmed that the DPRK21 does not intend to attack South Korea, nor could it. More than 1,000 US nuclear warheads are stored in South Korea, ostensibly for defense, and it would take only two of them to destroy the DPRK. The DPRK supports the proposals [for nuclear disarmament] made by Comrade Gorbachev in Vladivostok and Reykjavik. Many problems could now be solved with South Korea. Progress in relations between the Soviet Union and the US would also help resolve the Korea problem.” If Kim Il Sung was being candid—and his assessment of South Korean defenses is accurate—it would follow that the modest nuclear arsenal he had begun pursuing by 1980 could hardly be more than a regional deterrent, if that. Certainly his small and increasingly impoverished country had no capacity to match the U.S. nuclear arsenal in South Korea, or the extended U.S. arsenal worldwide.