The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  Much political maneuvering between the United States and North Korea, South Korea, and the United Nations ensued before Gallucci, who had become assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, sat down in the conference room of the American mission to the United Nations in New York on the morning of Wednesday, 2 June 1993, opposite the North Korean first vice-minister of foreign affairs, Kang Sok Ju—“a short, stocky man”38 in Gallucci’s recollection, “who displayed a mixture of earthiness, bluster and unexpected candor.” Gallucci’s exposure to the Koreas was so limited—“I knew that the North39 was on the top and the South was on the bottom,” he told me—that he had to be taught beforehand how to pronounce Kang’s name.

  He wasn’t in the language business, however. “I’d been to Korea, but I wasn’t a regional specialist. I was in this because the North Korean nuclear-weapons program was an issue of crisis proportion for the Clinton administration at that time. Not because they had a million-man army fully deployed, not because they had a ballistic-missile program. They’d had the army for a long time, and they could have all the ballistic missiles they wanted which had CEPs”—circular error probable, a measure of missile accuracy—“the size of Ohio, because if they didn’t have nuclear weapons, who cared? Not even the South, you know, because with North Korea that close, the artillery would reach. Let’s keep our eye on the ball here: the ball is the nuclear-weapons program, and all I need to be interested in, in this negotiation, if I’m going to do my job, is the extent to which I can stop that program. And if it’s not a permanent stop, then I’ve got to make sure that we are always better off with any deal we make than without it at whatever point the deal ends. So that we aren’t snookered, so they don’t get something and get ahead. I can’t have long-term confidence in this deal, I just need to be constantly evaluating, putting us in a better position than if we didn’t have the deal. It’s a very incremental, small-steps-for-little-feet kind of deal.”

  By custom, as the head of the visiting team, Kang spoke first. “Not surprisingly,”40 Gallucci and his colleagues wrote, “he portrayed his country as the injured party.” Kang went on in that vein for some time. “You want to strangle us,” Gallucci remembered Kang saying. As Gallucci interpreted Kang’s opening statement, “they felt threatened by the trajectory of their economy, their state and the South Korean economic miracle, by the South Korean alliance with the United States and the disappearance of their alliance with Russia. Those things all led them to feel as though they were extremely vulnerable, and the only thing that would prevent them from being overrun was the ability to deter. So they were interested in a reliable deterrent in the interest of defending themselves and their sovereignty.” Kang then offered the argument that both Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il had made routinely in recent months in conversations with visitors:

  Now, according to the chief41 delegate, his country faced an important decision: whether to use its reactors to produce nuclear weapons or electricity. Kang said Pyongyang had the “capability” to build such weapons, but going that route made little sense since the United States had a large nuclear arsenal. “We make one, two, three or four but what is the use,” he shrugged. His government’s decision, however, hinged on the outcome of this meeting. Switching to English for emphasis, Kang proposed a deal. If the United States stopped threatening North Korea, his country would commit itself never to manufacture nuclear weapons.

  That afternoon, Kang made his offer concrete: He proposed the old trade that the D.P.R.K. had sought first from the Soviet Union, then from Russia, then through the good offices of Hans Blix: light-water reactors in exchange for dismantling the D.P.R.K.’s several gas-graphite reactors, the one in operation and the two under construction, and ending reprocessing of spent fuel. Unfortunately, the Americans were so focused on keeping the North in the NPT that they missed the offer, and the North Koreans inexplicably let it go.

  This first round of talks continued through 11 June, when the two sides issued a joint statement42 agreeing to give “assurances against the threat and use of force, including nuclear weapons,” to principles of “peace and security in a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula,” to “support for the peaceful reunification of Korea” and to continue talking. In exchange for the U.S. agreements, North Korea unilaterally suspended its withdrawal from the NPT for “as long as it considers necessary” and agreed to allow safeguards inspections again.

  The two teams next met in Geneva in mid-July. Gallucci had hinted to Kang that the North Korean negotiator might want to bring up the reactor deal again, and two days into the meetings, at a luncheon at the D.P.R.K. mission, Kang did so, formally introducing what he called his “bold new instructions”43: North Korea was willing to trade its gas-graphite reactors for light-water reactors. Since the United States insisted that the D.P.R.K. reestablish itself under the NPT before discussing such a trade, the ensuing days of discussions were brutal, with Gallucci even pounding the table at one point and Kang musing threateningly that without agreement, the North Korean military would “remove the fuel rods44 and declare to the world they would make bombs.” The best Gallucci could tell the press afterward was that the meetings were a small step forward.

  The vulnerability model that Gallucci described to me as one version of why the North Koreans might want nuclear weapons was what he called “Model One, the happy model.”45 He had another, competing model in mind as well during the negotiations. “Model Two is that they are ideologically, psychologically, and politically forever committed to unifying the peninsula under their regime. That they have no hope of doing this except by force, and the only way to succeed by force is if they are able to fracture the [South Korean–American] alliance. And by fracture I mean to deter us, on the assumption that we aren’t willing to trade Los Angeles for Pyongyang. And therefore their interest in the nuclear program was for deterrence, but in the service of offense.”

  With the first model in mind, Gallucci went on, “You could actually believe that if we succeeded in buying off their nuclear-weapons program with light-water reactors, fuel oil, and a smile, it could be a genuine trade in which the North Koreans were persuaded that they were gaining a relationship with the United States, which no longer made it politically plausible for us to join the South in an invasion. That they would in a sense achieve a sort of détente with us and with the South. Model Two, unfortunately, would lead one to believe that they wouldn’t be interested in really giving up a nuclear-weapons capability and would look on an agreement to freeze their program as a sort of rental agreement. They might ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ these weapons or potential weapons for awhile, but they would never really give them up because that would mean giving up their dream of dominating the peninsula. I mean, you can have other models but these were two.”

  Either way, Gallucci and his colleagues wrote, “in making the proposal46 the North Koreans created a precarious tightrope for both negotiators. At the core of the proposal was a sensitive argument over self-reliance versus dependence on the outside world”—because the D.P.R.K. would have to rely on the outside world to supply it with enriched uranium fuel for the light-water reactors. “That issue went to the heart of a decade-long debate between ‘conservatives’ and ‘realists’ in North Korea.… Accepting the new reactors meant accepting dependence.” Since the North had organized itself around the principle of Juche—proud self-reliance—dependence would require a realist victory in the intra-party debates. Much of the confusion and conflict of this period of relations between the United States and the D.P.R.K. appears to have derived from confusion and conflict within North Korea itself about how the country should proceed in the new post–Cold War world. Of course the same could be said of the United States, Russia, and several other nuclear and near-nuclear nations as well.

  Gallucci couldn’t agree to the United States’s giving North Korea reactors; U.S. export laws made doing so impossible even if the price had not been billions of dollars. He identified a potential alternati
ve during a lunch that summer with James Laney, a Methodist minister and former college president who had lived in Korea, spoke Korean, and was the incoming ambassador to Seoul. Laney “suggested that the United States47 put together a consortium to build the new reactors,” Gallucci and his colleagues reported, “using Japanese money earmarked for the North should the two countries normalize diplomatic relations.”

  At about the same time—August 1993—Tom Graham, who had become acting director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) at the beginning of the year, led a delegation of ACDA staff out to Omaha for a day of briefings by officers of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM). The new organization, which had replaced SAC, operated the entire U.S. strategic triad: ICBMs, strategic bombers, and nuclear submarines. General Lee Butler was commander-in-chief, and the highlight of the day, Graham wrote, “was a full hour-long48 presentation by the CINC himself, in which he briefed us as to how nuclear weapons really could be, safely and effectively, drastically reduced and eventually prohibited someday in the future under appropriate verification and enforcement arrangements. And the enforcer could be STRATCOM, North Korea could be a type of test case, and we were fortunate that the first breach of the nonproliferation regime was by a country as reprehensible as North Korea. It was a brilliant presentation.”

  The Clinton administration pursued diplomatic discussions with North Korea directly, and indirectly through the IAEA, during the summer and fall of that year. Blix reluctantly accepted North Korean limitations on his inspectors’ access at Yongbyon, deeming “continuity of safeguards” a lesser evil than the alternative; at least it allowed him to make sure that no fuel gravid with plutonium—or, at least, no more fuel—would be diverted. “Clearly,” wrote Gallucci and his colleagues, “the consequences49 of declaring continuity of safeguards broken weighed heavily on Blix. ‘If I announce that continuity is lost, then what?’ he would later ask the South Koreans.” For their part, the North Koreans made sure the IAEA inspectors could at least change the tapes and batteries in their instruments before they failed.

  But conservative Republican pressure on Clinton drove him at the same time to explore a military solution to the North Korean challenge. On the NBC television program Meet the Press in early November he painted himself into a corner by announcing, “North Korea cannot be50 allowed to develop a nuclear bomb. We have to be very firm about it.” As far as he knew, North Korea might already have done so; the following month, a Special National Intelligence Estimate concluded that a D.P.R.K. nuclear weapon or two was “more likely than not.”51

  General Gary Luck, a Kansan who had commanded the 18th Airborne in the Persian Gulf War, was now commander of U.S. forces in Korea. Luck returned to Washington that fall, officially to consult on war preparations, but his personal mission was to make sure that Clinton and his advisers understood the stakes they were playing for with the North Koreans. “If we pull an Osirak,”52 he told Daniel Poneman, likening an attack on Yongbyon to the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor, “they will be coming south.” (Poneman was the National Security Council’s senior director for nonproliferation at the time.) Luck reported the results of a recent war game53 that produced between 300,000 and 750,000 U.S. and R.O.K. military casualties and an equivalent or greater number of casualties among South Korean civilians as well. He requested a battalion of Patriot missiles to shield his forces from North Korean Scuds.

  The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency raised the stakes further in late December with an estimate that North Korea had separated at least twelve kilograms of plutonium, enough for at least two implosion bombs, adding to the pressure on Clinton. Separating plutonium and building a reliable implosion weapon are two very different challenges, but Clinton and his advisers had been badly rattled by the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia in early October, when a U.S. Special Forces unit in Black Hawk helicopters pursuing renegade Somali political leaders in Mogadishu was shot down and surrounded, with eighteen Americans killed and eighty-three wounded; some of the bodies were dragged through the streets. The incident led directly to Defense Secretary Les Aspin’s resignation on 15 December. (Fortunately, his replacement would be Bill Perry, the Stanford mathematician whose advanced weaponry had transformed the 1991 Persian Gulf War.) To add insult to injury in that miserable season, General Merrill McPeak, the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, told reporters with impolitic disappointment, “We can’t find nuclear54 weapons [in North Korea] now except by going on a house-to-house search.” Nor was South Korea happy so far with the United States’ diplomatic initiatives.

  Despite the stakes Luck had described, Clinton and his advisers judged North Korea to be bluffing in rejecting inspections; White House officials told The Washington Post in late January 1994 that the D.P.R.K.’s “bellicosity” was “more of a negotiating55 tactic than a genuine threat to peace on the peninsula.” Ironically, that description fit Clinton’s bellicosity rather better than it did North Korea’s. Sanctions were the answer, Clinton now argued, even though the North had threatened to go to war rather than allow itself to be strangled with sanctions as Iraq had been. (By one careful contemporary estimate,56 sanctions would cost the D.P.R.K. up to 8 percent of its GNP at a time when it was suffering from an economic decline so severe that it was asking its population to reduce its food intake to two meals per day. On the other hand, 8 percent of its GNP was a high price to pay for a few atomic bombs.) The clear deadline was 22 February 1994, when the IAEA would hold its next board meeting, a point beyond which Blix felt it was dangerous to extend his continuity-of-safeguards certification.

  When The New York Times broke the story of Luck’s Patriots on 26 January—Clinton was said to be “likely”57 to approve the general’s request—the North Koreans managed a surprisingly muted response. In discussions in Vienna with the IAEA they were actively working to avoid being denounced to the IAEA board and the U.N. Security Council. They came to agreement on a comprehensive list of safeguard inspections on 15 February, just in time. The problem with their cooperation, of course, was that it fed the belief of Clinton and his advisers that the D.P.R.K.’s threats were idle. After the 15 February deadline, relations deteriorated progressively as the three interested parties—the United States, North Korea, and South Korea—fell out of sync.

  An IAEA inspection team was admitted to Yongbyon on 1 March 1994 to conduct what the DPRK believed would be only a continuity-of-safeguards inspection. That is, in the words of an 18 March D.P.R.K. memorandum, “all the activities in the DPRK’s nuclear facilities as specified in the Vienna agreement of February 15, including the reloading and servicing of containment and surveillance devices, the verification of the physical inventories, examination of a number of records and documents, verification of the design information, sampling and measurements.”58 The inspectors replaced several dozen seals, the North Koreans reported in a second memo, read tank levels, did fresh- and spent-fuel measurements, did limited gamma mapping (detecting gamma rays in order to locate and identify any traces of radioisotopes from clandestine reprocessing), and conducted thirty-five destructive-assay samplings (in which samples are altered by testing) and smear tests. The inspectors “thanked us for our59 cooperation on several occasions,” the North Koreans claimed. They may have, but Yongbyon’s refusal to allow thorough inspection of the big reprocessing building, where the inspectors were shocked to discover that a second reprocessing line was nearing completion, prompted three separate telexes from Vienna—from Blix, that is—threatening to report “that the Agency60 is not in a position to verify non-diversion of nuclear material.”

  When the inspectors returned to Vienna on 15 March, Blix did just that, the very next day, and on 21 March the IAEA board of directors voted to refer the North’s refusal to the U.N. Security Council as a serious violation. A few days later at Panmunjom, on the 38th parallel, which divides the two Koreas, the South’s Song Young Dae raised the possibility of U.N. sanctions. The North Korean negotiator raged, �
��We are ready to respond with an eye for an eye and a war for a war. Seoul is not far61 from here. If a war breaks out, it will be a sea of fire. Mr. Song, it will probably be difficult for you to survive.” It was the first time in more than forty years that the North had explicitly threatened war. The South Korean leadership, as ready as its northern counterpart to cast blame, put the threat, which had been surreptitiously taped, on national television.

  FINALLY, IN APRIL, the Clinton administration stopped dithering. At the beginning of the month it formed a senior policy steering group on Korea and made Bob Gallucci its chairman, with ambassadorial rank and authority to coordinate overall U.S. policy toward North Korea. Gallucci quickly allied himself with the new secretary of defense, Bill Perry. Both Gallucci and Perry believed that freezing the North’s present nuclear-weapons capacity was more important than punishing it for its past. Asked about the possibility that the North already had one or two nuclear weapons, Perry told Time on 11 April, “We don’t know anything62 we can do about that. What we can do something about, though, is stopping them from building beyond that.”

  The two men bonded on a five-day visit to Seoul in mid-April during which the first delivery of three Patriot missile batteries—twenty-four launchers and eighty-four Stinger antiaircraft missiles to defend the Patriots—arrived by ship at Pusan and Kim Il Sung, having just celebrated his eighty-second birthday, disavowed his Panmunjom negotiator’s “sea of fire” threat, calling it “out of place.”63 He added, “Actually, we don’t want any war. Those who like war are completely out of their minds.” The North Korean leader also said pointedly, “The only way that64 the nuclear problem on the Korean peninsula can be solved is through direct talks with the United States.” There had been direct talks in the past, but not at the national leadership level. “Except for … one senior-level session during the Bush administration in 1992,”65 wrote the U.S. career diplomat Marion Creekmore, Jr., “and … two during the Clinton administration in 1993, all contacts between the United States and North Korea had been conducted by lower-policy-level officials with North Korean diplomats assigned to the North Korean mission in New York.” Evidently Kim Il Sung wanted talks only at the highest level; in May, when senior U.S. senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar volunteered to undertake the mission, the North denied them visas.