The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  Carter did not meet Kim that first day. Instead, Creekmore wrote, the ex-president and his party had to sit through a tedious seventy-five-minute speech by the North Korean foreign minister, Kim Yong Nam, “that spelled out,14 in a taxing and repetitive manner, the hard-line position of his country.” Carter responded, says Creekmore, by focusing on achieving four major goals: “To persuade the North Korean leadership to keep the IAEA inspectors in place, to stop North Korean actions that could lead to nuclear weapons development, to facilitate U.S.-North Korean negotiations to resolve the outstanding nuclear issue, and to make the imposition of UN sanctions unnecessary.” He projected “the image of a trusted neutral seeking to help [the two countries] find a peaceful and mutually productive resolution of their differences.” But when Carter “probed for possible North Korean flexibility,” the foreign minister responded by emphasizing the red line of U.N. sanctions: “We strongly affirm,”15 he said, “that any sanctions enacted by the UN Security Council would be seen as a declaration of war.”

  The North Koreans wanted another round of talks with the U.S. before offering any concessions; the U.S. wanted concessions before any more talk. Carter made a note to himself: “Tell Wash. Sanctions will have no effect here except as an insult to an aging deity. Advise Gallucci schedule 3rd Round [of talks], maybe in Panmunjom now. It’s a society like the religious group at Waco.”* That night, after a banquet featuring ginseng liqueur, side dishes of fiery kimchi, lengthy toasts, and a strolling female band strumming guitars and singing “Oh Susannah” and “My Darling Clementine,” Carter awoke at three a.m. agonizing over the clear possibility that his mission might fail and the United States and North Korea blunder into war. He roused Creekmore, who joined him and Rosalynn Carter in the garden of their guesthouse, out of range of hidden microphones, and spent the next two hours walking and talking about the problem. They decided that Carter might be getting a good-cop-bad-cop routine and that his meeting in the morning with Kim Il Sung might bring something better than the current bleak standoff. In case it didn’t, Carter wanted Creekmore to return to Panmunjom in the morning with a confidential message from Carter to Clinton16—they lacked secure communications in Pyongyang—which he would only transmit to Washington if Carter sent word. The message asked Clinton to authorize a third round of talks without prior North Korean concessions.

  That Thursday morning, 16 June 1994, Creekmore found no one in authority south of the DMZ who believed Carter’s appeal would carry the day in Washington, where Clinton was under siege. “We are heading toward17 catastrophe,” Ambassador Laney told him. “Carter must persuade the North Koreans to make a tangible gesture of good faith to save Clinton’s face. Kim Il Sung has to decide on a bold new initiative.” Laney, wrote Creekmore, was worried about a White House meeting scheduled for ten a.m. in Washington, eleven p.m. Korean time, “over which President Clinton18 would preside, [when] the administration would decide whether and by how much to increase American troops and equipment in and around South Korea as a precaution against a possible military thrust by North Korea.” Two freight trains—U.S. military deployment and the Jimmy Carter–Kim Il Sung diplomatic effort—were racing for the crossing.

  Carter sat down with Kim Il Sung at his palace in Pyongyang at ten in the morning with Rosalynn Carter and their translators. The North Korean leader looked like his son Kim Jong Il but with a lower hairline and ruddier complexion. At eighty-two his legs were bandied; otherwise he was plump, vigorous, and alert. He still smoked. His son was not present. Kang Sok Ju, Gallucci’s counterpart, joined the meeting at his Great Leader’s side along with several other officials, in a conference room with a vast wooden table along which the two delegations lined up on opposite sides.

  Kim clearly wanted a direct connection to the United States, a new patron to replace the Soviet Union and help with his country’s failing economy, and a U.S. guarantee against nuclear attack. “We must have a way19 to live,” he told Carter. “We need electricity, and if we cannot fulfill our electric power needs, our economic development efforts will be harmed.” Carter wanted the IAEA inspectors to be allowed to remain in Yongbyon, the five-megawatt reactor and spent-fuel pool kept under their surveillance, and the nuclear program frozen until the next round of talks. “The central problem is20 that we lack trust,” Kim said at another point, “and creating trust is our most important task. The distrust comes from the lack of contacts between us.”

  But Kim returned repeatedly to his need for light-water reactors, which was evidently, after a U.S. guarantee against nuclear attack, his bottom line:

  If the U.S. had helped us21 acquire a lightwater capability [following the Gallucci-Kang talks in 1993], even if from a third country, we could have avoided the current problem, and we would have reached a point of greater confidence, and we would now enjoy improved relations. If the U.S. would agree to hold a third round of talks, and to help us get lightwater reactors, then there will be no problems.… We announced that we are withdrawing from the IAEA, but we have not withdrawn completely from the NPT; if we get lightwater technology, we can take care of these things.… We need to build confidence, so your country can help us get lightwater reactors, and then we could do away with our existing reactor. If we can solve this problem, we intend to return fully to the NPT regime … [and] immediately freeze all our nuclear activities.

  Carter summarized Kim’s offer in his post-mission report:

  He accepted all my proposals,22 with two major requests. One was that the United States support the acquisition of lightwater reactor technology, realizing that the funding and equipment could not come directly from America.… This is something we want the North Koreans to have, because the enriched fuel will have to be acquired from foreign sources, and the production of weapons-grade plutonium is not so easy as in their old graphite-moderated reactor that can use refined uranium directly from their own mines. His second request was that the United States guarantee that there will be no nuclear attack against his country. He wanted the third round of United States–North Korean talks to be resumed to resolve all the outstanding nuclear issues. He was willing to freeze their nuclear program during the talks, and to consider a permanent freeze if their aged reactors could be replaced with modern and safer ones.…

  I assured him that there were no nuclear weapons in South Korea or tactical weapons in the waters surrounding the peninsula, and that my understanding is that the United States desires to see North Korea acquire lightwater reactors. He agreed with me that the entire Korean peninsula should be nuclear-free.

  At that point Carter saw that he had achieved his goals in the negotiation. Through an aide he passed word to Creekmore to stand down and return to Pyongyang. Carter still had to run the gauntlet of an afternoon session with Kang Sok Ju. Kang pressed Carter to give up some of his gains, but Carter was far too shrewd to be manipulated. When Kang pushed, the former president “asked him each time23 if he had a different policy from his ‘Great Leader,’ [whereupon] he would back down.”

  After dinner, Carter called Gallucci on an open line to brief him on the breakthrough. It was eleven p.m. Friday evening in Pyongyang, ten a.m. Friday morning in Washington, and Gallucci was at the White House participating in the urgent meeting of Clinton administration principals. The meeting included Clinton, Vice President Gore, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Perry, the Joint Chiefs chairman John Shalikashvili, the C.I.A. director James Woolsey, the U.N. ambassador Madeleine Albright, and Tony Lake. Clinton had authorized a push for U.N. sanctions at the beginning of the meeting; the discussion concerned what military preparations should follow. The president was still smarting from the October Somalia debacle, which he was widely accused of having botched by dispatching too few troops to protect the mission.

  “The North Koreans had virtually told us that we could expect a violent response even to a sanctions resolution,” Gallucci recalled, “never mind an attempt to implement sanctions. Secretary Perry was presenting a force-enhancement p
ackage that Christopher and Shalikashvili had signed off on at breakfast earlier that morning. And right in the middle of the meeting, as Perry was presenting the options, the door opened and the person at the door said, ‘President Carter is on the telephone.’ The president started to get up and the person said, ‘No, no, it’s for Bob Gallucci.’ Remember, I had briefed Carter twice; he’d probably called my office and they’d patched him through to the White House. So I kind of slunk out, not on all fours, but I slunk out and talked to Carter. He told me that they had made a deal that we could go back to the table and the North Koreans wouldn’t reprocess any of the fuel that they had offloaded into the pond. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll report that.’ He said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘Well, the President’s in the other room; I don’t know if what I think matters very much right now. I think I’d better report this.’ He said, ‘You can also report that I’ll be describing this on CNN.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ He said, ‘So give me a call.’ I said, ‘Actually, you’ll have to call back, we aren’t allowed to call North Korea.’”

  “So I got off the phone,” Gallucci continued, “and went back in and told them President Carter had worked out a deal with the North Koreans. If we were to accept it, then they would not reprocess and we could go back to the bargaining table. Someone said, ‘That’s not new. This is where we were before,’ and there was moaning and grousing. Then I said, ‘Oh, and he’s going to go on CNN and say this.’ Tony Lake said, ‘You did tell him not to do that, didn’t you?’ I started to answer. I was sitting next to the secretary of state. His eyebrows went up and he said, ‘You did tell him not to do that?’ Then the president said, ‘What did he say when you told him not to do that?’ So I had the national security establishment of the United States after me. I said, ‘Actually, I didn’t tell him not to do that. I didn’t think it would have much impact.’ ‘But you did try, didn’t you?’ ‘No, no I didn’t.’ So I thought that this was the end of what had up until then been a pretty successful career for me. But before we went any further, someone said, ‘Let’s go into the next room and watch it on TV.’ Which we did.” The principals crowded into the adjoining reception area, filling the available chairs or standing. A few sat on the floor. Gallucci retreated to a corner behind Gore and sat against a credenza, making himself inconspicuous.24

  The interview that the White House watched on CNN was the second that Carter had given that night. It crossed the Pacific on radio circuits rather than television. After Carter’s television interview, he had returned to his government guesthouse and undressed for bed and some much-needed sleep, when CNN knocked apologetically on his door to report that the North Korean television station whose satellite uplink CNN had expected to use had shut down for the night; the network now wanted to do a live radio interview to fill in. Irritably, Carter had changed back into his day clothes and submitted to the interview, which was broadcast live on CNN television with a still photograph of Carter for a visual. Creekmore said the former president agreed to the second interview because he was concerned that Kim Il Sung’s advisers might persuade the North Korean leader to renege on his commitments.25 But Carter may have been at least as concerned about forestalling rash U.S. action as he was about restraining North Korea; his first words to Creekmore after the television taping had been, “That killed the [United States’s] sanctions26 resolution. The Chinese will never permit it to get out of the Security Council now.”

  CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Judy Woodruff interviewed Carter at length. Carter called Kim Il Sung’s commitments “a very important27 and very positive step toward the alleviation of this crisis.” What was needed now, he said, was “a very simple decision just to let the already constituted delegations from North Korea and the United States have their third meeting, which has been postponed. That’s all that’s needed now, and all the North Koreans are addressing.” After the radio interview was broadcast, the earlier television interview was archived and never run.

  In Clinton’s eyes, Carter had preempted the White House’s authority and prerogatives. Gore moved to bandage the presidential wound. “The outcome of that,” Gallucci told me, “was that the vice president said, ‘We’ve got lemons, go make lemonade—go make this a good deal.’” Gallucci got the thankless task of drafting the Clinton requirements. “We said, ‘Well, let’s raise the bar. Let’s say they can’t restart the five-megawatt reactor.’ So that would be our deal. It wouldn’t be Carter’s deal, it would be Clinton’s deal. And then I went out to face the press, and the first question, after I told them what had happened, was, ‘Did you tell President Carter not to go on CNN?’ I said, ‘Tell President Carter not to go on CNN? Of course not.’ They said, ‘Really? You didn’t try to discourage him?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ So when I went back in, Tony Lake said, ‘You are a lucky son-of-a-bitch.’”

  Carter was predictably furious to be second-guessed, but Kim Il Sung wanted the deal enough to go along with the additional terms. The crisis ended there, only days short of what might have been a second Korean war even more brutal than the first.

  GALLUCCI MET WITH Kang Sok Ju in Geneva for the first of the third-round talks on 8 July 1994. The next day, Kim Il Sung died of a heart attack. There was mass lamentation in North Korea, but the death of the Great Leader hardly slowed the negotiations. “We postponed that round just a little bit,” Gallucci said, “and then ultimately we had a round. I’ve never been able to identify an impact on the negotiations. We were heading in a direction and we just kept going in that direction.”

  The two sides resumed the delayed negotiations on 15 July. They discussed the curious option of shipping an unfinished power reactor from Washington State to North Korea. The Washington Public Power Supply System, WPPSS, had two white-elephant reactors—the “whoops” reactors, people called them derisively, punning on their acronymic names—that had been cancelled when the bottom dropped out of U.S energy demand in the wake of the 1973–1974 Arab oil embargo. The cancellation, wrote Gallucci and his colleagues, “occasioned the largest municipal-bond28 default in American history. Ever since then, the desperate owners had sought some alternative use for the reactors to recover at least part of their investment.”

  Eventually Kang and Gallucci agreed on two new reactors, implicitly South Korean reactors although not named as such, to be supplied by a new multinational consortium called the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO).* In October, the two sides completed four months of negotiations by adopting an agreed framework. North Korea agreed to freeze and eventually to eliminate its nuclear complex by dismantling its Yongbyon reactor and the two larger reactors under construction elsewhere in the country. It agreed to allow the IAEA to conduct special inspections and the Americans to can the five-megawatt reactor’s eight thousand spent fuel rods and ship them out of the country. In exchange, KEDO would finance and supply the D.P.R.K. with two light-water reactors. Until they were finished and operating, their equivalent energy, two thousand megawatts, would be made up by annual shipments totaling five hundred thousand tons of heavy fuel oil.

  Congressional Republicans bitterly criticized the Agreed Framework, calling it appeasement. It had not been an easy sell. When Gallucci came back from Geneva to push the agreement through the interagency process, he told the Atlantic Monthly some years later, he was confronted by people such as Kenneth Adelman, the neoconservative former director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, who had opposed negotiating with the D.P.R.K. “They hated the idea29 of trying to solve this problem with a negotiation,” Gallucci said. “And I said, ‘What’s your—pardon me—your fucking plan, then, if you don’t like this?’

  “‘We don’t like—’

  “I said, ‘Don’t tell me what you don’t like! Tell me how you’re going to stop the North Korean nuclear program.’

  “‘But we wouldn’t do it this way—’

  “‘Stop! What are you going to do?’

  “I could never get a goddamn answer. What I got was, ‘We
wouldn’t negotiate.’”

  Gallucci and his colleagues disagreed with conservative assessments of the Agreed Framework:

  From the standpoint30 of American taxpayers, [it] left them a good deal safer at a relatively small cost, even if the North Koreans eventually broke the freeze or did not dismantle their nuclear program. In other words, the Agreed Framework did not deprive the United States of any future options. One way to think of the U.S. contribution to the Agreed Framework was as term insurance; for a small yearly premium, the United States avoided an increment of tens of new bombs’ worth of plutonium being separated in North Korea over the same twelve-month period.… And, obviously, if the North broke the terms of the Agreed Framework, the United States would stop paying its yearly premium [of heavy fuel oil].

  Despite troubles and setbacks, the Agreed Framework held together, just barely, through the remainder of Clinton’s second term. The U.S. relaxed its sanctions on North Korea in June 2000, allowing trade and investment, and the North reciprocated by reaffirming its moratorium on missile tests, the new bone of contention between the two countries. (At a dinner following a meeting between Kim Jong Il and South Korean president Kim Dae-jung in the summer of 2000, a South Korean newspaper publisher asked Kim Jong Il why he was spending so much money on ballistic missiles. “The missiles cannot reach the United States,”31 the Dear Leader answered, “and if I launch them, the U.S. would fire back thousands of missiles and we would not survive. I know that very well. But I have to let them know I have missiles. I am making them because only then will the United States talk to me.”)