B00BY4HXME EBOK (24 page)

The United States and other major Western countries have good reason to worry about the North Korean nuclear program. But contrary to what North Korean propagandists now tell their domestic audience, US leaders do not lose sleep in fear of a North Korean nuclear attack on the United States. The North Korean nuclear potential is small and its delivery systems unreliable or nonexistent. Thus, at least in the foreseeable future, the chances of an attack are very low, and chances of a success lower still.

Admittedly, the North Korean military can be very creative and could compensate for the technological shortcomings through ingenious tricks—for example, a nuclear device can be hidden in an ordinary-looking fishing boat and then detonated somewhere in San Francisco Bay.

It might be argued that in the event of a war between the United States and North Korea, the trawler in question would probably arrive at its destination long after hostilities are over and the North Korean regime has ceased to exist. This is true, but a device might be detonated closer, like in Tokyo Bay or Incheon, a couple of dozen miles away from Seoul. Such a (relatively)
low-tech revenge operation will not merely kill tens of thousands of people but also close down these important transportation hubs, creating an economic shockwave of global proportions.

Nonetheless, the probability of such a doomsday scenario is not high, so the North Korean threat is largely indirect—but still serious. North Korea’s bold defiance of international counter-proliferation regimes sets a very dangerous precedent. If North Korea were to get away with its nuclear program, it would likely be followed by other rogue states.

Another worry of Washington is the threat of proliferation itself. Indeed, the North Korean government might be willing to sell nuclear technology or fissile materials to the highest bidder. Nuclear proliferation and cooperation between Pakistan and North Korea is a well-known fact and seemingly reliable intelligence indicates that North Korean nuclear weapons experts have maintained links with Iran, Burma, and Syria.
²

Consequently, for the United States, denuclearization is the overwhelming concern while all other matters are seen as marginal. Had North Korean nukes not existed, few Washington movers and shakers would care about North Korea. Pyongyang decision makers rightly assume that nukes are their major leverage in dealing with the developed world—and they have made great use of this leverage in the last two decades.

The North Korean nuclear program has a long history: as early as 1959, the Soviet Union and North Korea signed their first agreement on cooperation in nuclear research. A similar agreement was soon concluded with China as well (Pyongyang never put all its eggs in one basket).

In the 1960s the North Korean version of Los Alamos began to take shape in the city of Yongbyon, some 90 kilometers to the north of Pyongyang. For reasons of greater secrecy, the nuclear research facility was called the “Yongbyon furniture factory.” The major article of equipment of this “furniture factory” was not a sawmill but a small Soviet-designed research reactor, the IRT-2000, completed in 1965. In the 1970s the North Korean scientists independently modernized the reactor, increasing its output.

There are few doubts that from the early stages Pyongyang leaders considered the military applications of their nuclear program, but it seems that the decisive turn happened in the 1970s. At that time, South Korea
was working hard to develop nuclear weapons of its own—and came quite close to success.
³
For the North, which has always had good intelligence about its archenemy, Seoul’s nuclear ambitions were a well-known secret. As a result, in approximately 1975, the North Korean political leaders decided to speed up their own military nuclear program.

The chief political obstacle was the position of the former Soviet Union, the major supplier of nuclear know-how. Moscow took non-proliferation seriously, and had no intention of seeing its nuclear monopoly erode—let alone creating conditions where its rogue and unruly quasi-allies would be able to provoke serious trouble. Sensing the true intentions of Pyongyang, the Soviet Union made nuclear cooperation conditional on a number of measures that would seriously hinder the development of nuclear weapons. Incidentally, Washington treated South Korea’s nuclear plans in much the same manner and eventually ended the nuclear ambitions of Seoul. China also did not want a nuclear power across its border, so the usual North Korean strategy of playing Beijing against Moscow didn’t work as it usually did.

Nonetheless, Pyongyang tried hard. As Walter Clemens writes in his research on the history of the North Korean nuclear program:

[S]everal features of its diplomatic behavior are of more than historical interest. First, Pyongyang was aggressive and insistent in seeking foreign aid and assistance for nuclear purposes [….] Second, […] North Korea’s leadership consistently evaded commitments to allies on nuclear matters, particularly constraints on its nuclear ambitions or even the provision of information. Third, North Korea’s words and deeds evoked substantial concerns in Moscow and other Communist capitals.
⁴

The Soviets made their continuing cooperation conditional on North Korea’s participation in the non-proliferation regime. In exchange for compliance, North Korea was promised technical assistance in building a nuclear power station of its own. Pyongyang bowed to Soviet pressure and in 1985 signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
⁵

But the world changed. The Communist bloc that both controlled Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions and provided it with aid collapsed and the North Korean economy nose-dived immediately. North Korea also ceased to be a part of the uncomfortable but sometimes reassuring Cold War alliance system, so it had to take security far more seriously. To meet the new challenges, the nuclear program had to be sped up.

When promoting their nuclear program, North Korean leaders essentially had two main goals in mind.

First, the North Korean nuclear program serves military purposes. Nuclear weapons can be seen as the ultimate deterrent, so North Korean leaders believe that as long as they have a credible nuclear potential they are unlikely to be attacked by any foreign power, above all the United States. Theoretically, it could be argued that an alliance with China would provide North Korea with a measure of security. However, the Pyongyang leaders might be afraid that China would not be willing to get into a major confrontation in order to save the Kim family from annihilation—the world has changed much since 1950, when Chinese forces had crossed the Yalu.

Needless to say, this fear of being attacked was amplified by the experiences of the 1990s and 2000s, when a number of states were the subject of US military actions. After the Iraq War, North Korean diplomats and politicians frequently said to their foreigner interlocutors: “Had Saddam Hussein really had nukes he would probably still be in his palace.” This opinion was further reinforced by events in Libya—after all, Colonel Gadaffi’s willingness to surrender nukes did not prevent the West from a military intervention when Gadaffi’s regime was challenged by the local opposition forces.

Second, Pyongyang requires nuclear weapons for diplomatic purposes—frankly, as an efficient tool for diplomatic blackmail. On balance, this goal seems to be even more important than using the nukes as a strategic deterrent.

Indeed, they do in fact necessitate such a blackmail tool. If we look at the geographic and macroeconomic indicators, the one of closest similarity to North Korea is Ghana. If the CIA Factbook is to be believed, in 2010 North Korea’s and Ghana’s populations were 24.4 and 24.7 million,
respectively, while their per capita GDP were $1,800 and $1,700, respectively. Still, North Korea is light years ahead of Ghana when it comes to international attention and ability to manipulate the external environment. In terms of aid volume, North Korea punches above its weight.

The aid-monitoring regime in North Korea is remarkably lax by any accepted international standard. It has to be lax, since North Korea does not merely need foreign aid: it needs the aid that will come without too many conditions, and whose distribution the donors will not monitor too carefully. Contrary to what some extreme critics of the regime say, it does not want to starve its population to death. Kim Jong Il and his son Kim Jong Un, as well as their advisers, would probably much prefer to see North Korean farmers alive and well (and extolling the leadership’s wisdom and benevolence), but their survival is not very high on the regime’s political agenda. Thus, uncontrolled aid can be distributed to the chosen groups of the population whose support or, at least, docility is vital for the political stability—above all, to the military, police, officials, and the population of Pyongyang and other major cities. Therefore, the irritating presence of foreign monitors is not welcomed. Needless to say, political demands of the donors—like, say, a suggestion of changes to the economic management—are not acceptable, either.

So far, North Korean diplomats have been remarkably successful in getting aid on conditions that would be seen as unacceptable from another country—and there is little doubt that the nuclear program played a key role in this success.

The first nuclear blackmail campaign (aka, “the first nuclear crisis”) was launched around 1990. Evidence of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program began to surface, despite the fact that North Korean officials denied the very existence of such a program. Nonetheless, the evidence mounted, and North Korean diplomats did not really mind: the growing unease served their interests quite well (one cannot rule out that some leaks were
even arranged by the North). As tensions mounted, North Korea threatened to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and at one point Pyongyang diplomats even promised to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire” if the necessary concessions were not made.

The blackmail brought success. After much saber rattling and diplomatic maneuvering, in 1994 the oddly named “Agreed Framework” treaty was signed in Geneva. According to the Agreed Framework, North Korea promised to freeze its military nuclear program and accept international monitoring of its nuclear facilities. North Korea also agreed to suspend construction of two additional nuclear reactors and ship some spent nuclear fuel rods out of the country.

In exchange, it got hefty payments. To handle the issues, an international consortium known as KEDO was created (KEDO stands for “Korean Energy Development Organization”). By far the chief donors to the KEDO budget were South Korea, Japan, and the United States (in 1995–2005 they provided $1,450, $498, and $405 million, respectively).
⁶
KEDO was to build in North Korea two light water reactors that are good for power generation but not particularly useful for production of weapons-grade plutonium. It was also promised that until the completion of the reactors, KEDO would regularly ship significant quantities of heavy fuel oil to North Korea, free of charge.
⁷

It is widely rumored that the US negotiators were ready to be so generous because at that time they assumed the North Korean regime would not last long and thus the promised aid and concessions would not need to be delivered. For example, in 1994 Jeffrey Smith of the
Washington Post
quoted unnamed US officials who assured him that the implementation period of the Agreed Framework “is almost certainly a sufficient period of time for their regime to have collapsed.”
⁸

Apart from the light water reactors, North Korea also received a lot of foreign aid without too many conditions. To a large extent this reflected the mood that remained dominant during the Clinton administration. At the time, a number of US policy makers believed that by providing aid and pursuing the KEDO agreement, the United States might eventually build enough trust to persuade North Korean leaders to surrender their nuclear program
completely—or at least keep the situation under control until the collapse of the Kim family regime, which they thought would happen soon.

It was against such a backdrop that North Korea, then in the grip of a disastrous famine, became a major recipient of foreign aid beginning in 1995–1996. Most of the aid was presented as purely humanitarian in nature and unrelated to the ongoing crisis, but there are good reasons to think that North Korean officials saw the aid as a kind of tribute, an additional reward for their willingness to ostensibly freeze their nuclear program. This might be a cynical view, but a look at the statistics confirms that North Korean officials might have been right in their hard-nosed assessment. As we’ll see below, as soon as relations with the United States deteriorated in 2002, the American aid all but disappeared. The same thing happened to Japanese aid after a crisis in relations caused by revelations about the abduction of Japanese citizens. This hardly supports the view that the aid was driven exclusively by lofty humanitarian considerations.

Throughout the 1996–2001 period (the time when the food crisis was most acute) North Korea received a total of 5.94 million metric tons of food aid. Most of this aid came from countries described by Pyongyang’s official propaganda as the “mortal enemies of Korean people”—the United States, South Korea, and Japan. The United States provided 1.7 million metric tons (28.6 percent of the total), South Korea provided 0.67 million metric tons (11 percent), and Japan provided 0.81 million metric tons (13.6 percent). Of the ostensibly “friendly” countries, only China was a major provider of aid throughout the 1996–2001 period, with 1.3 million metric tons of food shipped to the North.
⁹
The food shipments played a major role in mitigating the humanitarian disaster.

North Korean diplomats not merely succeeded in acquiring a large amount of aid, but also ensured that the aid came without too much obtrusive control, and hence could be channeled to those people whose compliance and support were vital for the regime’s survival. Foreign monitors were denied any access to a significant part of the country, including areas that were hit hardest by the 1996–1999 famine. Even in the most permissive period, around 2004, the foreign monitors were allowed to supervise distribution only in 167 (of 201) counties.