Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (90 page)

The North also had gotten its act together in propaganda directed outside Korea. An English-language booklet, “U.S. Nuclear Threat to North Korea,” was published in March 1991 in the name of a magazine called
Korea Report,
an organ of Pyongyang’s unofficial “embassy” in Tokyo, the International Affairs Bureau of the Central Standing Committee of the Chongryon. It was a thoroughly professional piece of research that read as if it might have been prepared by a Western scholar or peace activist. No author was listed, but I suspected that the Korean residents’ group or someone in Pyongyang acting through the group had commissioned just such a person to do it. There was one place where a reference to American “impudence” seemed to have been inserted by one of the old guard propagandists, but otherwise the document stuck to an unemotional approach that worked very well.

The booklet made the linkage argument about as persuasively as it could have been made. It skillfully turned Pyongyang’s refusal to allow inspection into a valiant defense of the rights of the less powerful countries against the superpowers. The booklet recited a history of U.S. planning for the use of nuclear weapons in Korea in the Korean War and listed in startling detail the various nuclear weapons the United States was alleged to keep in the South. “South Korea is the only place in the world where nuclear weapons face a non-nuclear ‘foe,’ namely North Korea,” it said. The booklet called for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, to be accomplished through talks among North and South Korea and the United States. (The other side pointed out that American nuclear weapons faced Russian weapons just a few miles from North Korean territory in the Vladivostok area. Washington was suspicious of local nuclear-free zones generally and argued that in order to work they must include all the nuclear-power neighbors.)

The booklet attacked the “unfairness” of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The United States had issued a blanket guarantee that any non-nuclear nation that signed the NPT would not be attacked first with American nuclear weapons unless it allied itself with N-powers attacking the United States or its allies. Pyongyang demanded that this “Negative Security Assurance” be made specific and legally binding toward North Korea in particular, another of the demands the booklet set out. There was also a UN Security Council resolution of 1968 promising immediate action by the permanent members of the council to aid any non-nuclear power attacked by a nuclear power. But “the non-nuclear powers, while welcoming these guarantees, do not regard them as providing a complete guarantee,” the booklet said. Non-nuclear powers wanted more “effective” international guarantees.

Even more controversial was a long and comprehensive article published in Seoul in the March 1991 issue of the monthly magazine
Wolgan Cho-son,
written by a leading South Korean investigative reporter, Cho Gap-jae. Cho argued forcefully that South Korea’s military should not simply watch quietly to see whether diplomacy succeeded in persuading Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons program. It should be adding to the pressure, planning a last-resort preemptive strike. He said both South Korean and American military people were at least considering such a strike. Cho recalled that Washington had made life miserable for the late South Korean President Park Chung-hee until Park gave up his own nuclear weapons program in the 1970s in exchange for a U.S. promise to protect the South and keep the North from developing nukes. That sort of pressure in the long run could be hard for Kim Il-sung, too, to resist—but if he timed it right Kim had much to gain by hitting up Japan and the United States for payment once he agreed to accept inspection. Even then the North would retain superiority over the South in terms of being able to crank up a nuclear program again if the situation demanded it, Cho wrote. Still, “a compromise involving a with-
drawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from South Korea together with a termination of nuclear development by North Korea is the most possible and most peaceful solution under the current conditions.”

Lest anyone think South Korea was fully resigned to permanent non-nuclear status, Cho wrote that “an extremely small circle” of South Koreans was thinking ahead to Korean unification and a world in which a unified Korea would face “hypothetical enemies” such as Japan, China and the Soviet Union. Those Southerners were wondering whether Pyongyang shouldn’t be allowed to continue with its nuclear weapons development. Such thinking, of course, was a nightmare to the anti-proliferation mavens in Washington and elsewhere.

The Cho article was on many people’s minds in April of 1991 when Defense Minister Lee Jong-koo told a group of journalists that the country ought to work out “punitive measures” in case North Korea persisted in its nuclear-weapons development. Mixing up his Israeli raids, he spoke of an “Entebbe” solution. Entebbe is in Uganda, and that wasn’t the nuclear weapons case. But Lee got in plenty of hot water anyhow. Pyongyang called his remarks a “declaration of war” and opposition parties demanded he be sacked because he had hurt the chances for North-South rapprochement. The government tried to hush the whole thing up, asking newspapers not to write about it, and Lee himself withdrew his remarks. The incident illustrated, among other things, the fact that nuclear weapons were not that much talked about in South Korea. There was a kind of taboo, it was said.

Besides nukes there were North Korea’s chemical and biological weapons. “They have one of the five biggest stocks of chemical and biological weapons,” Kim Chang-soon of Seoul’s Institute of North Korean Studies told me. “I can’t go into details, but from the Mount Kumgang area on the Eastern front they can use such weapons, taking advantage of seasonal winds, and destroy a corps of enemy forces [three divisions] in an hour. That’s part of the North’s aim for supremacy. They aim at quick attack and quick resolution. Their idea is to resolve everything before the U.S. side makes preparations to help us out.”

North Korea also had Scud missiles, which were of particular interest in 1991 after Saddam Hussein had used them. Cha Young-koo, an arms control expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis, noted that Saddam’s use of Scuds was mainly intended to try to draw Israel into the Gulf War. A renewed Korean War would not offer a similar temptation to provoke a neighbor, Cha told me. But if North Korea should fire Scuds at South Korea in peacetime, “it means they want war,” he said. “And in wartime if they use Scud missiles, we’ll use
our
missiles, with the assistance of the United States.”

The
Wolgan Choson
article said that the North Korean newer-model Scuds had been made broad enough in diameter to carry low-tech nuclear warheads of the type that could be achieved by countries just joining the club and unable yet to miniaturize. So the presence of the Scuds presumably pointed to a viable nuclear delivery system.

The many good reasons for removing U.S. nuclear weapons from South Korea finally persuaded President George H. W. Bush. Pyongyang mean-while had a number of apparent reasons to use the occasion to open up its relations with South Korea, as Seoul’s business interests hoped. The controversy over suspected nuclear weapons development had turned Kim Il-sung into the international bogeyman to replace Saddam Hussein for the time being. Even as Pyongyang desperately wished to normalize relations with Japan, Tokyo had made clear that normalization must await Pyongyang’s submission to international inspection of its nuclear facilities.

North Korea evidently intended to announce it would comply but no sooner than necessary. It may have seemed to Pyongyang that its interest lay in distracting attention from the nuclear issue to buy time—perhaps for further development and concealment of-what already had been done—before permitting international inspections. Perhaps the leadership thought that taking a constructive approach to issues regarding the North-South relationship would provide just such a distraction. It was also a way to produce an accomplishment that could be cited in the upcoming April 15 celebration of Kim Il-sung’s eightieth birthday.

For whatever combination of such reasons, members of the Northern delegation to a December premier-level meeting in Seoul said they had orders from no less than the Great Leader himself not to come back empty-handed.
⁸
They even held out the possibility of a summit meeting between Kim Il-sung and South Korean President Roh Tae-woo. They went home bearing an agreement of “reconciliation, nonaggression, exchanges and cooperation” between North and South. Within a few days South Korea had traded cancellation of the 1992 Team Spirit exercise for North Korea’s agreement to permit IAEA inspection. On December 18, South Korean President Roh was able to announce that no nuclear weapons were in South Korea. The two Koreas then concluded an agreement pledging that neither side would have anything to do with nuclear weapons or the facilities for manufacturing them; each would permit inspections by the other to verify that. The North’s Supreme People’s Assembly finally ratified the IAEA safeguards agreement on April 9, 1992, and the international body the following month was able to send inspectors to start to find out just how sincere Pyongyang was about its no-nukes promise.
⁹

Kim Jong-min was one of the higher-level defectors from North Korea. After rising to a rank equivalent to brigadier general during a career in the Ministry of Public Security, he had become a businessman as president of the Daeyang Trading Company. The company’s purpose—like that of some 150 other trading companies that had been set up in various units of the regime including the military since 1971—-was to raise foreign currency. Daeyang was assigned to acquire millions of dollars to help finance the 1989 youth festival. Kim went abroad on that mission in 1988. His efforts failed and, he told me, he believed he would be punished upon his return to North Korea. Thus he defected, via the Netherlands, to South Korea. In Seoul following his debriefing he was given a post at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies, researching and writing on North Korean political, economic and military matters.

Kim showed up for our first talk in November 1993 looking the part of a businessman in a crisp, starched white shirt, a nice silk tie and a well-tailored blue suit. He wore a gold wrist-watch. He showed a facial resemblance to members of the Kim Il-sung family and, tantalizingly he called attention to that resemblance. “Don’t you think I look like Kim Jong-il?” he asked me, noting that the Jong of his own middle name was the same character as the Jong in Kim Jong-il’s name. He quickly denied any blood relationship, though, saying the resemblance was mere coincidence. He told me he had known Kim Jong-il while growing up, especially between 1957 and 1961;
they had hung out together, along with other children of elite officials, although Kim Jong-il was several years older. Kim Jong-min’s father was an editor
of Nodong Shinmun,
the party daily he told me.

Kim’s testimony was useful in helping me to understand the mindset of North Korean high officials at the time of the first nuclear weapons crisis. Ways of thinking in North Korea changed slowly and his remarks remained illuminating after the country’s nuclear weapons became, once again, the center of attention. Thus I offer much of our exchange in the following pages.

Q. You keep joking about how your middle name is the same as Kim Jong-il’s and you look like him, but you say you’re not one of his brothers. I’m trying to figure out how a less-than-top official like your father, who wasn’t the top editor
of Nodong Shinmun,
could live in the neighborhood with Kim Il-sung and the rest of the top leadership, the people you mentioned earlier as your neighbors.

KIM JONG-MIN
: “My father was unofficially the most powerful guy on
Nodong Shinmun
despite his title. He was one of the most educated of the North Korean elite. In the end he had to go back to his home district because he had been part of the Korean elite under the Japanese occupation. He was a very prominent figure in the media, but he died in his home province. My father wrote editorials and critical essays. My middle name is just a coincidence. [He grinned.] I laughed because of the meaningful look you gave me. If I were the illegitimate son of Kim Il-sung I would have had no reason to defect. Under those circumstances I wouldn’t have feared punishment.”

Q. How do you assess economic trends in North Korea?

A. “South Korean and foreign analysts see the North Korean economy as being in bad shape. It is,
but
for thirty years the North Korean economy was based on
juche.
The end of the Cold War era has reduced trade among communist countries. But the economy can’t just collapse overnight, because North Koreans have existed this way for thirty years. In Western society the goal is to maintain the highest quality of life. But we could say that the goal of the North Korean economy is simply to survive despite the lowest possible living standards.