The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (43 page)

On January 30, eight days after the Kanter-Kim meeting, North Korea kept the promises it had made by signing the safeguards agreement with the IAEA in Vienna. The agreement was then ratified on April 9, in an unusual special meeting of the Supreme People’s Assembly. The following day, the accord was presented to IAEA director general Hans Blix at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna to bring it into force.

THE COMING OF THE INSPECTORS

This progress was not to be sustained, and after a few months of grace the situation rapidly headed downhill. Given later developments in the North’s nuclear weapons program, the story of the first North Korean nuclear crisis seems almost quaint by comparison. That is not to say that the intense focus on evidence of North Korean “cheating” was misplaced, only that it appears now like a Greek tragedy, with few actors realizing at the time where events were leading despite continuous warning signs
and, true to form, with innocence, ignorance, and moral posturing playing equal parts in the drama.

From its headquarters in the towers of the UN complex in Vienna, the International Atomic Energy Agency, created in 1957, runs the world’s early-warning system against the spread of nuclear weapons. Since the establishment of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, the most important task of the IAEA has been to send its multinational teams of inspectors to verify that nonnuclear weapon states are keeping their commitments not to manufacture or possess nuclear weapons.

Until 1991 the IAEA limited itself to checking civilian nuclear facilities and materials that NPT signatories reported in voluntary declarations to the agency. The aftermath of the US-led Operation Desert Storm, however, disclosed that Iraq, an NPT signatory, had carried on a sophisticated nuclear weapons program at secret sites adjacent to those being inspected by the agency. The impact on the IAEA was profound.

In the face of withering criticism for ineffectiveness and timidity, the IAEA under Hans Blix underwent an upheaval in personnel and a sea change in attitudes, from complacency to alertness about suspicious nuclear activities. Despite the misgivings of some third-world members of the IAEA board, Blix, a former Swedish foreign minister, established the right to accept intelligence information supplied by the United States and other member states in its investigations and the right to demand access to suspicious facilities through mandatory “special inspections.”

Starting in September 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War, the United States began supplying intelligence information to Blix and senior aides at his Vienna headquarters, eventually including the services of its incomparably sophisticated national laboratories and supplied photos from US spy satellites that were rarely shown to outsiders. Armed for the first time with extensive independent information about the nuclear programs that they were checking, the IAEA’s leaders and its corps of international inspectors were determined not to be hoodwinked or embarrassed again. North Korea became the first test case of their new capabilities and attitudes. In this first blush of newfound resolve, the IAEA appeared not to realize that North Korea was not prepared to stand and salute.

FIRST INSPECTIONS

For six days in mid-May 1992, Blix led a team to North Korea to establish relations with the country’s leaders and prepare for full-scale IAEA inspections. After preliminary discussions in Pyongyang, Blix and his party were taken to the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. There, as far as is known, Blix and his three technically expert companions were the first outsiders
ever to see, from ground level, what the American surveillance cameras had been peering down on for nearly a decade.

Taking no chances that the IAEA chief would miss something of importance, US officials had provided intelligence briefings for Blix and his top aides in September 1991, March 1992, and on May 7, immediately before his departure. On the final occasion, Blix was given a “virtual reality” tour of Yongbyon, complete with ominous background music, using advanced computer modeling based on aerial photographs. Blix and his party were encouraged to memorize the shapes and relationships of the main facilities. The highlight of the intelligence tour was the reprocessing building. North Korea, after consistently denying that it had such a facility, listed the plant as a “radiochemical laboratory” in the declaration of its nuclear facilities provided a few days before Blix’s visit.

When they were actually walking through this facility, Blix and his team had two surprises: first, that the six-story-high building was even more imposing than they had expected from the CIA briefings and, second, that the building was only about 80 percent complete, with the equipment inside only about 40 percent ready for full-scale production. An IAEA official described the works inside the giant building as “extremely primitive” and far from ready to produce the quantities of plutonium needed for a stockpile of atomic weapons. This conclusion contradicted worst-case US assessments, such as that by CIA director Robert Gates on March 27 that “we believe Pyongyang is close, perhaps very close, to having a nuclear weapon capability.”

North Korea had reported to the IAEA in its initial declaration that in 1990, it had already produced about ninety grams of plutonium, roughly three ounces, on an experimental basis in the “radiochemical lab.” In a third surprise, the seemingly obliging North Koreans shocked Blix by proudly presenting him with a vial of the plutonium in powdered form, which is deadly when inhaled. This small amount was far short of the eight to sixteen pounds needed to produce a weapon. Nevertheless, if plutonium had been manufactured at all, it would be difficult to ascertain scientifically how much had been produced, raising the possibility that North Korea had squirreled some away.

While very small quantities of plutonium could be separated using test methods in a laboratory, IAEA officials found it illogical that North Korea would have erected a huge and expensive facility without first building a pilot plant to test its procedures. North Korea denied that such a pilot plant existed, but doubts persisted.

In late May, after Blix and his team returned to Vienna, the agency sent its first set of regular inspectors to Yongbyon. “The first inspection was just to get the picture,” said Olli Heinonen, a sandy-haired IAEA veteran who eventually became chief inspector of the North Korean program.
“The second inspection [in July] saw something that didn’t fit the picture, the first signals that something was wrong.” More discrepancies appeared in September, with the third inspection.

North Korea had reported that it had separated the three ounces of plutonium in an experimental procedure in 1990, when a small number of faulty fuel rods had been taken from its 5-megawatt indigenous reactor. To confirm what had been done, IAEA inspectors swabbed the inside of the steel tanks used to process the plutonium. The inspectors assumed that the North Koreans had previously scrubbed down the equipment, but the IAEA teams employed gamma-ray detectors and other gear capable of finding minute particles clinging to grooved surfaces. The IAEA also convinced the North Koreans to cut into a waste-storage pipe to obtain some of the highly radioactive waste that is a by-product of the plutonium production process.

Tests on some of this material were run at the IAEA’s laboratory. Far more sophisticated tests were conducted for the IAEA in supporting laboratories run out of the US Air Force Technology Applications Center at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida. Much of the work of this laboratory, which had pioneered the analysis of Soviet nuclear tests, had been secret during the Cold War.

Precise measurements of the samples indicated that three different episodes of plutonium separation could have taken place in 1989, 1990, and 1991—rather than the single operation in 1990 that North Korea had claimed. In another sophisticated set of tests, the isotopic signatures in the plutonium sample presented to Blix did not match those of the waste products that supposedly had been produced from the same operation. “It was like finding a left-hand glove of plutonium that is missing its right-hand glove, [and finding] a right-hand glove of nuclear waste that is missing its plutonium,” Blix said in an interview for this book. There had to be more plutonium, Blix and his experts reasoned, but “whether it is grams or kilograms, we don’t know.”

Pyongyang’s expectations about the capabilities of the inspections probably had been shaped by the limited experiences of a North Korean who had worked as an IAEA inspector before the Gulf War and who in 1992 emerged as director of the safeguards liaison office of Pyongyang’s Ministry of Atomic Energy. “It’s hard to believe he had seen anything like this,” said Heinonen, speaking of the greatly enhanced scientific prowess that provided detailed test results from tiny samples of radioactive material. Said Willi Theis, initially the chief of the IAEA inspection team in North Korea, “North Korea grossly underestimated the agency’s measurement capability. . . . They never expected us to be able to perform isotopic analyses. They could not understand this or explain the [test result] differences. The more they learned, the more they provided manufactured
responses. We had to approach them harder and harder as they realized we were going to discover their wrongdoings.”

FROM ACCOMMODATION TO CRISIS

In the last half of 1992 and early 1993, the euphoria that had resulted from opening North Korea’s nuclear program to international inspection gave way to suspicion, antagonism, and, eventually, crisis. The rewards Pyongyang had expected from agreeing to nuclear inspections had not developed; instead, the presence of the inspectors provided the focal point for accusations of cheating and new international pressures. Contributing to the setback was a worsening political climate between the North and the South, brought about in part by preparations for ROK presidential elections in December 1992 as well as bitter personal rivalries within the South Korean bureaucracy over how to deal with the North. The United States, distracted and largely immobilized by its own November presidential balloting, did nothing to forestall the approaching storm.

Since the signing of the unprecedented series of accords between North and South the previous December, negotiations over their implementation had gone slowly. In the North-South Joint Nuclear Control Commission meetings that were charged with preparing the bilateral nuclear inspections called for under the accords, Pyongyang resisted Seoul’s demands for short-notice “inspections with teeth” by South Koreans. This deadlock became more worrisome as the discrepancies in the IAEA data accumulated, and conflict grew between North Korea and the international inspectors, providing new ammunition for those who had believed all along that North Korea would never reveal crucial elements of its nuclear weapons activity.

With a record of foreign-policy accomplishments behind him, President Roh Tae Woo was relatively relaxed, telling the
New York Times
in September that he believed North Korea’s “determination to develop nuclear weapons has become weaker.” Roh still hoped for a meeting with Kim Il Sung, although in April 1992 he had been forced to reject an unexpected and secret invitation to travel to Pyongyang for the Great Leader’s eightieth birthday. To meet his counterpart on this occasion would make him seem to be a celebrant at Kim’s party. Nevertheless, Roh secretly sent his intelligence chief to Pyongyang to wish Kim happy birthday and express continuing interest in a meeting.

Kim Young Sam, the former opposition leader who had joined the ruling party in 1990 and who became its presidential candidate in May 1992,
was apprehensive about the positive aspects of North-South relations. Kim and his political managers feared that continuation of the North-South euphoria of earlier months would benefit his old political rival, Kim Dae Jung, who was shaping up as once again his principal competitor, this time as opposition presidential candidate. As the political authority of Roh as a lame-duck president began to ebb and that of his chosen successor grew in the late summer of 1992, South Korea slowed down its normalization process with the North, and its officials urged Americans to do the same.

In early October, as a part of a campaign of pressure and linkage, the United States and ROK defense ministers announced in Washington that “in the absence of meaningful improvement in South-North relations, especially on bilateral nuclear inspections,” they were preparing to relaunch the US-ROK Team Spirit, canceled in 1992 in the period of mutual accommodation that led to the IAEA inspections of Yongbyon.

The South Korean military took the lead in demanding a renewal of Team Spirit, which was deemed important for readiness as well as a potent pressure point against the North. The US Command, under General Robert RisCassi, was determined to go ahead with the exercise unless countermanded by higher-ups for political reasons. Surprisingly, interagency policy committees in Washington were neither informed nor consulted before this politically explosive decision was made in the defense ministers’ annual meeting. To Korea experts in Washington and to Donald Gregg, US ambassador to Seoul, it was an unpleasant bolt from the blue—he later called it “one of the biggest mistakes” of Korea policy on his watch.