The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (49 page)

State Department and US national laboratory analysts hotly dissented from the 1993 estimate. The qualifying phrase “better than an even chance” fell away in the public remarks of several senior officials, leaving in its place
the perception that Washington
knew
that the North already possessed sufficient plutonium and might even already have nuclear weapons. Eventually, the CIA concluded that “plumeology” was flawed and that the lower figure cited by North Korea, 60 days, could well have been right. The likelihood of a lower figure for reprocessed plutonium was further reinforced by meticulous work done by one of the Department of Energy national laboratories, which bounded an assessment for plutonium production with more precision than observations about the reactor’s operations from satellites could do. In turn, a more accurate assessment of the probable range of plutonium produced supported a more accurate judgment of the North’s theoretical weapons potential at the time.

Outside the classified debate, some experts believed that the US intelligence estimate was, in the words of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, a “worst-case scare-nario”—that it was highly unlikely that North Korea could have unloaded so many rods so quickly and successfully, or that the rods could have been so well made or fully irradiated, or that the reprocessing operation could have worked so effectively that Pyongyang had the plutonium for one or two bombs. Even in the worst case, skeptics pointed out, possession of the plutonium was several key steps away from having a viable, deliverable nuclear weapon. There was so much disagreement within the administration, Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, told me, that the president often received diametrically opposite estimates on North Korea from the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence on the same day.

Unloading the reactor in 1994 was of great importance for two reasons, one concerning the past and the other the future. Regarding the past, IAEA experts believed that systematic sampling of carefully segregated rods from particular parts of the reactor’s core would disclose how long the fuel rods had been burned and at what intensity. In this way, they could compile a record of the operating history of the reactor, confirming how many rods had been previously removed, and therefore identify the outer limit of the plutonium that might have been produced. Such a disclosure would be a major step toward eliminating the ambiguity about the DPRK’s past acquisition of fissile material.

Of even greater importance was the future of the eight thousand fuel rods, now about to be unloaded from the reactor. Secretary of Defense Perry estimated that this entire load of rods could be converted into enough plutonium for four or five nuclear weapons. Although the United States was not prepared to go to war to clarify the past, it was determined to do so, if necessary, to prevent North Korea from reprocessing these and future irradiated fuel rods. Nearing completion at Yongbyon was a much larger 50-megawatt reactor that could potentially produce much more
plutonium, and an even larger 200-megawatt reactor was under construction nearby. The latter was unlikely to be used as a weapons-grade plutonium producer, but the 50-megawatt would be ideally suited for that purpose.

North Korean negotiator Kang Sok Ju had been warned repeatedly by Gallucci that if the refueling of the 5-megawatt reactor took place without IAEA supervision, negotiations with the United States would be terminated, even though such action would be within North Korea’s rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. However, a US official familiar with the issue said, “We didn’t lay down with great force and clarity that this was a drop-dead issue.” Moreover, this official said, most of the US–North Korean discussion before the spring of 1994 had been about the
re
fueling of the reactor, not about
de
fueling, or unloading the current stock of irradiated fuel rods. “If North Korea understood, they chose to ignore it,” he added.

In Pyongyang opponents of the unloading fought as hard as they dared to get the decision reversed, knowing it would lead to a major crisis, but in the end they were told that the decision had been made and they must support it. On April 19, Pyongyang notified the IAEA of its intention to defuel the reactor “at an early date,” and invited agency inspectors to witness the unloading—but without specifying what procedures would be followed or what the inspectors would be able to see and do. There followed weeks of sparring over the procedures, with Pyongyang offering to permit inspectors to observe and take some measurements but not to segregate or sample the fuel rods in a way that would make it possible to determine their past history. The IAEA refused to send inspectors unless its procedures for sampling were fully accepted. Washington backed the IAEA, though some officials believed the agency was being too rigid.

Removal of the spent fuel rods began on May 8 without international observation or approval. To the shock of the IAEA, the operations proceeded much more rapidly than expected. The North Koreans produced a second defueling machine that nobody knew they had. The two machines worked at top speed in three shifts around the clock.

At the end of May, in a last-ditch effort to preserve the reactor’s verifiable operating history, the IAEA sent a high-level team headed by Dimitri Perricos, a twenty-two-year, tough-as-nails veteran of the agency and director of its East Asia division of safeguards operations. Perricos got nowhere. With about half of the rods already unloaded, the North Koreans refused to slow down discharge operations or to accept the IAEA’s method of segregating the rods to verify their history.

Instead, North Korea proposed a discharge method that the IAEA team judged would not guarantee preservation of the necessary data. Even worse, Perricos observed that the actual unloading of the rods by the
DPRK reactor operators was “a big mess” that would make it impossible to learn much of anything of the past operations, and he concluded—probably accurately—that this disarray was deliberate. He sensed that a political decision had been made, probably at the very top, not to surrender the North’s ace—the outside world’s uncertainty about how much plutonium it had. The North did, however, permit two IAEA inspectors to remain at Yongbyon to observe the unloading of the fuel rods and the cooling pond into which they were placed.

At IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Hans Blix, the director general, was indignant at North Korea’s refusal to cooperate. All along Blix had been uncomfortable with bending the agency’s global rules and requirements to meet the self-proclaimed “unique status” of North Korea—partly in, partly out of the international nuclear inspection regime. So far as Blix was concerned, the DPRK was fully in the regime until its withdrawal was official and complete, and in the meantime it should fully comply with IAEA requirements, even though some of these had never been levied on any other state before. Blix feared that tolerating compromises with IAEA directives could damage the agency’s shaky authority and credibility with other nations.

Washington officialdom was privately unhappy with the agency’s legalistic mind-set. Gallucci, who had gradually become imbued with the regional and political aspects of the dispute, described the workings of the IAEA in May as “medieval or perhaps Talmudic, depending on what religious metaphor you use.” The administration did not know from one day to the next, he said, how Blix would react to North Korea’s machinations. Gallucci could not pressure Blix, for fear it would be seen as American interference with nonproliferation objectives that everyone held dear. About the same time, a high-ranking Defense Department official whom I met on a social occasion described Blix as “a fanatic” who was single-mindedly protecting his agency with little thought for the overall consequences. Former ambassador to Korea Donald Gregg described the IAEA inspectors as “a bunch of eager proctologists, making painful inquiries without holding out any benefits to North Korea.”

On June 2, when more than 60 percent of the fuel rods had been removed, Blix sent a strong letter to the UN Security Council that was an implicit call for international action. Blix reported that despite an earlier appeal to Pyongyang from the Security Council president to heed the IAEA’s proposal, “all important parts of the core” had been unloaded, and the agency’s ability to ascertain with confidence whether reactor fuel had been secretly diverted “has been lost.” The situation, he declared, is “irreversible.” Blix’s letter was the opening gun in the long-discussed drive for UN sanctions against the recalcitrant, often-maddening DPRK.

In Pyongyang Kim Il Sung explained the situation as he saw it to his friend Cambodian chief of state Norodom Sihanouk: “Please compare us to a man: They want us to take off our shirt, our coat and now our trousers, and after that we will be nude, absolutely naked. What they want us to be is a man without defense secrets, just a naked man. We cannot accept that. We would rather accept a war. If they decide to make war, we accept the war, the challenge we are prepared for.” In case anyone failed to get the point, North Korea issued a formal statement on June 5 announcing that “sanctions mean war, and there is no mercy in war.”

Undeterred, Washington proceeded with diplomatic consultations aimed at a sanctions vote in the Security Council and, in parallel, with plans for a stepped-up US military presence in and around Korea, preparing for the possibility of war.

THE MILITARY TRACK

Throughout the four decades since the armistice of 1953, the US military considered the renewal of war in Korea to be one of its most dangerous potential challenges. Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, American military planners had consistently identified Korea as the most likely spot for hostilities involving the United States in Asia. Although US troops had been reduced over the years to thirty-seven thousand, the presence of these forces guaranteed that the United States would be instantly involved if the massive North Korean army should attack across the narrow demilitarized zone. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, US military forces were restructured as a “base force” whose main job was to be capable of fighting two regional wars at once—one of which was consistently identified as a renewal of war in Korea.

In late 1993 and early 1994, as the international tension over North Korea’s nuclear program heightened again, the US Command in Korea began to prepare more seriously for new hostilities. For the first time in decades, the US military war plan—Operations Plan 50–27—took on the flesh-and-blood colors of reality rather than remaining abstract papers in folders and computer programs. Although it kept the same designation number, the plan had been updated several times over the years, and its emphasis had shifted from defensive maneuvers to offensive action north of the DMZ, to take the fighting into North Korea after the start of hostilities. The early-1990s revision of the war plan under the supervision of General Robert RisCassi, who was chief of the US Command at the time, authorized a massive US and ROK counterattack to take Pyongyang and topple the North Korean regime, with an option to proceed farther north toward the Chinese border and essentially reunify the country. It also put heavier emphasis on military steps to be taken by the United States and
South Korea in the “prehostility” phase leading up to a potential outbreak of war.

To the surprise of US commanders, ROK defense minister Lee Pyong Tae publicly outlined the essence of the war plan in testimony to the National Assembly on March 23, just four days after the North Korean “sea of fire” statement inflamed the South. “He did it as a threat to the North Koreans . . . as a deterrent measure,” said a senior US officer in Seoul, who was initially startled by the disclosure of the highly secret blueprint. For months, as its US ally was becoming alarmed, the ROK military had been relatively complacent about the possibility of military conflict. Now the South Koreans had suddenly become “nervous as a cat,” the senior officer said. “They thought we were going to war too.”

As tension continued to rise over the unresolved nuclear inspections and defueling of the North Korean reactor, the US Command and the Pentagon moved ahead with military preparations. The first shipment of Patriot antimissiles arrived in Pusan in mid-April and were deployed before the end of the month. A battalion of US Apache attack helicopters was brought in to replace the older Cobras, with more on the way. Additional heavy tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles (the modern replacement for armored personnel carriers), advanced radar tracking systems to pinpoint North Korean artillery, aircraft spare parts, and new ammunition-loading equipment arrived. About a thousand more troops landed quietly with the additional weapons, bringing US forces up to their full authorized strength of thirty-seven thousand. More heavy combat gear was loaded aboard American ships, to be within easy reach of Korea if additional troops were needed.

I met with the then-CINC (commander in chief) of US forces in Korea, General Gary Luck, for the first time on May 3 at Yongsan, headquarters of the command since the time of the Korean War. In the mid-1980s, Luck, fifty-six, had commanded the Second Infantry Division in Korea and led the Eighteenth Airborne Corps into action against Iraq in Operation Desert Storm. Wearing fatigues with his four stars sewn on the collars and his sleeves rolled up, showing his impressive muscles, the gray-haired, crew-cut general had the physique and disarming country-boy drawl that marked him as a combat leader. Given his appearance and bearing, I was not surprised to learn that he often jogged with his troops and lifted weights, but I would not have guessed, and only learned much later, that Luck had earned a PhD in business administration from George Washington University.

The situation in Korea, Luck told me, is “much more dangerous now than a year or two ago,” because of a slow-paced but constant military buildup in the North and especially because of the nuclear maneuvering, which he called “the catalyst for a more tension-filled drama.” Luck’s
intelligence officers had coined the phrase “incremental normalism” to describe the creeping buildup and improvement of Pyongyang’s forces, so constant that it was now taken for granted. In 1994 roughly 65 percent of North Korean forces, including eighty-four hundred artillery pieces and twenty-four hundred multiple rocket launchers, were estimated to be stationed within sixty miles of the DMZ, compared with 45 percent a decade earlier. US estimates were that in case of war, North Korea could pound Seoul with five thousand rounds of artillery within the first twelve hours, causing havoc, death, and destruction in the capital despite the fierce counterattack planned by US and ROK forces.