The Great Successor

by Fifield, Anna;

Since Kim Jong Un took charge, that blue-roofed building has doubled in size. No one knows exactly how much fissile material the regime has. Some experts say enough for fifteen bombs; US intelligence says perhaps enough for sixty or even seventy. Hecker thinks the Kim regime is producing enough material for six or seven bombs a year—every year.

  In many ways, it doesn’t matter how much nuclear material North Korea has. One fact is incontrovertible: North Korea now has the bomb. “People are surprised that this backwards country can do this,” Hecker told me. “But in this business, they are not backwards.”

  With the hydrogen bomb test and the concurrent development of the ballistic missile program, Kim Jong Un had made his grandfather’s dream an undeniable reality.

  From the earliest days of North Korea’s existence, Kim Il Sung had been thinking about getting nuclear weapons. His obsession with them stemmed from seeing the devastation that the United States wreaked on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and the way two bombs forced imperial Japan’s immediate surrender.

  Then came the American threat during the Korean War to use nuclear weapons against the North. The warnings had the desired effect—the two sides called the war to an end with an armistice. But the effect on Kim Il Sung’s thinking cannot be overstated. The danger that the United States might use its nuclear weapons against the North has been a central principle in the regime’s strategic thought and actions ever since.4

  Kim Il Sung wanted the same weapons. Just a few years after North Korea emerged from the Korean War, Kim Il Sung sent his nuclear scientists to study and receive practical training at the Soviet Union’s preeminent Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, outside Moscow. It wasn’t long before the North Korean leader saw exactly why he needed his own nuclear capability, illustrated all too alarmingly by the Cuban missile crisis.

  In 1962, the Soviet Union and the United States were locked in a thirteen-day standoff over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles in Cuba, less than one hundred miles from the US coastline. For those two weeks, the world teetered on the edge of nuclear war. But the conflict was resolved diplomatically when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles as long as President John Kennedy agreed not to invade Cuba. A deal was done.

  Kim Il Sung viewed this deal as a capitulation by the Soviet Union to the United States, a sign that Moscow was willing to sell out an ally for the sake of its own security. The Great Leader apparently learned from this that North Korea should never entrust its national security to any other government.

  This injected new momentum into his drive for nuclear independence. Within a few months, Kim Il Sung’s regime had started to explore the possibility of developing a nuclear deterrent of its own. The leader who had espoused a need for a stronger agricultural policy was soon standing before the cadres in Pyongyang to hammer home the importance of putting equal emphasis on economic growth and national defense. This was the first “simultaneous push” policy. The proportion of the national budget devoted to defense rose from only 4.3 percent in 1956 to almost 30 percent within a decade.5

  The nuclear scientists who returned home from the Soviet Union set about building, about sixty miles northeast of Pyongyang, a similar complex to the one they’d worked at in Dubna. This would eventually become the Yongbyon Nuclear Research Complex.

  More impetus came in the early 1970s, when it emerged that North Korea’s other main ally, China, had secretly started to forge relations with the United States, an effort that led to President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing in 1972.

  Meanwhile, in South Korea, the strongman Park Chung-hee, a general who’d seized the presidency through a military coup, was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons of his own. When this news emerged, it was an unbearable blow to Kim Il Sung’s personal vanity and sense of national pride.6

  Another key factor that must have been weighing on Kim Il Sung’s mind was his own mortality. He was in his sixties by this time and was starting to prepare his son to take over. He thought that having nuclear weapons would make it easier for his son to keep a grip on the state. In lieu of charisma, Kim Jong Il should at least have nukes.

  In the late 1970s onward, the North Koreans had built more than one hundred nuclear facilities at Yongbyon alone.7 American intelligence agencies were alarmed. In the space of about six years, a country with no previous experience had built a functioning nuclear reactor. Three years later came unambiguous proof that the reactor’s purpose was military, not civilian; the country had built a major reprocessing facility that would enable it to turn the fuel from the reactor into fissile material.8

  But its efforts were not going unnoticed among allies either. The Soviet Union pressured Kim Il Sung into signing the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty at the end of 1985. It took seven years for North Korea to allow in the inspectors required under that treaty, and when they got in, they found numerous signs that the regime was secretly working on the very kind of nuclear program it had pledged against. In 1993, Kim Il Sung threatened to withdraw from the treaty, triggering an alarming standoff. North Korea and the United States came the closest to war in forty years.

  Talks to resolve the impasse were ongoing when Kim Il Sung suddenly died in the summer of 1994, propelling both sides into unknown territory. They did, however, manage to sign a landmark nuclear disarmament deal called the Agreed Framework, under which North Korea agreed to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear weapons program and a US-led coalition agreed to build two civilian nuclear reactors that could be used to generate electricity for the energy-starved country.

  Pyongyang had no intention of abiding by this agreement either. Signing the deal was all about buying the Kim regime time to work on its program while maintaining the appearance of cooperating.

  North Korea had developed a close relationship with Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. In the 1990s, while North Koreans were dying of starvation and while Kim Jong Un was watching Jackie Chan movies in Switzerland, the regime was building a uranium-enrichment program. Uranium enrichment wasn’t technically covered under the Agreed Framework. And North Korea loves technicalities.

  George W. Bush’s administration declared in the summer of 2002 that Pyongyang had a dedicated program, helped in no small part by A. Q. Khan. Thereafter, the Agreed Framework was dead.

  As Kim Jong Un was preparing to mark his fifth anniversary in power, an event happened half a world away that would upend North Korea’s way of dealing with the United States. Celebrity businessman Donald J. Trump was elected president. Officials in North Korea, as in many other countries, initially struggled to anticipate what this new president’s approach would be.

  But as Kim Jong Un’s weapons program became more and more credible during the first year of Trump’s presidency, the new American commander-in-chief used increasingly blunt language. Republican leaders quickly labeled Kim Jong Un a madman. Donald Trump called him a “total nut job.” Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said he was “not a rational person.” The Republican senator John McCain called him a “crazy fat kid.”

  Since his first days in power, Kim Jong Un’s state of mind has been the subject of intense speculation.

  Many leaders over the centuries have realized that, as Machiavelli also wrote, it can be wise to pretend to be mad. Sometimes leaders want their enemies to think they’re crazy as a way to force them into action they would not otherwise take.

  President Richard Nixon offered a textbook example of this during the Vietnam War. He even called it his “madman theory” of coercive diplomacy. During the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1960s and then through the Cuban missile crisis, the prospect of nuclear action led both sides to exercise restraint in issuing nuclear threats.

  “With the prospect of mutually assured destruction, the leaders in Moscow and Washington avoided making explicit threats, exerted tight central control over their nuclear forces, and used direct communicatio
ns to defuse tensions that could escalate into a military confrontation neither side desired,” scholars Scott D. Sagan and Jeremi Suri have written.9

  Nixon believed his predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, had convinced North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union to end the Korean War in 1953 by threatening to use his nukes.

  In 1969, Nixon was unable to win domestic support for his preferred option of launching a massive bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese. So Tricky Dick wanted to use Eisenhower’s tactics. He was going to pretend to do what he knew he couldn’t do. He would send a secret nuclear signal to try to convince the Soviets that he was going to launch a major bombing attack, perhaps even a nuclear attack, against North Vietnam.

  “I call it the Madman Theory,” he told his chief of staff. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”10

  During 2017, many wondered who was playing the madman in the war of words between Trump and Kim. Some said Trump was trying to convince the North Koreans he was volatile enough to do what presidents before him had not—even if it meant sacrificing Seoul. Yet all the while, Trump was accusing Kim Jong Un of being the crazy one.

  The North Korean leader was a “maniac” and “obviously a madman” who “doesn’t mind starving or killing his people,” Trump said in 2017. (For what it’s worth, North Korea fired back by calling Trump an “old lunatic.”)

  The American president’s remarks might make ideal soundbites for cable news, but are they actually true? Does a person have to be clinically insane, a verifiable psychopath, to be so cruel to his own people? Can a person succeed against the odds if he doesn’t have all his mental faculties?

  These are questions that occupy psychological profilers in spy services around the world.

  For decades, the CIA has been trying to build profiles of world leaders to figure out what makes them tick and to predict how they might act, especially during negotiations and crises.

  As far back as 1943, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, was trying to figure out Adolf Hitler’s psychology and personality using “psycho-biographical techniques.” Since the 1970s, the CIA has built profiles of world leaders to assess their political behavior, their cognitive styles, and their decision-making processes. But it also looks at the culture in which the leader operates to assess what other factors might have an influence.11

  Contrary to Trump’s assertions, American intelligence analysts described Kim Jong Un as a “rational actor” who is operating in accordance with fulfilling his one goal in life: staying in power.

  “There’s a clarity of purpose in what Kim Jong Un has done,” Yong Suk Lee, a top official in the CIA’s Korea Mission Center, said in rare public remarks in 2017, as the young leader was firing a barrage of increasingly high-tech missiles. Kim Jong Un is not going to wake up one morning and decide to nuke Los Angeles, because he knows that this would lead the United States to reciprocate. “He wants to rule for a long time and die peacefully in his own bed,” Lee said.

  In fact, it would be mad for Kim Jong Un not to pursue nuclear weapons. For a small country with few resources and a constant fear of being annihilated by the United States, North Korea gets a lot of firepower by investing in nuclear and missile technology. Even Kim Jong Un knew his conventional weaponry was no match for American military might, but the prospect of mutually assured destruction, which had worked so well during the Cold War, could help him stave off any US attack.

  But in the White House, Kim Jong Un’s actions were depicted as those of a certifiable madman.

  After the intercontinental ballistic missile launches of July 2017, the American president threatened to rain down “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea. The US military was “locked and loaded,” he said. After the nuclear test in September, Trump took the podium at the UN General Assembly and said that he would “totally destroy North Korea” if necessary to defend the United States. Although this had been the United States’ policy for decades, no president had ever said it quite as bluntly as Trump.

  At the same time, the American president mocked his adversary as “Little Rocket Man.” “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself,” Trump declared to a stunned UN audience.

  Kim Jong Un was not deterred. In fact, he was emboldened. “I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire,” he said about Trump, sending people the world over scrambling for their dictionaries. The statement was not just the normal North Korean bluster—this time the threat was attributed directly to Kim Jong Un himself, an extremely rare event that underlined the gravity of the situation.

  This was a primitive alpha male contest like no other.

  Trump’s threats helped Kim bolster his claim that he was protecting the North Korean people from the evil Americans. This state was founded on the premise that the United States was a hostile power out to destroy it. Trump’s words seemed to confirm that.

  Coincidentally, the American and South Korean militaries were starting their huge annual drills. Amphibious craft began practicing beach landings, while fighter jets dropped bombs on a training range in South Korea, just a few dozen miles from the border with the North.

  White House national security advisor H. R. McMaster was threatening “preventive war” if the North Koreans continued to rapidly accelerate their nuclear weapons program. He defined that as “a war that would prevent North Korea from threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon.”

  McMaster spoke in language that recalled the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. “I think it’s impossible to overstate the danger associated with a rogue, brutal regime, [a man] who murdered his own brother with nerve agent in an airport,” he said.12

  The South Korean and American militaries began actively practicing conducting “decapitation strikes” on the North Korean leadership. South Korea set up a dedicated “decapitation unit” of elite soldiers called Spartan 3000. During that tense period, Kim Jong Un often changed his itinerary at the last moment to keep people guessing, according to South Korea’s intelligence agency.

  In response, North Korea threatened to “envelop” the American territory of Guam with missiles to “tame the Americans with fire.” It also threatened to “take our hand closer to the ‘trigger’ for taking the toughest countermeasure,” a North Korean official declared, hinting at a nuclear strike.

  There was a very palpable concern in northeast Asia—and in parts of Washington, DC, too—of a real prospect of conflict with North Korea.

  Japan held drills to prepare for incoming missiles for the first time since World War II. South Koreans worried about the unpredictable and inflammatory new American president. In Hawaii, authorities reactivated a network of sirens dating back to the Cold War.

  In Washington, even cautious analysts were putting the chances of conflict at higher than 50 percent.

  This fear was only heightened when McMaster and other Trump administration officials suggested that deterrence—the bedrock of American nuclear policy throughout the Cold War—could no longer work with North Korea.

  Instead, Trump launched a campaign of “maximum pressure” on North Korea, pushing for even tougher sanctions.

  Whereas sanctions had previously targeted industries and money flows linked to the nuclear and missile programs, they now began to look like a trade embargo. Seafood, coal, and garment exports were banned. The sanctions were accompanied by a travel ban that required every American citizen to get special permission to travel to North Korea—and humanitarian workers found that their reasons for visiting were not accepted by the State Department. The Global Fund, a multilateral global health agency, suspended funding for malaria and tubercul
osis projects in North Korea, leading doctors to warn of a major public health and humanitarian crisis that could take decades to reverse.

  The US State Department estimated that the sanctions had blocked more than 90 percent of North Korea’s exports, not including labor, which, for good measure, was also banned. In total, the sanctions were estimated to cut North Korea’s hard currency earnings by one-third—or by $1 billion.

  That was a huge number, but the game-changing actions were happening on North Korea’s border. China enforced the sanctions like never before.

  Previously, Beijing had done the bare minimum, fearing the collapse of North Korea much more than any rogue missile. But now, it seemed like Trump might be serious about conducting strikes on the North, and Beijing found the prospect of war much more alarming than the prospect of instability.

  Beijing cut off trade. The seafood and the coal stopped arriving in China. Many of the thousands of North Korean laborers working in China were sent back. A palpable chill settled over Dandong, the commercial gateway to North Korea. I got kicked out of a North Korean restaurant in Dandong at 7:30 p.m., barely having finished my last mouthful of dinner. In this kind of environment, everything was being closed down.

  China needed to show the United States that it was taking action with sanctions to make sure that Washington did not take military action. Stability was better than instability, but instability was better than an invasion.

  Experts also openly worried about miscalculation leading to war, that one side might misread the delicate dance of signals and maneuverings that had been carefully choreographed between them over the years and react impulsively. After all, the leaders of the two countries had only seven years of political experience between them. Six of them were on Kim Jong Un’s side.

  The chances for misunderstanding seemed to grow greater by the day.

  There was talk about the Trump administration hatching a plan to give Kim Jong Un a “bloody nose.” The idea was to conduct a limited, surgical strike on a North Korean nuclear site or missile facility and, in doing so, force the young leader to think twice about his provocative actions and return to talks about getting rid of his nuclear program.