The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  The North Koreans had long felt massively threatened by the United States’s South Korean deployment; with the exception of Jimmy Carter, U.S. leaders throughout the Cold War had been uniformly hostile to the durable Communist regime. Encouraging the removal of the American arsenal became a central goal of North Korean foreign policy, along with increasing the country’s supply of electricity, preferably with nuclear power. The Soviet Union had been the North’s grudging patron in the years since the Korean War. The relationship grew progressively worse in the later 1980s as the North’s economy declined and it was unable to meet its trade obligations. At some point along the way, Kim Il Sung began looking for a new patron.

  As early as 1986 the North’s “Great Leader” was already encouraging his government officials to reach out to the United States, which he evidently identified as a potential new patron despite the long and bitter history of dispute between his country and the Western superpower. A Stanford University Asia scholar, John W. Lewis, visited North Korea as a private citizen on many occasions over the years and heard the appeal repeatedly. “The long-term goal22 of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” Lewis told a Stanford audience in 2006, “one that was first stated to me in 1986, is to have a normal, positive relationship with the United States. That’s their strategic goal. They want that because they are ‘little shrimp,’ as they put it, surrounded by all these whales that have been very nasty to them in history. The Chinese, the Japanese, the Russians have all caused them problems over the millennia. They believe that a fair and balanced relationship with the United States would be a long-term asset. They’re realistic; they talk about the balance of power in terms that sound like Henry Kissinger.”

  To that end, North Korea acceded to the NPT in December 1985, although it was not yet prepared to admit safeguard inspectors to Yongbyon, which it was supposed to do within eighteen months. (The Soviet Union, which had encouraged the North Korean commitment, was also supposed to provide light-water reactors in return, but that arrangement foundered on the North’s delay in following through with safeguards until after the Soviet Union’s demise.)23 A key North Korean requirement for improving North-South relations was the withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from South Korea. George H. W. Bush found a way to meet that demand after the failed August 1991 anti-Gorbachev coup in the Soviet Union, when he announced the unilateral U.S. withdrawal of all ground-launched tactical nuclear weapons throughout the world, a withdrawal that included U.S. nuclear weapons, both ground and (in a secret codicil) air-launched, in South Korea. The action was palatable to Republican congressional hawks because American naval ships and nuclear submarines armed with nuclear weapons still patrolled the Pacific and the Sea of Japan.

  On a visit to North Korea in December 1991, the New York congressman Stephen Solarz pressed Kim Il Sung about the North’s nuclear program. The North Korean leader’s response, which was consistent with his response to Erich Honecker three years previously, endorses John Lewis’s understanding of Kim’s strategy for transferring fealties. “What’s the use of a few24 nuclear weapons?” Kim asked Solarz. “In ten thousand years’ time we couldn’t have as many nuclear weapons as you. Assume that we are producing nuclear weapons and have one or two nuclear weapons. What’s the point? They’d be useless. If we fire them, they will kill the Korean people.” Threatening the United States or its South Korean ally with a few nuclear weapons would be suicidal, but a nuclear-weapons program could be traded away as a bargaining chip in D.P.R.K.-style high-risk negotiations.

  Selig Harrison, a former Northeast Asian bureau chief at The Washington Post, learned later from North Korean contacts of a bitter debate at that time in D.P.R.K. leadership circles about whether or not an opening to the United States was feasible:

  It became increasingly clear25 to the reformers that the nuclear issue was the principal obstacle to normalization [of U.S.–North Korean relations] and thus to a liberalization of foreign economic policy. In December 1991, they forced a showdown over nuclear policy in the Workers Party Central Committee and won a significant victory. With Kim Il Sung’s blessing, the committee gave the go-ahead for the inspection of North Korean nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency, then a key U.S. demand. North Korean informants have subsequently told me of the bitterness that marked the intra-party debate over the IAEA issue. The reformers argued that economic survival required an economic opening to the United States, Japan, and South Korea. Hard-liners ridiculed the idea that Pyongyang would get any help from Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul, insisting that they wanted to bring about the collapse of North Korea.

  As a result of the reformers’ victory, the North signed a joint declaration with South Korea at the end of December 1991 on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula that proscribed even the production of plutonium and HEU, a restriction that exceeded NPT requirements. The North was then prepared to sign its IAEA safeguards agreement as soon as the U.S. certified that all nuclear weapons had been removed from the Korean Peninsula. Certification followed in early January 1992, and the safeguards signing took place in Vienna at the end of the month. Russia’s announcement in March that it was canceling technical and financial assistance for North Korean nuclear-power-plant construction (it had ceased exporting nuclear equipment and fuel to North Korea the previous year) underlined the urgency of the North’s transition from Russian to American patronage. In April it officially ratified the IAEA safeguards agreement and began compiling its safeguards declarations. Those arrived in Vienna at the beginning of May in the form of a detailed and surprisingly revealing 150-page inventory. Blix and his three-man team of experts, who had been briefed extensively by U.S. intelligence, traveled to Yongbyon on 11 May for an initial six-day visit, to be followed by IAEA inspections, and the confrontation between North Korea and the IAEA began.

  “SO I WAS THERE and it was all sunshine,”26 Hans Blix told me with irony. “They took us to Yongbyon, they took us to see a two-hundred-megawatt nuclear power plant under construction, they took us to a place where they were milling uranium in a mine. But they didn’t want to take us into the laboratory at Yongbyon. They called it a ‘radiochemical’ laboratory. I said, ‘Now, you’ve been opening everything so well, and you must realize that if you say no to this, then I have to report it.’ So eventually they took us to the lab. It had glove boxes”—for handling radioactive materials—“but they were not linked together in a line, and they had only installed about half of the equipment. Even so, we were suspicious that it might be a reprocessing plant.” For a laboratory supposedly making radiochemicals, which are typically used in small quantities for medical and industrial diagnostics, the building was impossibly large, six hundred feet long and six stories high. Blix asked his attendants about the purpose of their “radiochemical” laboratory. “They said they wanted to have breeder reactors in the future so they were learning to reprocess spent fuel. I found what they said very odd. I thought, if they had said that they wanted to reduce the volume of waste, then, yes, reprocessing would have been plausible, but a breeder reactor was not very plausible.” Even the French, with years of experience designing and operating nuclear reactors, had trouble during this period developing advanced breeder reactor technology; for a country such as North Korea, at the outset of its nuclear-power development, to advance directly to building breeders was unlikely in the extreme.

  The North Koreans told Blix that they had separated about a hundred grams of plutonium, some three ounces, as a scientific experiment, and they gave him a sample—in powder form in a single-walled glass vial, not the safest way to transport powdered plutonium.* The plutonium, they said, came from several damaged fuel rods they had removed from the five-megawatt reactor in 1990. The IAEA director reserved his judgment of that claim pending detailed tests.

  More significantly, in light of what followed, North Korean officials sought Blix’s help in acquiring light-water reactors to ease their country’s energy shortage—the same request they
had made previously of the Soviets. They offered to abandon fuel reprocessing in exchange. Since light-water reactors require enriched uranium, which the North lacked the facilities to produce and would have to buy internationally, it was essentially offering to give up its indigenous nuclear program. That offer ought to have rung bells in Washington and elsewhere, but the George H. W. Bush administration’s mind-set on North Korea was baleful. A “senior Defense Department official27 deeply involved in monitoring the North Korean effort” crowed to The New York Times’s David Sanger, who broke the story, “They are moving toward an admission that they have had a bomb project underway, but they are trying to save face. It tells you that the pressure is working.”

  In late May, in July, and again in September 1992, IAEA inspection teams swabbed and sampled the operations at Yongbyon, set up surveillance cameras, and installed seals. By September the inspectors had identified discrepancies in the North Korean declarations. “Our inspectors went into the nuclear waste at the site and took samples,” Blix told me; “that was when they found that the isotopic composition of the pure plutonium the Koreans had given us and of the waste was not the same.”

  In the idiom of metallurgy, the word “campaign” refers to the period during which a furnace is continuously in operation—by analogy with military campaigns, which are “a distinct period of activity.” (The science of metallurgy evolved from the craft of making weapons.) In nuclear metallurgy, the furnace is a nuclear reactor. The plutonium bred in the uranium fuel in the course of a single campaign of reactor operation should contain the same proportions of various plutonium isotopes (e.g., Pu-239, Pu-240, Pu-241) as the traces of plutonium in the liquid waste left behind from its purification. The plutonium powder that the North Koreans had given Blix turned out to be highly homogeneous, indicating that it had been produced in a single campaign, just as Blix had been told. Not so the waste in the tanks that the inspectors had sampled. That waste revealed plutonium concentrations indicative of three distinct campaigns. Since plutonium-241 decays fairly rapidly (it has a half-life of 14 years) to americium-241, measuring the amounts of americium-241 in the waste dated the three campaigns successively to 1989, 1990, and 1991. The North Korean story—that they had undertaken only one reprocessing campaign between March and May 1990 as a proof test of their as-yet-unfinished laboratory—was evidently false. Other measurements found discrepancies between the claimed and actual amounts of plutonium reprocessed.

  The North Korean scientists were shocked to have been caught in a deception. They had been careful to adjust the volume of their liquid waste to levels appropriate to the single reprocessing campaign they claimed to have run. They were apparently unaware of more recent technologies for measuring minute amounts of radioisotopes picked up as swab samples. “So I began to press28 the North Koreans to admit that they’d had more than one campaign,” Blix told me, “and so there must be more plutonium, and they said, ‘No, no, no, we only had one campaign.’ I had the North Korean minister in my office and I remember saying to him, ‘Look, if you have overlooked something, it’s much better that you tell us now than that we find out.’ And he said, ‘No, we have not overlooked anything.’ They made the most strenuous efforts to try to frustrate us, but our inspectors were quite clear that they had seen the numbers and there was no credibility to the claims.”

  What the North Koreans had actually done was more difficult to determine. One scenario that the IAEA developed led to the conclusion that only a few grams of plutonium had been separated. The other scenario, however—that more irradiated fuel rods had been removed from the five-megawatt reactor than Yongbyon had admitted—implied that several kilograms had been separated, which would have put the D.P.R.K. well along the road toward its first plutonium implosion bomb29—assuming they had mastered implosion.* The North Koreans raised further suspicions by refusing to allow the inspection of two sites at Yongbyon that the IAEA believed contained undeclared nuclear waste—another sign of unacknowledged reprocessing.

  Having learned boldness from the IAEA’s efforts in Iraq, Blix in February 1993 formally requested special inspections of the two suspicious sites. Also that month, with the newly inaugurated Bill Clinton determined to cast himself as tough on proliferation, General Lee Butler of the new U.S. Strategic Command announced the retargeting of U.S. strategic nuclear weapons from Russia onto several countries with which the U.S. had conflicts, including North Korea, and the CIA director James Woolsey30 described North Korea as “our most grave current concern.” Clinton also reinstated the annual large-scale Team Spirit joint military exercises with South Korea that his predecessor had canceled in 1992, exercises which the North considered to be a screen for a possible U.S. nuclear surprise attack. (For the same reason, a comparable NATO exercise in Europe in 1983, Able Archer,31 had nearly prompted a Soviet preemptive attack on the United States.) If North Korea was the worst threat the United States faced in the winter of 1992–1993, then America was secure indeed. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had implied as much two years earlier when he told a reporter for the Army Times, “I’m running out of demons.32 I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.” But even if the U.S. concern for the security of its South Korean ally was warranted, the North also had the misfortune to have been caught bargaining with the nuclear devil at a time when the U.S. military-industrial complex and its allies in Congress and the intelligence bureaucracy were conjuring demon villains to rationalize resisting major cuts in the defense budget that many thought the end of the Cold War more than justified.

  Rather than allow special inspections, and responding to the opening of Team Spirit ’93 on 9 March, North Korea on 12 March announced its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as provided in the treaty’s Article X if a signatory “decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country.” North Korea was the first NPT signatory ever to do so. Withdrawal required three months’ notice, so D.P.R.K. withdrawal would not take effect until mid-June.

  Three American participants in the ensuing events—Bob Gallucci, Joel Wit, and Daniel Poneman—wrote at length in a subsequent memoir about what they called “the first North Korean nuclear crisis.”33 In their analysis, the IAEA’s demand for special inspections had presented Kim Il Sung’s son Kim Jong Il, then fifty-two years old, with “his first major foreign policy crisis since assuming most of his father’s responsibilities.” Kim Jong Il had replaced his father as chairman of the D.P.R.K. National Defense Commission—as military leader of his country, that is—just prior to the NPT withdrawal announcement, Gallucci and his colleagues noted:

  The recent example of Iraq34 loomed large in the minds of North Korea’s leaders. Pyongyang had closely studied U.S. military operations during Desert Storm, but also the broader political implications of the Gulf War, concluding that Saddam Hussein may have maintained his grip on power [after the war], but Iraq had lost its independence of action because of measures taken by the international community. For the North Koreans, such a fate would be intolerable, perhaps fatal. They vowed never to let the United States turn their country into another Iraq. Yet that was precisely the danger Pyongyang perceived.

  If North Korea’s withdrawal from the NPT was a crisis for that country, it was perhaps an even more exigent one for the United States. With the NPT up for review in 1995, the withdrawal of a state while in violation of its NPT agreements, a state that was believed to be advancing steadily toward acquiring nuclear weapons, would at the very least seriously undercut that crucial vote. It might even destroy the treaty. Worse, wrote Gallucci and his colleagues, given the danger to South Korea and Japan of a nuclear-armed North Korea, “it was clear to all35 that, if the North’s plutonium production program could not be stopped by negotiations, the only real alternative was military action. Perhaps the United States could strike and destroy Pyongyang’s nuclear facilities from the a
ir without suffering retaliation, but that was not the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community or its military leaders.” Both sides, then, had reason to hurry into negotiations before the mid-June opening for North Korean withdrawal from the NPT.

  Hans Blix, in the meantime, was looking for a way to limit the North’s access to the plutonium bred in the Yongbyon five-megawatt reactor, which was approaching the end of its most recent operating campaign and was due for shutdown and refueling in early May. The surveillance cameras his teams had installed were still operating, but would soon need new batteries and film. If they ran down, the IAEA would be blind to North Korean removal of the irradiated fuel, which might be diverted for plutonium extraction. (If the entire fifty metric tons of fuel rods in the reactor core were removed and the eight thousand fuel rods reprocessed, about 9.5 kilograms of plutonium36 could be extracted, enough for a bomb and a half or possibly two.) Creatively, Blix decided to adapt an existing stipulation in the IAEA-D.P.R.K. safeguards agreement to the new conditions. “In a telex to Pyongyang,”37 wrote Gallucci and his colleagues, “he proposed an inspection to maintain ‘the continuity of safeguards information.’” Inspections had never previously been limited to replacing batteries and film. Nevertheless, the North Koreans agreed, the IAEA inspectors arrived in Yongbyon on 10 May for four days of work, and the cameras continued to record.