Since Gallucci’s negotiations the previous summer with Kang Sok Ju, the North’s first vice foreign minister, the two diplomats had stayed in touch by exchanging messages and letters. Leaving Seoul, Gallucci heard from Kang that the North had decided to unload the fuel from the five-megawatt reactor—the first step toward reprocessing. Gallucci and his colleagues call this message “a bombshell.”66 The reactor had been operating long enough to have bred sufficient plutonium in its eight thousand fuel rods, Perry would estimate, to make “four or five nuclear bombs.”67 If Perry and Gallucci had decided to focus on the present and the future of D.P.R.K. nuclear-weapons progress rather than the past, here were the present and the future staring them in the face.
The challenge then was to persuade the North Koreans to allow IAEA inspectors to observe the unloading operations. On 2 May, Gallucci warned Kang that unloading the reactor in the absence of IAEA inspectors would end the United States–North Korean dialogue. Perry followed up in a speech to the Asia Society in Washington the next day:
If North Korea were to break68 the continuity of safeguards—for example, by refusing to allow adequate IAEA monitoring of the spent fuel rods it will remove from the 5-MWe reactor—the issue would return to the United Nations, where the U.S. and others would consider appropriate steps, including sanctions.…
We believe this response would be commensurate with the problem posed by North Korea’s refusal, and it would be done with no intention of being provocative. However, North Korea has stated that the imposition of sanctions would be equivalent to a declaration of war. This is probably another example of excessive North Korean rhetoric, but, as Secretary of Defense, I have a responsibility to provide for the adequate readiness of U.S. military forces in the face of such threats.
The North’s pointed rejoinder, starting around 10 May, was to begin unloading the five-megawatt reactor.69 Essentially a large block of graphite drilled through with a lattice of multiple vertical channels for fuel rods and gas-coolant circulation, the reactor was built below a floor—a biological shield of thick concrete—with a corresponding lattice of holes for fuel-rod insertion and retrieval. An unloading machine would pull the rods out of the core one at a time while shielding the operators from their intense radiation, and transport them to a nearby cooling pond, where distilled water would remove their heat and shield their radiation as their accumulation of short-lived fission products decayed to less radioactive, longer-lived elements.
Blix expected the unloading to take about two months to complete, based on the use of one unloading machine operating during normal work hours. He sent off his inspectors from Vienna on 15 May,70 with Dimitri Perricos in charge.71 When they arrived at Yongbyon, they found that the Koreans were using two unloading machines and running them both twenty-four hours a day. By 20 May they had already unloaded fourteen hundred fuel rods, and they were making no effort to identify where in the reactor core the rods had been positioned—information the IAEA required if it hoped to determine how many campaigns the reactor had run. Blix dispatched more inspectors72 to deal with the around-the-clock defueling operation, but the Koreans only allowed them to watch.
“They just dumped the fuel73 rods into baskets in the spent fuel pool,” Sig Hecker, who visited Yongbyon at a later time, told me. “They made an incredible technical mess because the fuel rods were clad in magnesium alloy, and water and magnesium don’t mix well. The only way you can put magnesium in water is to very carefully control the pH, which they didn’t do. The rods were a little over half a meter long and an inch and a half or so in diameter, forty to a basket, and they just dumped them.” Perricos called the unloading “a big mess”74 and told the journalist and historian Don Oberdorfer that he’d “concluded that this disarray was deliberate. On reflection, the struggle over the fuel rods reminded him of a poker game in which Pyongyang’s ace was the outside world’s uncertainty about how much plutonium it possessed. He believed that a political decision had been made, probably at the very top, that Pyongyang would not give up its high card.”
In Washington, the Clinton administration was advancing rapidly toward requesting United Nations sanctions despite the D.P.R.K.’s threat that it would consider the imposition of sanctions to be an act of war. “You think of the United Nations75 as neutral,” Kang Sok Ju warned Gallucci. “But they were the belligerent opposite us in the Korean War. So a sanctions resolution in the United Nations would be a violation of the armistice of 1953.”
Perry understood, Gallucci and his colleagues wrote, that “the United States could not fight76 a war in Korea without Japan. Bases in that country would be critical to support forces on the Korean Peninsula.” At the same time, Japan recognized “the possibility of North Korean77 attacks [on Japan] using chemical or biological weapons or attempts to destroy the twenty-five nuclear reactors [on the Japanese coast] along the Sea of Japan, vulnerable to North Korean commando operations and missile attacks.”
At a meeting with Clinton and his senior advisers on 19 May, Perry, Luck, and the Joint Chiefs’ chairman, John Shalikashvili, gave a tough-minded assessment of a war they believed they could win at great cost—without mentioning the cost. “When asked by the president78 at a different briefing whether the United States would win the war,” Gallucci and his colleagues wrote, “General Luck replied, ‘Yes, but at the cost of a million and a trillion.’” The million were military and civilian casualties killed or wounded; the trillion was the loss in dollars to the South Korean economy of a second Korean War. Standing against these grim statistics, Hecker pointed out, was the reality that the entire North Korean plutonium capability was still concentrated at Yongbyon, so that “at that time they still79 would have had the chance to destroy it all. If they bombed the reactor or bombed the reprocessing facility or bombed the spent fuel pool they would destroy the fuel rods, and the plutonium would be gone.”
Why taking out or defending a plutonium-production facility in a country which had not yet tested a bomb would be worth thousands of American, hundreds of thousands of South Korean, and an unspecified number of North Korean and perhaps Japanese lives, no one in the several governments involved has yet satisfactorily explained. Perry, with his former assistant secretary of defense Ashton Carter, attempted to do so in 2003 when another crisis mounted on the Korean Peninsula. The only reason the two former Pentagon officials could adduce, nine years later, that the North “must not be allowed80 to produce a series of nuclear bombs” was that “nuclear weapons might embolden [North Korea] to believe it could scare away the United States from defending the South, making war more likely.” That was a repetition of Gallucci’s “Model Two” argument, which of course depended entirely on how easily the United States, a superpower with more than ten thousand nuclear weapons in its arsenal, could be intimidated.
The other justification Perry and Carter gave for threatening war over their hypothetical was the familiar Vietnam-era claim that “the North’s nuclear program could set off a domino effect of proliferation in Asia and around the world.” It could, but it also might not, and sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Nor was it likely that it would, because the U.S. nuclear umbrella would remain in place, and if the American arsenal was adequate to deter a Soviet nuclear attack on Europe and the United States for four decades, why would it not be adequate to deter a North Korean attack on the South, or even on Los Angeles? The risks inherent in the red line that the U.S. drew across the defueling became more evident at the beginning of June 1994 when Blix, faced with the fact that Yongbyon had unloaded more than 60 percent of the five-megawatt reactor’s fuel rods, finally abandoned his Trojan-horse “continuity of safeguards” ruse and reported to the U.N. Security Council that the loss of information about the reactor’s previous operations was irreversible. The North’s response, on 5 June, was to threaten that “sanctions mean war,81 and there is no mercy in war.”
* A fifty-megawatt reactor, for which construction began around 1984, remains unfinished and abandoned
at the Yongbyon site.
* Plutonium, contrary to popular opinion, is relatively harmless to handle as solid metal or oxide—it radiates weak alpha particles, which a sheet of paper or even bare skin can block—but plutonium powder is hazardous to inhale.
* The plutonium implosion bomb (called Fat Man) that the United States exploded over Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 was built around a solid plutonium core that weighed less than six kilograms.
ELEVEN GREAT LEADERS
AT LEAST ONE PERSON was alive in that time of crisis on the Korean Peninsula with the perspective necessary to see beyond the mutual folly of the U.S.–North Korean dispute. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter had followed the enlarging confrontation closely through the winter and spring of 1994, and beginning in June, against the Clinton administration’s strong resistance, he moved to intervene. North Korea had been trying for three years to convince Carter to visit Pyongyang. The obvious thing to do was to pick up the invitation.1
Before he did so, Carter wanted to be thoroughly briefed and to coordinate his efforts with Clinton. He called Clinton on 1 June and warned the president that sanctions could lead to war. Clinton was noncommittal. He offered to send someone to brief Carter on the state of play. That became a comedy of errors when the person assigned—the NSC’s Poneman—sought a few days’ delay because his wife had just given birth. To placate an angry and impatient Carter, the White House substituted the all-purpose Gallucci, who met with the former president and his wife Rosalynn at their home in Plains, Georgia, on Sunday morning, 5 June.
Gallucci had never met Carter before. The former president explained at the outset of their conversation why he was considering personal intervention: because the North Koreans had appealed to him to help. “I spent over three hours2 with President Carter,” Gallucci told me, “going through the intelligence on why we were concerned about the North Korean program. Then where we were in the negotiations, why we had reached this impasse, why we had left the negotiating table when they discharged fuel from the reactor. What our concerns were about the gas-graphite reactor, the problems it presented in terms of the corroding fuel cladding and reprocessing, et cetera, et cetera. And therefore the crisis and our intent to proceed next to the Security Council.”
Present at the discussion was Marion Creekmore, Jr., the former career diplomat, now a Carter aide and adviser. Creekmore reported Gallucci expressing his personal view “that North Korea wanted3 to make a deal. He thought that Kim Il Sung wanted enough investment to strengthen the [North Korean] economy and so protect the country during the political transition from his rule to that of his son.”
“President Carter’s capacity to see something from the other person’s perspective is truly remarkable,” Gallucci told me. “He immediately started devil’s-advocating, asking what right we had to determine the North Koreans’ choice of fuel cycle.” Reprocessing spent fuel is allowed under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, although the North had agreed not to do so in its 1992 South-North Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. “And I said, ‘Well, if you recall 1977, you made quite a thing about the American position on reprocessing. We haven’t liked it when other countries reprocess. Even when it’s France, never mind North Korea.’ Obviously he knew all this, but he made me work my way through it.” It was the defueling of the five-megawatt reactor to reprocess the fuel, which the North Koreans had insisted was long overdue, that had precipitated the current crisis. Ominous in the background was what the Clinton administration was calling the Osirak option, the option of a preventive attack on Yongbyon. Gallucci told Carter, he and his colleagues wrote, “that the United States4 became ‘very flexible’ at this point, in part because Secretary of Defense William Perry, after reviewing the surgical strike option and its possible adverse consequences, favored a negotiated settlement.”
The North had no intention of tolerating a U.S. buildup of forces in the region as Saddam Hussein had done after invading Kuwait. A North Korean colonel, Oberdorfer reported, had said as much to an American officer at Panmunjom in May: “We are not going to let you5 do a buildup.” An American general “with access to all6 the available intelligence” told Oberdorfer, “I always got this feeling that the North Koreans studied [the 1991 Persian Gulf War] more than we did almost. And they learned one thing: you don’t let the United States build up its forces and then let them go to war against you.”
Carter responded to Gallucci’s briefing with his own assessment of what the root cause of the standoff might be, Creekmore wrote:
Carter emphasized his strong view7 about how to deal with Kim Il Sung. He said that despite Washington’s understandably negative view of him and his record, Kim Il Sung must be treated with respect and honored as a senior statesman if the crisis was to be resolved peacefully. Unfortunately, the administration had moved in the opposite direction. It was proposing sanctions that, even if not implemented, would be a “tangible and official branding of [Kim Il Sung] as a criminal and outlaw.” He insisted that the passage of a sanctions resolution by the United Nations Security Council would likely cause North Korea to leave the NPT permanently. The act of imposing sanctions, whether done in one or more stages, would be for North Korea “an act of war.”
Carter flew to Washington on 10 June for further briefings, including a full-scale presentation by government experts whose conventional wisdom Carter systematically challenged by asking if they had ever been to North Korea, and if not, how did they know? Tony Lake, Clinton’s national security adviser, tried to tell the ex-president what he could and could not say to Kim Il Sung and was similarly rebuffed.8 Clinton would authorize Carter to visit North Korea only as a private citizen, not as an official representative of his administration. The young president was afraid to associate himself too closely with Carter, Creekmore wrote, citing two Clinton administration officials as his authority; “too close an identification9 with Carter would undercut the image of toughness in international affairs that he was trying to project.… [He] regarded Carter as a loser and did not want to appear to be close to him … out of his fear of being categorized as ‘another failed Southern governor.’” Gallucci had a very different view of the former president. “Carter is a man of strong views,” he said, “and he is also a man of real political calculation. The idea that he is a sort of neophyte in political terms and not up to the job is complete nonsense.”
While Carter hacked his way through the Washington thicket that day, the IAEA board of governors in Vienna voted to suspend technical aid to North Korea. The amount involved was modest, only $250,000, but the insult registered; three days later the North pointedly withdrew from membership in the international agency.
By then the Carters had arrived in Seoul. Creekmore was traveling with them. The thriving South Korean capital, in the west of the Korean peninsula just twenty-three miles southeast of the demilitarized zone that divided North from South, was in ferment. “With rumors of shortages10 floating widely,” Creekmore wrote, “constituents deluged members of the South Korean National Assembly with phone calls asking whether they should stockpile basic foodstuff. Most acted without advice, cramming into stores to buy quantities of dried noodles, rice, and candles. The Seoul stock market plunged 25 percent between June 13–15.”
“I know a lot of people,” Gallucci told me, “who said they didn’t believe we were close to war. I can tell you that the strike planning had been done. The decision to call up the reserves had been made, a limited call-up. I mean, we didn’t do any of it, but it was essentially the front end of a war plan that we were putting in place. The most provocative thing we were doing was starting NEO planning—non-combatant-evacuation operations, which means essentially that you evacuate the embassy and take the Americans out. And that’s really provocative, because then the North Koreans can see that you are getting ready to do something. Well, we were headed that way.” Some eighty thousand Americans lived among ten million Koreans in the crowded capital, within range of Nort
h Korean artillery. Evacuating them would be no easy task. Other foreign embassies in Seoul11 were also struggling with the question of when to evacuate their nationals.
The Carters crossed into North Korea at Panmunjom on Wednesday morning, 15 June, at about eleven a.m., walking past a crowd of media from the South to the North Korean side of the border. Carter found the experience eerie.
“The crossing at Panmunjom12 was a bizarre and disturbing experience,” he wrote in a report completed immediately after returning from Korea, “evidence of an incredible lack of communication and understanding. For more than forty years, the Koreans and Americans have stared across the demilitarized zone with total suspicion and often hatred and fear. We were the first persons permitted to cross the DMZ to and from Pyongyang—since the armistice was signed in 1953!”
Carter, an engineer by training, next noticed the party’s two-hour drive to Pyongyang “over an almost-empty13 four-lane highway” and in Pyongyang itself “a superb mass transit system … with an especially beautiful subway system more than three hundred feet underground.” The system’s depth, of course, had been determined by its dual purpose as a shelter against atomic bombing. Rosalynn Carter saw a “beautiful” countryside “with mostly rich-looking crops (some poor-looking corn), trees, rivers, and mountains,” and in Pyongyang “roses in full bloom, on bushes along the streets and trailing over fences along the sidewalks … stretches of hollyhocks … ginkgo trees and weeping willow.” Then the great bronze statue of Kim Il Sung loomed up, sixty-five feet high, reaching forth his hand.
The Twilight of the Bombs Page 26
