Korean Peninsula. Gleysteen succeeded in thwarting Carter’s proposal by arguing that it would only raise a sense of anxiety, anger, and betrayal in South Korea. With the memory of the United States’ unilateral pullout from South Vietnam and the consequent demise of Nguyen Van Thieu’s government, Park could interpret Carter’s initiative as the beginning of the application of the “Vietnamese solution” to the inter-Korea situation.85
The historic meeting between Carter and Park took place on June 30, 1979, a day after Carter spent the first night of his visit in Camp Casey with American soldiers. The summit was the first held since U.S. military aid in the form of grants ended in 1976. Park began the summit meeting with a lengthy lecture on the North Korean military threat, which ended with a strong rebuke of Carter’s troop withdrawal policy. As recollected by a South Korean official, Carter was in a fury. Rather than pledging a freeze in the troop withdrawal plan, Carter demanded an increase in South Korea’s defense expenditures and a significant improvement in its human rights conditions in return for retracting his idea of holding the trilateral peace talks. Park’s reply was terse, pledging to accommodate Carter’s human rights request by lifting Emergencey Decree no. 9, but in the eyes of all the participants, the summit was a disaster. There was a heated discussion among the Americans about the issue of troop withdrawal in Carter’s limousine ride to the U.S. ambassador’s residence, with Gleysteen, Vance, and secretary of defense Harold Brown all siding against any further troop withdrawal.86 Carter yielded, enabling Gleysteen to hold a meeting with Park’s chief of staff Kim Kye-wôn, at which the South Koreans pledged to increase military expenditure to up to 6 percent of gross domestic product and to make a significant move on human rights,87 in return for Carter’s promise to accommodate Park’s demand for the continued stationing of the U.S. Second Infantry Division and the maintenance of the CFC.88 Park released a total of 180 political prisoners after Carter’s departure. In Washington, Brzezinski announced a de facto freeze on any troop withdrawals until 1981.
Human rights disputes in the 1970s seriously strained U.S.–South Korean relations. The dispute, however, could have been restrained, had there not developed simultaneously the United States’ congressional investigations of Koreagate and Carter’s policy of troop withdrawal. As Brzezinski once recalled, the problem for Carter was that it was exceptionally difficult to apply the general principle of human rights to the particular case of South Korea, where security interests were at stake.89 The United States could not put pressure on Park for human rights progress to the point of
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endangering bilateral relations, because it had vital strategic interests in South Korea.
More important, however, the security alliance survived without serious damage in the long run. The turnaround in relations came in the late 1970s as abruptly as the crisis had arrived in the mid-1970s. The way both changes occurred demonstrates that the simultaneous development of the human rights, Koreagate, and troop withdrawal disputes was brought about as much by domestic political changes in the two allies as by the transition to détente in regional power politics and Nixon’s Guam Doctrine. The domestic political consequences of the Vietnam debacle constituted a core intermediating variable in bringing the two unequal allies into a direct political collision. The way their domestic politics (mal)adjusted to the fluid international environment aggravated the disputes. Park’s sense of military insecurity led him to launch the yushin regime, which in turn sowed the seeds for a human rights dispute, and even Koreagate, by making Park believe that he had power not only to silence the opposition but also clandestinely to buy influence in the U.S. Congress. In a similar way, the Carter administration reacted to the Vietnam debacle with a military disengagement from Asia, which translated into the withdrawal of ground forces from South Korea. The legacy of Watergate, which helped “outsider” Carter win the 1976 presidential election with a highly moralistic political agenda on human rights and public ethics, was also part of the picture. These forces of moralism found their target in Park’s yushin regime.
Carter’s South Korea policy was initially driven by his personal conviction. What tamed it was not Park’s political protests, but the U.S. Congress’s intervention. Even more crucial than this process of interbranch checks and balances in torpedoing Carter’s troop withdrawal policy was the resistance from the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and senior officials of the State Department. The opposition to troop withdrawal built up early within the Carter administration, providing advocates of a strong U.S.–South Korean alliance in the U.S. Congress with an opportunity to freeze Carter’s troop withdrawal policy and bring about the anticlimactic eclipse of both the human rights and the Koreagate disputes. Making a concerted effort to reevaluate North Korean security threats with new intelligence, the defense community proved to be effective in overturning Carter’s South Korea policy by 1979.
In the end, the primacy of security interests prevailed and the commitment to the existing alliance was renewed. The change in Carter’s position was nowhere more evident than in the 1979 Carter Doctrine, which called
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for a new cold war to contain communist threats after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.90 Carter’s freeze on troop withdrawal from South Korea in 1979 was an integral part of his strategic rethinking at the global level. Just as the Vietnam debacle triggered the policy of troop withdrawal in the early and mid-1970s, it was the Afghan war that encouraged an about-face in U.S. policy toward South Korea on issues previously deemed of highest importance. In his last year as president, Carter abandoned his zeal for human rights issues. Instead, he focused on the strategic value of the U.S.–South Korean alliance.
However, it is important to emphasize that despite the eventual defeat of Carter’s South Korea policy, the four years of Carter’s presidency irreparably damaged the yushin regime. The prolonged dispute on human rights, military withdrawal, and Koreagate not only discredited Park in South Korean domestic politics, thus energizing the opposition political parties and chaeya movements (see Chapter 13), but, more important, fractured Park’s inner circle into hard-liners and soft-liners on the issues of whether the yushin regime could survive domestic political turmoil and how it should deal with the United States. It was this divide within the political elite that eventually led to the assassination of Park by KCIA director Kim Chae-gyu on a chilly night in October 1979.
c h a p t e r
s e v e n t e e n
The Search for Deterrence:
Park’s Nuclear Option
Sung Gul Hong
When it comes to issuesinvolvingnuclearweaponsontheKorean Peninsula, North Korea, not the South, comes to most people’s minds. But in the early 1970s, it was the South that became embroiled in conflict with the United States over the issue of nuclear sovereignty. In November 1971, a year before promulgating his yushin regime, Park Chung Hee asked O Wôn-ch’ôl, then a newly appointed member of the Blue House senior staff and in charge of developing defense-related heavy and chemical industries: “Our national security is vulnerable because of the uncertainty surrounding continued U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula. To become secure and independent, we need to free ourselves from dependence on U.S. military protection . . . Can we develop nuclear weapons?”1 This was not a question. Park was instructing O Wôn-ch’ôl to draw up concrete plans.
Park sought or pretended to seek the “super weapon” to maximize South Korean security. Frustrated by the unilateral U.S. policy of military disengagement after the adoption of Richard M. Nixon’s 1969 Guam Doctrine, Park had his Agency for Defense Development (ADD) begin research and development on nuclear weapons design, delivery systems, and explosion technologies. To assist the ADD, the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) also made efforts to import nuclear reprocessing and fuel fabrication technologies and facilities from France and Belgium. Because reprocessing the spent fuel could produce weapons
-grade pluto-
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nium, KAERI’s attempt to purchase French technology was viewed by the United States as driven primarily by military goals, although KAERI justified its efforts as a search for alternative forms of energy. To alarm the United States even more, South Korea also imported a Canadian heavy-water reactor, CANDU, departing sharply from its past practice of purchasing U.S.-made light-water reactors. Although Park never publicly admitted his commitment to developing nuclear weapons, it was becoming increasingly clear that he was interested in acquiring a nuclear bomb similar to the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. Yet eventually, under strong U.S. pressure, both multilaterally and bilaterally, Park’s efforts didn’t materialize.
Few countries seriously consider the option of going nuclear even when hard pressed by external security threats. But even fewer countries give up nuclear programs once they have committed themselves to the project.
Why did Park launch his nuclear initiative in the first place, and why did he retreat when the United States put pressure on him? How did the conflict with the United States over nuclear issues influence what was already becoming a troubled alliance? What was at stake for Park and his American counterparts in the nuclear conflict?
Four general points can be made on the nature of U.S.–South Korean relations. First, the nuclear conflict shows not only the weakness but also the strength of the bilateral relationship. Park toyed with the nuclear option in the early 1970s, when the alliance entered one of its most rocky periods since the end of the Korean War. Fear bred mistrust and vice versa, trapping the allies in a spiral of conflict across a variety of issues. Clashes were contagious, making each of the allies pressure the other by mobilizing resources in unrelated areas, only to produce new frontiers of conflict. The original seed for the alliance crisis was Nixon’s unilateral decision to withdraw the Seventh Infantry Division in 1971 to win the support of U.S. voters. Fearful of the United States’ abandonment of South Korea, Park pursued the nuclear option, which only made the United States hostile. In addition, Park hired Pak Tong-sôn to try to fight U.S. unilateralism by purchasing support in Congress through illegal lobbying. He also clamped down on his domestic opposition under the pretext of a national security crisis. These countermeasures, however, boomeranged into the Koreagate scandal and conflict over human rights in South Korea, controversies that greatly weakened U.S. support for Park and his regime. At the same time, given their geopolitical interest in avoiding a total collapse of the alliance, both South Korea and the United States tried to stop, if not reverse, the deterioration of their relationship. Conflict spread and worsened, but there existed a safety net that kept the alliance from collapsing.
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Second, among the bilateral conflicts of the 1970s, the nuclear conflict was unique in the sense that the outcome was a clear U.S. “victory.” Even in extremely asymmetric relationships such as the one between the United States and South Korea, the weaker party usually has some leverage, because the stronger member to some extent depends on the weaker one to realize its goals. It was through these U.S. interests that South Korea protected itself from the worst of U.S. unilateralism. The United States refrained from escalating conflict with South Korea, lest its client state became threatened with instability. Consequently, Koreagate ended as an anticlimax, with Pak Tong-sôn free from U.S. prosecution. The human rights disputes heated up, but they did not lead to any sustained U.S. intervention. Even Carter’s plan to withdraw all U.S. ground troops from the Korean Peninsula by 1981 was rescinded in 1978. In each of these bilateral confrontations, South Korea succeeded in holding its ground until the United States reversed its policy, not because South Korea had the power to stop the United States, but because the strategic importance of the Korean Peninsula to the superpower made it reluctant to fully flex its muscles (see Chapter 16). But where the nuclear issue was concerned, the United States resorted to every possible means to stop Park. Compromise was unthinkable, because what was at stake was the stability of the postwar U.S.-
led regional and global regime of nuclear nonproliferation. Park did try to bargain throughout the 1970s, arguing that he was seeking nuclear technology strictly for economic purposes. When the United States came back harder against him, he zigzagged, clandestinely pursuing nuclear programs, only to engage in risky diplomatic dialogues with U.S. officials under intense pressure. In the end, he realized that there could be no negotiation on the nuclear issue.
Third, the nuclear conflict demonstrates that it was military issues that decisively shaped Park’s political relationship with the United States. Both good times and bad times in the alliance relations were primarily the result of military issues. When the United States increased its military presence in East Asia to fight the Vietnam War during the mid-1960s, Park’s relationship with the U.S. political leadership improved significantly because of the value South Korea had as an ally that was willing to send combat troops to South Vietnam with the goal of assisting U.S. war efforts and sharing the burden of “collective security.” When the United States began military disengagement from South Vietnam in the early 1970s, Park lost the leverage he had had on U.S. policy toward South Korea. On the contrary, he found himself desperately pleading with the United States not to include South Korea among the countries targeted for military disengagement. When the pleading failed to reverse the U.S. decision, Park resorted
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to a wide range of countermeasures. The speed and scope with which the bilateral political relationship either improved or deteriorated with a change in U.S. security policy were remarkable. Moreover, once the United States decided on a new course of policy on the basis of its altered regional and global security calculations, South Korea could only negotiate the terms of the change, not the direction of the change. It is difficult to find any other bilateral relationship in which both conventional and nonconventional nuclear military issues dominated general political relations to the extent that they did in U.S.–South Korean relations.
Fourth, despite the unique character of nuclear issues, the conflict over Park’s nuclear development program once again demonstrates that commercial interests were always closely intertwined with military and security issues in the two countries’ relations. Initially, Park thought he could outmaneuver the United States by contracting with French and Canadian suppliers for nuclear technology and equipment. To a certain extent, his strategy worked, luring these suppliers to act as a protective shield for his plans. At the same time, once the alternative suppliers showed an interest in the sale of nuclear reactors and propellant facilities, commercial interests became another reason for the United States to press hard on South Korea and France to cancel their commercial deals. The sale of French nuclear technology could mean that the growing South Korean market for nuclear energy would become dominated by French suppliers.
With these general features of United States–South Korean security relations outlined, we turn to a more in-depth analysis of Park’s motives in toying with the nuclear option, the channels and processes of U.S. intervention against Park’s nuclear initiative, and the factors that enabled the United States to successfully stop the program.
From Research to Weapons Development
South Korea began its nuclear research in 1956, three years after it signed a mutual defense treaty with the United States. The program was strictly one of research aimed at the peaceful use of atomic energy.2 As part of an effort to secure the blessing of the United States, South Korea joined the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which put South Korea’s infant research program under international surveillance in 1957. In 1964, South Korea ratified the Partial Test Ban Treaty. In 1968 it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), although the actual ratification was postponed because of North Korea’s delay in becoming an NPT member-state. The United States did not press South Korea to ratify the NPT imme-
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rrence 487
diately, because it thought that IAEA inspection and regulations were sufficient to restrict South Korean nuclear activities to peaceful research. Besides, the South Korean nuclear program was then assisted by the United States, giving its officials ample opportunity to control what the South Koreans were doing.
Parallel to these efforts to launch a research program was the need to construct an institutional base. In March 1956, Rhee established a nuclear energy section within the Ministry of Education to conduct basic research on nuclear energy. The Atomic Energy Law was promulgated in 1958, and the Office of Atomic Energy (OAE) was established directly under the president to coordinate the research, development, and use of peaceful atomic energy. The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute was launched in 1959 as an affiliate of the OAE, resulting in the assemblage of the General Dynamics–designed Triga Mark-II (250kw) research reactor three years later with U.S. assistance.
What started out as an energy research and development program, however, came to acquire a military dimension when the security environment swiftly deteriorated in the late 1960s. Park began to question the seriousness of the U.S. security commitment to South Korea when Nixon followed up on his 1969 Guam Doctrine with the removal of some 20,000
U.S. ground troops from South Korea, the pursuit of détente with China, and an exit from the Vietnam War. Park was shocked to think that the United States was abandoning its East Asian allies because of domestic political pressure. The shock was especially great because Park thought he had taken a significant domestic political risk for his U.S. ally in the 1960s when he dispatched combat troops to South Vietnam. When the two allies began to negotiate the terms of U.S. military disengagement, Park reportedly asked the journalists gathered at the Blue House: “The pressing question for South Korea is how long can we trust the United States.”3 He began to emphasize the principle of “self-defense” (chawi) and then “self-determination” (chaju), with an eye to reducing dependence on what he thought was an unreliable superpower ally.4
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