Park’s pursuit of the acquisition of reprocessing technology continued unabated till December 1975, when Sneider and Habib threatened Park with a dramatic change of the entire political, economic, and security relationship if South Korea did not stop its reprocessing program. This threat worked, and Park gave up his reprocessing program.
At the same time, Park thought he did gain a U.S. concession. Although the United States did not plan to remove its nuclear umbrella, Park thought this was a real possibility. Consequently, as Mitchell Reiss has explained,
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South Korea was “sending the simple message to Washington that the price of South Korea’s nuclear abstention was the retention of the American military presence in the country.”63 The distrust of U.S. military commitment continued, but through the nuclear conflict, Park came to be assured of at least the continued provision of the U.S. nuclear shield.
Park’s Nuclear and Missile Programs after 1976
A group of U.S. officials visited Seoul on January 22, 1976, to discuss the cancellation of the French reprocessing deal. In return, the United States pledged its continued assistance to South Korea’s nuclear development for the peaceful use of atomic energy. However, this was to be only a temporary halt in South Korea’s nuclear weapons program. As Pak K¤n-hye recalled, Park put the nuclear weapons program on hold when President Gerald R. Ford reconfirmed the U.S. security commitment to South Korea.64 When Ford’s successor, Jimmy Carter, aggressively pushed for the withdrawal of all U.S. ground troops from South Korea, Park renewed the nuclear weapons program.
The situation, however, had greatly changed since Park had initiated the nuclear program in early 1972. The situation in 1976 did not permit nuclear weapons development, because the IAEA safeguards had been strengthened and the NPT ratified during the 1974–1976 nuclear dispute.
Moreover, U.S. surveillance of South Korean nuclear activities had become much tougher and tighter through the U.S. provision of nuclear training, technology, and facilities for the peaceful use of atomic energy during the mid-1970s. Under these circumstances, it was not possible for South Korea to reprocess the spent fuel from light-water reactors as well as heavy-water reactors. The only way to continue the nuclear weapons program was to accumulate nuclear technologies indirectly to become a potential nuclear developer after the model of Japan.65 Instead of directly owning nuclear weapons, O Wôn-ch’ôl argued, South Korea needed to have the technology and the capability to develop the nuclear bomb whenever necessary, like Japan and Western European countries.66
KAERI’s nuclear reprocessing program was renamed the Chemical Fuel Replacement Project. When Carter was elected president in 1976, Park ordered O Wôn-ch’ôl to pursue a full-scale development of the South Korean nuclear industry as quietly as possible.67 In December 1976, the Korea Nuclear Fuel Development Institute (KNFDI) was established in Taedôk to head the Chemical Fuel Replacement Project. The KNFDI’s mission was to develop South Korean capabilities for nuclear fuel fabrication. At the same time, the KNFDI strove to acquire plutonium by reprocessing the spent
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fuel. In Park’s eyes, his 1976 agreement with the United States concerned only the cancellation of the French reprocessing deal, not a South Korean renunciation of its right to develop reprocessing technology through its own efforts. Because the technology learned and acquired through nonmilitary nuclear programs could turn into military technology, Park thought he could leave open the option of going nuclear, although he had agreed to live up to the NPT and cancelled the reprocessing deal with France.
Upon the establishment of the KNFDI in 1976, most members of the original special project team, including Vice Director Chu Chae-yang, were transferred from KAERI to KNFDI. Chu Chae-yang led the KNFDI as its president, making KNFDI more or less an expanded version of the KAERI special project team. By establishing KNFDI, South Korea wanted to acquire reprocessing technology indirectly through learning civilian nuclear technologies and acquiring nonmilitary nuclear equipment and facilities. No longer able to rely on either French or Canadian support, South Korea decided to develop its own indigenous research reactor to acquire the spent fuel for the production of weapons-grade plutonium. Despite many technological difficulties, the KNFDI scientists and engineers were able to complete the construction of a nuclear fuel fabrication facility by October 1978. Another research team, led by Kim Tong-hun at KAERI, succeeded in producing a detailed design of a research reactor in 1979.
The United States kept a close watch on all of this. Robert Steller, a science attaché in the U.S. embassy in Seoul, better known locally as a CIA agent with special expertise in nuclear weapons, frequently visited KNFDI without giving prior notification of his visit.68 However, because KNFDI’s research project closely paralleled the development of South Korea’s civilian nuclear energy industry, the United States could not come up with convincing evidence of military intentions in order to stop KNDFI’s research activities.
It is wrong to dismiss Park’s nuclear ambition as a personal fixation.
Only a week after his presidential inauguration, Carter ordered the Defense Department to prepare a secret plan to remove all nuclear weapons from South Korea.69 Upon strong opposition from the U.S. military establishment, Carter was unable to remove all strategic nuclear weapons.
Such an action would have triggered the threat of nuclear proliferation.
The episode demonstrates not only that Park’s fear of abandonment was grounded on an objective situation of wavering U.S. security commitment, but also that Park’s previous play of the nuclear card succeeded in restraining the isolationist tendencies of U.S. foreign policy in the post–Vietnam War era. While KNFDI kept busy learning nonmilitary nuclear technologies, the ADD continued to develop missiles—albeit under close U.S. sur-
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veillance. In September 1978, South Korea successfully tested the surface-to-surface missile named Paekkom (White Bear) on the west coast of the Korean Peninsula. However, because South Korea had accepted the U.S.
demand to limit the missile range to 180 kilometers (112 miles) as a precondition of purchasing U.S. missile technology, the success came at the cost of tight military restrictions. Whereas the international Missile Technology Control Regime (MCTR) allowed the development of missiles with a range of 300 kilometers (187 miles) for military purposes, and up to 500
kilometers (311 miles) for research objectives, the bilateral U.S.–South Korean agreement allowed only for the development of missiles with the shorter range of 180 kilometers.
After Park’s death in 1979, the entire missile program was downsized.
With an eye to winning support for the new military regime inaugurated in 1980, Chun Doo-hwan put the ADD through a major organizational overhaul, dismissing over 800 ADD employees by 1982. As later argued by O Wôn-ch’ôl, Chun Doo-hwan’s organizational restructuring profoundly damaged South Korea’s capabilities for developing long-range missiles, while the North was to acquire the Taep’odong, with a striking range of over 6,000 kilometers (3,728 miles).70
The 1970s constituted the most trying period for U.S.–South Korean relations since the Korean War ended in 1953. A wide range of political issues, from U.S. troop withdrawal to the Koreagate scandal, seriously ham-pered the bilateral relationship. To compound the already fragile situation, Park challenged the United States where it was most sensitive: nuclear weapons development.71 For Park, however, the nuclear card ultimately entailed more costs than benefits. First, South Korea could not pursue the clandestine development of weapons indefinitely, given U.S. intelligence capabilities and South Korea’s military integration into the U.S. armed forces. Second, because of the hegemonic presence of the United States in South Korea’s economic, political, and military realms, Park had to accommodate U.S. pressure, once his nuclear weapons program was revealed. Third, the United States was not interested in exchanging Park’s nuclear card with a
U.S. concession on troop withdrawal, which Park wanted to prevent. At best, he secured U.S. financial and technological assistance, the acceptance of which entailed further restrictions on the South Korean nuclear program. Fourth, the accommodation of U.S. demands did not transform his political image in the United States to that of a reliable ally. On the contrary, that he had toyed with the nuclear card was enough to make him an unpredictable and even dangerous client who needed to be restrained in the eyes of U.S. policymakers.
p a r t
v
COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
c h a p t e r
e i g h t e e n
Nation Rebuilders: Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk, Lee Kuan Yew, Deng
Xiaoping, and Park Chung Hee
Ezra F. Vogel
Of the many outstanding national leaders in the twentieth century, only four who inherited countries in great turmoil modernized their nations by building new systems and initiating very rapid growth, causing transformations that continued after them: Atatürk in Turkey, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, Deng Xiaoping in mainland China, and Park Chung Hee in South Korea. Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong underwent great system changes and grew very swiftly, but in these societies the leverage to guide fundamental change came from powerful outsiders who controlled local developments: in Japan, from the Allied Occupation; in Hong Kong, from Great Britain’s colonial government; and in Taiwan, from the newly arrived Kuomintang army. No country where fundamental changes were introduced from within and that achieved sustained rapid growth did so without having a strong authoritarian leader who guided those changes.
Comparing these four leaders can highlight the common features of such transformative leadership in the twentieth century and clarify what features were unique to Park Chung Hee.1
After World War I, Atatürk took an ancient empire that was being dismembered, firmed up some of the remaining borders, and built new institutions to remake Turkey into a modern, Western-style and Western-oriented nation. He formed a provisional parliament in 1920 when he was thirty-nine, declared his nation independent in 1923, and continued to rule until his death in 1938.
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Lee Kuan Yew helped hasten the British withdrawal from Singapore and then became prime minister of self-governing Singapore in 1959 at the age of thirty-five. When Malaysia cast Singapore out and forced it to be independent in 1965, Prime Minister Lee struggled to establish a new nation, guarantee its security, and transform it into a clean, orderly, attractive, and prosperous city with a broad social security net for its citizens. Lee continued as prime minister until 1990, when he passed the torch to Goh Chok Tong.
Deng took the world’s most populous nation, devastated by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, with a system that was not working, and held it together while reorienting its basic direction through his policy of reform and opening. Under Deng’s leadership, China began its transition from a poor backward country to one of the world’s leading nations. He became the preeminent leader in 1978 at age seventy-three and even when he passed the chairmanship of the Chinese Communist Party to Jiang Zemin in 1989, Jiang continued to report to him through 1992.
Park Chung Hee took a poorly functioning chaotic democracy in a divided country, under acute threat from the North, and held it together.
With military-style discipline and determination, he set South Korea on a path to become one of the world’s leading middle-sized powers. Park was forty-three when he led the coup in 1961 and remained president until he was assassinated in 1979.
Background and Leadership Style
Atatürk, Lee, Deng, and Park all came from countries that had fallen far behind the industrialized West. The four men shared a deep patriotism, a passion to end the domination of Western powers they believed to be inim-ical to the interests of their people and to strengthen their country.
Turkey after World War I was a dispirited, defeated country in danger of being broken up by the Allied powers. Lee headed a tiny nation struggling to defend itself from communist insurgency without help from the outside.
Deng became top leader in China after it was torn apart by the ten years of the Cultural Revolution. Park became head of a divided country, still not recovered from its civil war, under threat from an aggressive North Korea.
These four leaders were convinced that given the conditions they faced, democratic structures and practices of advanced industrial Western societies could not hold their countries together, to say nothing of enabling their states to become powerful and prosperous.
All four men had been hardened by struggle and were comfortable with
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the hierarchy and discipline they knew in the conflicts they experienced before taking power. Atatürk and Park were professional soldiers, and Deng had spent twelve years in the army fighting first the Japanese and then the Kuomintang. Lee was not a soldier, but he had led his fellow Singaporeans in dangerous political struggles, first against the British and then against the communists fighting to take over his country. After these four leaders rose to power they did not hesitate to use the authoritarian systems they had known earlier to respond to the continuing threats they faced after taking power.
As much as they were repelled by the domination of their countries by the industrial powers, in their youth all four men had acquired a deep understanding of Western (in Park’s case, Japanese) imperialists and were ready to take advantage of what they had learned from them in order to modernize. They could separate the fight against imperial powers from the imperial powers’ knowledge and structures, which they were prepared to use in full measure.
The four had a sense of history, a keen understanding of the great powers and how those powers had affected weaker nations’ security and development. Western countries had built up their institutions and modernized over a longer period of time, but these late industrializers, by government-led borrowing of technology and institutions, could modernize at a far faster pace than the earlier industrializing nations. None of the four leaders was an economist or a businessman, but each was ready to seek advice from and work with people, including foreigners, who knew how to make the economy function and grow.
They were all skilled in maintaining power. Their long tenure in office meant that they could consolidate the building of new institutions and witness the economic takeoff that they had launched. Two of the four, Atatürk and Park, died in office, but their legacy and the institutions they had built survived their period of rule. The success of all four in bringing order and then economic progress gained them enough support that the public could tolerate and in some cases even welcome their authoritarian leadership.
The four faced the same fundamental questions: How could they gain and keep power against possible rivals? How could they overcome the opposition of those with traditional thinking and those who felt their interests were not served by rapid modernization? How could they work with their core supporters and their staff to provide coherent effective programs? How could they provide for their nation’s security and get the foreign cooperation they needed to help guarantee that security and gain assistance in achieving economic growth?
Because the details of Park’s background and rule are developed in ear-
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lier chapters, here I concentrate primarily on the other three leaders to highlight how Park’s background and approach differed.
Early Education: Local Roots
and Foreign Learning
Atatürk, born in 1881, grew up in Salonica, a city with a strong Islamic tradition that also had a large Jewish population. The port and, after 1888, the railway linked Salonica with Istanbul and European cities.
Atatürk’s family was well versed in the Koran and his mother saw that he had good training in the Islamic tradition, but his father, who died when Atatürk was eight, was a civil servant who wanted his son trained in modern affairs. New elit
e educational institutions had been introduced in the 1880s, and military institutions were given government support to import modern weapons and training needed to fight the advanced European countries. Germans helped provide the Turks with training, arms, and equipment. Atatürk attended a civil service preparatory school and then switched to a military preparatory school, followed by a military high school, where he was second in his class. He went on to the War College in Istanbul, where he graduated eighth in a class of seven hundred, and then to Staff College for its three-year course, completing his studies in 1902.
Though familiar with traditional Islamic culture, he, like many of his classmates, became convinced that this culture impeded Turkey’s adaptation to the modern world. He sought modern learning from Europe.
Atatürk’s thirteen years of military training, including the highest training Turkey had to offer, gave him an excellent grounding in math, in which he especially excelled, and in science and technology. He also studied literature and political history. He took the initiative to get enough extra training in French to become fluent, and then through French, to acquire a broader knowledge of Western civilization. He was attracted to Western ideas of positivism and rationality. He socialized with secular patriotic fellow students and had acquired a passion for politics by the age of sixteen, when, during the Turkish-Greek War of 1897, he joined in demonstrations against the Greeks.
Lee Kuan Yew, born in 1923, grew up in Singapore, a more British and Chinese city than the rest of Malaya. The majority of youths of Chinese ancestry in Singapore went to Chinese-dialect schools, but Lee was in the significant minority, generally from wealthier families, who went to English-language schools. Lee went briefly to Chinese schools, but, having spoken English at home, spent six years in an English-language primary
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