Read The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Online
Authors: Don Oberdorfer,Robert Carlin
Although Rumsfeld was certainly not happy with some of what he saw in ROK policies, there were broader problems he was trying to deal with in terms of US forces worldwide. As early as July 2001, in a brief note to his special assistant, Larry Di Rita, he had raised the problem of getting the “allies to do more—transfer responsibility i.e., Japan, Korea.” Rumsfeld also thought it was past time to reduce the US military “footprint” in Korea and move its forces’ Yongsan headquarters, which sat in the middle of the South Korean capital, farther south.
Reconfiguring the US-ROK alliance, making it more flexible and less expensive, required changes that ROK conservatives found difficult to comprehend or accept. It wasn’t until early 2007, after Rumsfeld had left office, that the allies announced that they had finally settled on April 2012 for OPCON transfer. When the new ROK administration of Lee Myung-bak took office in 2009, it wanted that date put off, and so in June 2010, citing recent examples of North Korean aggression, the allies selected a new date—December 2015.
At the same time it was reevaluating the military arrangements on the Korean peninsula and gathering its forces to attack Iraq in early 2003, the United States found itself faced with a growing nuclear problem. North Korea was rapidly restarting its nuclear program and beginning to reprocess those eight thousand irradiated fuel rods that contained approximately twenty-five kilograms of plutonium ideally suited to the production
of nuclear weapons. For Washington, the need to concentrate on the final diplomatic and military preparations for Iraq was all consuming, meaning it could not afford to have the situation on the Korean peninsula boil over. Moreover, despite the official position that the United States could fight two wars at the same time, military planners knew they could not do much more than “hold” the North if fighting broke out on the peninsula while the US military was involved halfway around the world in Iraq.
Notwithstanding rumors that the Pentagon was working on plans for military action against the North, or public bluster from hard-liners seeming to support that option, a military solution in Korea was not widely seen in the administration as a viable course. The president himself was firmly convinced it was not the path he wanted to follow. The administration’s immediate concern was that the North might take advantage of US military involvement in the Middle East, provoking a military confrontation to test the American commitment to South Korea. To forestall such a contingency, Washington relied on an escalating series of high-level public warnings backed up by well-publicized movement of potent military equipment, primarily aircraft, to the Pacific. If deterrence failed, the Pentagon hoped at least to have additional forces in position to use against a DPRK foray.
Although the Americans had no plans to take military action in Korea, the North Koreans may not have been so sure. Taking note of US statements and reinforcements, Pyongyang responded in an unusual, and to the US military completely unexpected, fashion. On the morning of March 2, 2003, in an audacious gambit, four North Korean Air Force MiG fighters intercepted a US RC-135S reconnaissance aircraft over the Sea of Japan. North Korean pilots usually stayed close to land; for a formation of fighters to fly some 150 miles over the ocean was extraordinary. This surprise move could not have been the result of a sudden scrambling of aircraft in response to that particular US reconnaissance flight on that particular day, either. Rather, it had to have come about after planning and preparation. Aircraft had to be transferred from airbases elsewhere in the country to be in position to launch the operation. Though the preparations went undetected, there had been indications in the preceding weeks that something might be coming. Beginning in late February, North Korean public complaints about US military activity in the Pacific and around Korea began singling out RC-135S flights.
The North Korean fighters flew close to the unarmed US reconnaissance plane, but did nothing reckless. Reportedly, one of the pilots asked for permission from his central authorities to fire, but whether this was bravado or a serious step, permission was denied. After twenty hair-raising minutes, the US aircraft turned back to its base on Okinawa. For the North Koreans, simply putting its fighters up and out to meet the American plane was
enough of a gesture, a warning to Washington to keep back. Although the military leadership was doubtless pleased to declare the mission a success to Kim Jong Il, Pyongyang did not publicly crow over the episode. No mention of it appeared in North Korean media for more than a week, and then it was buried in a longer article in the party daily arguing that the “incident” would “never have taken place” if the Americans had not ratcheted up tensions in the area.
The episode at the beginning of March with the MiGs occurred as developments at Yongbyon were moving into a critical phase. On January 10, the North had announced that its final withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty would be effective the following day, on the grounds that there had been only twenty-four hours left on the clock when its initial thirty-day withdrawal notification had been “suspended” in June 1993.
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At the end of January, American media reported that US satellites spotted trucks apparently moving the thousands of spent fuel rods from the cooling pond, where they had been stored and monitored since 1994 by the IAEA, across the river to the reprocessing plant a few kilometers away. There was some debate in the US intelligence community about whether those trucks were actually moving the fuel rods or, indeed, whether the rods had been moved at all. Only later did it become clear that the rods had, in fact, been transported to the reprocessing plant, probably sometime in January. The North Koreans subsequently told a visiting American delegation that they had reprocessed all of the spent fuel in one continuous campaign, starting in January and finishing by the end of June 2003.
Early in 2003, a North Korean official quietly told a foreign contact that the people who had all along wanted the country to develop nuclear weapons had moved into a position of influence on the policy, and they would not stop until they had succeeded. On March 12, the North Korean UN Mission passed a message to former US ambassador Donald Gregg, who had remained in contact with the North over the years. The message was that in the face of what Pyongyang saw as a growing, almost imminent, threat from the United States, if Washington failed to do something very soon to start a direct bilateral dialogue, the North would take a number of steps, including launching a multistage missile and accelerating the pace of reprocessing—which, according to the North Korean message, “had already started.”
Coming in the middle of concerted efforts to restart their nuclear program, it seems unlikely that Pyongyang was offering to step back. The
North may have calculated, however, that the message would encourage the United States to explore the possibility of resuming talks, to reduce a potential threat in Korea in order to concentrate on Iraq. If so, Pyongyang totally misjudged the Bush administration’s single-minded opposition to bilateral talks, or even, at that point, to pursuing serious diplomacy with the North at all.
The multilateral diplomacy that was to be the focus of so much attention over the next several years, and would ultimately prove to be a dead end, began in March 2003. At that point, the Chinese became increasingly worried by what they saw and heard from Washington, namely, warnings that if Beijing did not rein in the North Koreans, the United States would form of “coalition of the willing” to do so—a phrase implying that the United States might solicit similar international support for action against the DPRK as it had for its unfolding invasion of Iraq. Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice says in her memoirs that this was deliberate theater on the part of the White House to scare the Chinese into action. If so, it only partly succeeded. The US warnings did not push the Chinese into applying pressure on Pyongyang, but they did help feed a debate in Beijing about the dangers of the North’s nuclear program—not in terms of the physical threat but rather the action-reaction cycle it could set off, leading to instability in the region and threatening the core Chinese interest in its own economic development.
In an effort to keep the situation within bounds, the Chinese eventually chose a backdoor solution. After highly contentious talks between Kim Jong Il and senior Chinese diplomat Qian Qichen (the same PRC official who had tried to soothe the North’s anger after Beijing’s decision to recognize the ROK in 1992), the Chinese squeezed out of Pyongyang an agreement to trilateral—US-China-DPRK—talks. They intended for these to evolve quickly into a US-DPRK bilateral meeting, the only outcome with which they could convince the North Koreans to attend talks at that point. Washington, however, refused to play along. The Americans said they would attend only one such meeting, and on this they held firm; the single three-way meeting, convened in Beijing on April 24–25, accomplished nothing.
The meeting did give the chief North Korean delegate, Ri Gun, a chance to make ambiguous and ominous remarks in a side conversation to Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly. Kelly and Ri had sat next to each other during dinner, conversing in English. As dinner ended, Ri called his interpreter over and began a presentation to Kelly in Korean. The North had warned the United States that it had nuclear weapons in
1994, Ri claimed, and asked rhetorically, why hadn’t Washington taken it seriously?
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Ri went on to warn that the North might have to “demonstrate” its capability and might “transfer” nuclear material, though to whom Ri did not specify.
Ri’s remarks—leaked to the American press virtually as soon as Kelly’s reporting cable reached Washington—were widely seen as a threat by the North to proliferate its nuclear technology or weapons and move on to conducting a nuclear test. President Bush called it “blackmail.” But given that the presentation was just weeks after pictures of Saddam Hussein’s statue being toppled in Baghdad, with an accompanying sense internationally that the American military was unstoppable and the American president a master of strategy, Ri’s presentation was probably meant less a serious threat than as an effort by the smaller, weaker country to brush back the Americans along lines similar to the MiG intercept of the US reconnaissance aircraft a month earlier. It also fit with an apparent North Korean decision, in the middle of the spent fuel reprocessing campaign at Yongbyon, to speak more openly about its nuclear weapons program. In early April, for the first time, Pyongyang spoke of the need for “a physical deterrent force, tremendous military deterrent force,” to protect the country.
Although the North did not publicize Ri Gun’s remarks, in May it responded to the charge that it was engaged in “blackmail,” arguing that it had merely “clarified” its stance in the Beijing talks and that its position constituted “neither a threat nor blackmail but a legitimate self-defensive measure.” Within a few months, Pyongyang edged back from the position Ri had conveyed to Kelly. It went on the record several times emphatically denying it would transfer nuclear material. It also, on June 9, announced it would build a “nuclear deterrent” unless it saw significant change in US policy. That position cut both ways. It implicitly denied Ri Gun’s assertion to Kelly that the North already had the bomb, but it also went another rung up the ladder to state clearly in public that Pyongyang had a nuclear weapons program.
Regardless of the North’s official posture, however, the dinner episode helped establish for Ri Gun a reputation with some Americans as tough and irascible, an image that probably did him no harm in Pyongyang after his several years mixing with the enemy while stationed in New York at the DPRK’s UN Mission.
With three-party talks at a dead end from the moment they began, the United States resurrected a proposal for a larger multiparty meeting, something Tokyo had also been pushing for some time. The Japanese had
wanted to include a reference to multiparty talks in the September 2002 Pyongyang declaration when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi met Kim Jong Il, but at that point the North Koreans said they were not ready.
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Six-party talks convened in Beijing in August 2003 and staggered through their first two years. They would probably have died but for Chinese persistence in producing “chairman’s statements” at the end of each session declaring that there had been agreement over what, on closer examination, was essentially meaningless rhetoric. It was fiction, but it worked. The chairman’s statements painted a picture of at least minimum consensus, enough to keep the talks alive.
At this point, one of Washington’s strongest beliefs was that six-party talks would, through the sheer arithmetic of the setting (optimistically assumed to be five against one), apply new and effective pressure on Pyongyang. Furthermore, it was argued, these talks would result in agreements more difficult for the North to break precisely because they were multilateral. Finally, and this notion gained adherents over time, the talks were seen as a way to get the Chinese “invested” in the process and encourage them to put effective pressure on the North Koreans, leverage that the United States was thought to lack.
The prospect of Chinese pressure on the North was an enticing but ever-fading goal. In late-October 2002, not long after the Kelly mission to Pyongyang, President Bush met PRC president Jiang Zemin at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. The Americans were pleased that the Chinese leader publicly expressed support for the goal of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, but privately, according to Bush, Jiang said that North Korea was not his problem. Jiang may have been worried at that point that the United States was preparing to take action against the North and hoped to calm the situation. Nevertheless, as much as Beijing was annoyed with Pyongyang—which it frequently was, and which it continues to be—the Chinese certainly had no interest then or later in putting sustained pressure on the North. As far as Beijing was concerned, the North Korean issue was something to be managed so that it did not interfere with a number of other higher-priority Chinese concerns. The best crisis management, in the Chinese view, was crisis avoidance.