North Korea: Prequel Stark, Sequel Still Dark

For the past year or so, Asia-Pacific chancelleries have been turning to a book central to analysis of one of the new century’s most disturbing geopolitical developments—North Korea’s acquisition of a thermonuclear weapon and the ability to hurl it at the United States. I refer to Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis (2004). The book’s three authors were at the centre of events in Washington when, in 1993, Pyongyang abruptly announced its intention to become the first nation to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Joel S. Wit had long served on the State Department’s North Korean desk; Daniel B. Poneman was for nearly four years President Bill Clinton’s special assistant for non-proliferation; Robert L. Gallucci had led the team that negotiated the 1994 US–North Korea Agreed Framework.

Don Oberdorfer, a former Washington Post correspondent in Tokyo who wrote his own workmanlike account of the North Korean nuclear program, The Two Koreas, graciously noted Going Critical’s superiority as a record of this highly dangerous time. Oberdorfer covered the complex topic in sixty-three pages. Wit, Poneman and Gallucci devoted 408 pages to these developments and included a good deal of inside information that was previously unavailable.

In late 1993 US intelligence had discovered that Pyongyang was breaking solemn promises on plutonium production. By US estimates, North Korea would soon be capable of building about three Nagasaki-sized nuclear weapons annually. When confronted with their subterfuge, Pyongyang pulled out of the world’s non-proliferation agreements. The possibility of a renewed Korean War loomed large.

The Washington term for a pre-emptive strike against North Korea (or Iran) is the “Osirak Option”. This refers to the Israeli Air Force’s destruction of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons laboratories at Osirak in 1981. At a crisis breakfast meeting at the White House on June 14, 1994, the name of this obscure place near Baghdad was on everyone’s lips.

Two former senior officials in the previous (Republican) administration—national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and under-secretary of state Arnold Kanter—were about to publish in the Washington Post a demand that the US destroy the nuclear processing plant at Yongbyon, North Korea. “The stakes could hardly be higher,” said the article. “The time for temporising is over,” it said.

The White House meeting’s consensus was that if the US launched a strike, a violent North Korean reaction was possible, even likely. As General Gary Luck, US forces commander in South Korea, bluntly put it: “If we pull an Osirak, they will come south.” If Pyongyang opted for a full-scale attack across the demilitarised zone (DMZ) dividing the two Koreas, thousands of North Korean artillery tubes arrayed just forty kilometres north of Seoul would be heard from first.

Seoul accounts for a quarter of South Korea’s population and almost half its economic output. US officials feared that a “spontaneous evacuation” of the South Korean capital would erupt, “throwing the South Korean government into a panic that would have greatly complicated allied military planning”. North Korean special forces would add to the turmoil—scattered attacks throughout South Korea by 65,000 or so (today an estimated 110,000) commandos trained for long-range penetration. South Korean and US units would try to withstand the North Korean push for up to fifteen days, allowing time for reinforcements to arrive.

The US counter-offensive plan in 1994 would have sent into action, over several months, 400,000 troops along with carrier battle groups, fighter squadrons and marine amphibious units. Later plans, which evolved from 1998 on, call for 690,000 troops and a more aggressive invasion. Instead of simply pushing back across the DMZ, the allies would mount a full-scale assault on Pyongyang. In a report fed to the press—undoubtedly for Pyongyang’s consumption—a Marine Corps general was quoted as saying: “When we’re done, they will not be able to mount any military activity of any kind. We will kill them all.” The revised plan’s goal, the report noted, is to “abolish North Korea as a functioning state, end the rule of its leader, Kim Jong-Il, and reorganise the country under South Korean control”. The battlefield would be far more lethal than that of the first Korean War (1950 to 1953): Pentagon estimates in 1994 assumed that another war would kill at least one million civilians. It would cost more than $60 billion (we may triple that for today’s dollar equivalent), devastate the South Korean economy, cause an Asian (and thus, of course, Australian) recession and adversely affect the entire world economy.

Asked by Mr Clinton whether the US would win the war, General Luck turned the estimate into an incantation: “Yes, but at the cost of a million and a trillion.” On June 6, 1994, senior US officials once again met to discuss moving troops to South Korea and to deliberate further on the “Osirak Option”. In South Korea, rising tension matched the mood in Washington. A US diplomat recalls that “on a scale of one to ten with ten closest to panic, the situation in Seoul was a six—and moving rapidly in the wrong direction”.

Almost by chance, the crisis was averted. Former US President Jimmy Carter, who was in Pyongyang on a private visit, discussed the nuclear stand-off with Great Leader Kim Il-Sung. The Great Leader told Mr Carter that he was willing to continue international monitoring in exchange for new reactors much less suitable for nuclear weapons production. Telephoned by the ex-president to the White House, the news defused the 1994 crisis.

Since then, the risk of a US–North Korea confrontation involving the nuclear weapons issue has become a headlines staple. A series of US leaders informs the world that “all options”—by implication military attack on the North—“are on the table”. Recently, Washington began labelling this policy “strategic patience”.

Going Critical’s authors ask, “How close did we come to war in 1994?” Their answer: “It does seem clear that, but for the Carter mission, the two sides would have been launched into a collision course driven by Pyongyang’s nuclear outlawry and the American determination to stop it, by force of arms if necessary.”

Both parties then signed the 1994 Agreed Frame­work. Shepherded into existence largely by US Ambassador Robert Gallucci, the Going Critical co-author, its central point was the provision to North Korea by the US of two light-water nuclear reactors to do away with weaponising reactors.

To say the least, over the next few years, neither side was faithful to the agreement. The light-water reactors were never built. The US-led consortium that was supposed to build them was in severe debt. Hawkish Republican congressmen charged the Clinton administration with rewarding North Korea’s aggressive behaviour and rejected funding. The US also failed to meet deadlines for another provision in the agreement: supply to the North of 500,000 tons annually of heavy fuel oil to compensate for the energy to be lost from reactors that it was abandoning.

North Korea also failed to comply. US intelligence agencies discovered that in 1998 the North’s centrifuge program was pursuing technology for a uranium enrichment program capable of producing material for nuclear weapons. John Bolton, under-secretary of state for arms control and international security under President George W. Bush, later wrote that “this was the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework”.

Published in 2004, Going Critical was the prequel. Fourteen years later the Koreas’ travail, outlined by the book, is still with us. The world deals with a stark sequel. A military solution seems as distant as ever. The US Congressional Research Service, which prepares papers covering issues for Washington’s policy-makers, identifies seven possible options, with their implications and attendant risks, for handling the unfolding sequel:

1. maintaining the military status quo;
2. enhanced containment and deterrence;
3. denying North Korean acquisition of delivery systems capable of threatening the United States;
4. eliminating ICBM facilities and launch pads;
5. eliminating North Korean nuclear facilities;
6. North Korean regime change; and
7. withdrawing US military forces.

There seems little point in detailing these, since 1 to 5 each implies a conclusion pointing to the prequel’s melancholy reminder: “a million; trillions”. Option 7 seems most unlikely until 6 occurs. And the prospects for regime change seem as unknowable as ever.

So, what is to be done? Short of some all-but-miraculous intervention—a coup in Pyongyang possibly instigated by China? a strike by some still-secret non-nuclear US weapon?—there is no recourse other than continuing diplomatic talks.

US policy seems thus to be drifting into a period of what may be dubbed “strategic ambiguity”—that is, strategic patience at risk of becoming impatience and a consequent enhanced threat of military action. The tense sequel that we are currently experiencing may inherit its own now-clichéd Cold War chant, one said to have come from Winston Churchill at a White House luncheon in 1954: “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”