Just what is going on in those mysterious buildings along the riverbank in Yongbyon, North Korea? The hard-line communist regime in Pyongyang acknowledges the site houses a nuclear reactor, but insists its purposes are entirely “peaceful.” American and French satellite photos suggest something else. The plant isn’t hooked up to any electric power lines. And why would a peaceful complex include two facilities that can make plutonium for bombs-one already operational, plus a larger one still under construction? To intelligence analysts in the United States and South Korea, the answer is alarmingly obvious: North Korea is developing a nuclear bomb.
Just weeks after a war waged in part to prevent Iraq from developing into a nuclear menace, the world now faces the prospect of another radical state wielding weapons of mass destruction. The North Korean regime run by 79-year-old Kim Il Sung is, if anything, more impervious to outside suasion than the government of Saddam Hussein. With 1 million troops, the North Korean Army is the world’s fifth largest. North Korea has updated and improved the Soviet-designed Scud ballistic missile. Some South Korean officials believe these could be used to deliver nuclear devices, which the North could have by the mid-1990s, according to U.S. estimates. South Korean Defense Minister Lee Jong Ku set off a furor on April 12 by suggesting a commando raid might be necessary to take out the Yongbyon complex. Seoul disavowed the remark, which North Korea called “virtually a declaration of war.” But Lee’s “slip of the tongue” reflected concerns in both Seoul and Washington.
North Korea signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1985, but has never allowed full outside inspection of the Yongbyon facility. Instead, says the regime, the world should focus its attention on the South, where U.S. forces are believed to have hundreds of nuclear weapons. In early 1989, when a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demanded access to Yongbyon, the North Koreans allowed only one member in. He was not a scientist. He was allowed to go only at night, and just after he arrived, a power failure blacked out the plant. He saw nothing. “The more they dig their heels in, the more you think they really have something to hide,” says a Western diplomat in Seoul.
Kim Il Sung, who launched the Korean War in 1950 from behind the line dividing the communist North from the non-communist South, has never abandoned his dream of reunifying Korea under juche, his peculiar brand of “self-reliant” communism. The project to build A-bombs at Yongbyon is thought to have begun in earnest in the 1980s, when the North realized it would eventually lose its military edge over the rapidly modernizing South. The outcome of the gulf war, in which American equipment bested Soviet arms similar to those used by Kim’s forces, can only have underscored the North’s feelings of insecurity. “After the gulf, I don’t think any North Korean leaders believe they can win a war with their present weapons systems,” says Kim Chang Soon, a top South Korean expert on the North. “They are developing nuclear weapons not to win a war but to deter war or avoid losing one.”
Still, neither post-Saddam concerns in the West nor the ambitions of North Korea quite explain the furor that has suddenly developed over Pyongyang’s nuclear program–which has been widely known since the mid-’80s. The origin lies in the byzantine geopolitics of Northeast Asia. The United States, Japan, the Soviet Union and China are each pursuing some form of “cross-recognition” of the two Koreas. All aim to strengthen ties with the prosperous South without sacrificing ultimate access to the North, whose help would be needed in any reunification effort. The United States initiated its first diplomatic talks with North Korea in 1988; the main result has been the return of the remains of five U.S. soldiers listed as missing during the Korean War. Though the American commitment to Seoul is ironclad and the South’s own 650,000-man Army is formidable, the government of President Roh Tae Woo is ambivalent about Pentagon plans, announced last year, to withdraw 7,000 U.S. ground forces from South Korea.
Hence one South Korean interest in playing up the threat from the North: to prevent any outside actor from going too far in cozying up to Pyongyang. The South is especially worried about Korea’s former colonial oppressor, Japan. Seoul is quick to suspect Japan of subtly trying to shore up the North to make reunification, which some Japanese fear, more difficult. Last fall Japan appeared to be moving rather fast toward diplomatic recognition of Pyongyang, dangling the prospect of billions of dollars in aid. Washington sent an intelligence team to Tokyo with satellite photos of the suspicious reactor complex. The Japanese backtracked and told Pyongyang there would be no normalization without full IAEA inspection of its nuclear complex.
The Soviets, who covet South Korean aid and trade, have cheerfully helped Seoul call attention to the North Korean threat. Moscow has cut aid to North Korea and warned Pyongyang it will end further shipments of nuclear fuel and technology unless it agrees to international inspection of its nuclear facilities. Last week Mikhail Gorbachev paid the first visit ever by a top Soviet leader to the Korean peninsula; significantly, he went to the South, lured by a promise of broad new economic cooperation from President Roh Tae Woo. But because they have tilted so strongly toward Seoul, the Soviets may not have as much leverage on the North as they used to. Katsumi Sato, a leading Japanese expert on Korean affairs, says when Eduard Shevardnadze, who was then foreign minister, visited Pyongyang last September, North Korean Foreign Minister Kim Yong Nam told him the new Soviet ties with Seoul relieved Pyongyang of its obligation not to make nuclear weapons.
If North Korea will not respond to pressure, some argue, its neighbors might try another tack: to meet its demand for withdrawal of American nuclear weapons from the South. Now that Pyongyang has been partially abandoned by the Soviet Union, the theory goes, it is so desperate for economic help that it would be willing to bargain away its nuclear capability. In February a bilateral committee set up by the East-West Center in Honolulu and the Seoul Forum for International Affairs argued that South Korea could do without nuclear weapons on its soil. The assumption was that the South would remain under the umbrella of U.S. long-range weapons. At a recent conference on Asia in British Columbia, top North Korean academics hinted Pyongyang might respond to U.S. nuclear withdrawal by allowing IAEA inspection.
But there’s no guarantee such approaches will yield results. China, for example, portrays its close ties with Pyongyang–which apparently include transshipment of Chinese weapons exports through North Korea–as a moderating influence. “The more North Korea opens and becomes tied to the world,” says a Chinese scholar, “the less the threat.” But China has not pressed hard on the nuclear issue. North Korea remains one of the world’s most isolated nations, and one of the most intransigent: Kim has shown few signs of taking Beijing’s advice to reform his Stalinist economy. Then there are the lessons of Iraq. The world tried to influence Saddam Hussein–right up to the day he invaded Kuwait. That suggests that if a dictator is bent on having weapons of mass destruction, no amount of friendly persuasion can change his mind.
Aided by Soviet and Chinese weaponry, Pyongyang has a military edge only partly offset by the U.S. presence in the South.
North Korea South Korea Army-Troops 1 million 650,000 Main Battle Tanks 3,500 250 Fighter Planes 706 380 Bombers 80 0 Surface-to -Surface Missiles 69 12 Antiaircraft Missiles 176 plus 540 plus
SOURCES: “THE MILITARY BALANCE, 1990-1991” JANE’S REFERENCE BOOKS
