Korea and Our Asia Policy

Korea and Our Asia Policy

Mini Teaser: On January 30, 1995, in response to a question in a Diet committee,Japanese Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi* said that Japan is partlyresponsible for the division of the Korean peninsula after World WarII.

by Author(s): Chalmers Johnson

On January 30, 1995, in response to a question in a Diet committee,
Japanese Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi* said that Japan is partly
responsible for the division of the Korean peninsula after World War
II. The following day, January 31, Murayama retracted his remark,
saying "I spoke of Japan's responsibility for the Japanese colonial
rule of Korea in the past. I want to make it clear that Japan has no
responsibility for the division of Korea into North and South Korea."

Japan may not be responsible for the division of Korea, but like
China, it seems utterly comfortable with two Koreas and stirs itself
only when it looks as if there might be some progress toward
unification. The ostensible reason for Murayama's reversal is that
Japan does not want to accede to North Korea's demand for
compensation for the division of Korea. But the real issues behind
Japan's ambiguous stance are: the place of Korea in the future of
East Asian international relations, whether Japan will always have
the American nuclear umbrella and thirty-seven thousand American
troops in Korea to provide the first line of defense, what would
happen to the Japanese-American "alliance" if the Americans ever
again had to use force in Korea while the Japanese merely looked on.
And indeed there is the even more fundamental question of why
American troops are still there forty-five years after the outbreak
of the Korean War and five years after the end of the Cold War.

The United States' position is no less ambiguous. Together with the
former USSR, it does bear responsibility for the division of Korea
after World War II, but that is something long forgotten. (In 1945
the Americans and Russians glanced at the map and chose the 38th
parallel as the dividing line between the zones where the two
putative allied armies would take the Japanese surrender.) Other
things the Americans prefer to forget are those aspects of the Korean
War that made it a civil war as well as a response to North Korean
aggression; the American role in delaying democracy in Korea by its
passivity in the face of Chun Doo Hwan's military coup d'état in 1979
and his massacre of civilians at Kwangju the following year; and
their continuing military presence in a nation twice as populous and
sixteen times as rich as its northern rival. The United States is
also an ally of Israel, a country with a population of five million,
compared to South Korea's forty million, and surrounded by enemies;
but the United States does not station American soldiers in Israel to
defend it. Arguably, the Americans have a greater stake than any
other external power in the unification of Korea, but current
policies, particularly the determination to keep U.S. ground forces
there until 2015 (according to the so-called Nye Report of February
1995), directly contradict long-term American interests.

The Chinese, Korea's first colonizers, are the big winners in this
situation. Not unlike the Tang Dynasty's relations with the three
kingdoms of Koguryo, Silla, and Paekche, China today enjoys
diplomatic relations with both the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea, with its capital in Pyongyang, and the Republic of Korea, with
its capital in Seoul. The Chinese prefer a structurally divided Korea
that is unable to play its full role as a buffer between China,
Russia, and Japan, thereby giving China a determining influence on
the peninsula. China's greatest worry has been that the North might
collapse due to economic isolation and ideological irrelevance,
thereby bringing about a unified Korea. This could make Korea an
independent actor in northeast Asian politics, one the size of, and
potentially as rich as, the former West Germany--and possessing a
good army with nuclear weapons. This is not a development the Chinese
would welcome. They would prefer to see the Americans, as outsiders,
performing the dual role of continuing to protect the South while
also propping up the regime in the North economically--and getting
their South Korean and Japanese allies to help pay for the latter.

The Russians no longer have much influence on the Korean situation,
although until the U.S.-North Korean agreement of October 21, 1994,
they were the second most important source (after China) of fuel oil
for the North. Today the Russians increasingly look to the Chinese as
trading partners and as models of how to get capitalism before, or
possibly without, democracy, and for the time being they seem to be
following China's lead with regard to Korean policy. But that is not
a path one can expect the former superpower to pursue indefinitely.

Meanwhile the Koreans themselves, both North and South, try to deal
with this ambiguous environment, their own legacies of civil war, and
their disputed claims to resistance or collaboration with the
Japanese colonialists. And, of course, there are the broader
questions raised by South Korea's capitalist miracle and North
Korea's failed autarky, the learning curve spawned by the collapse of
the Soviet empire and what happened to those countries that tried to
jump directly into Anglo-American capitalism, and the opportunities
and dangers posed by the shift in the global economic center of
gravity to East Asia.

Variables and Constants

We must look at the strategic choices of both North and South Korea
in this age of profound ambiguity, particularly as they relate to and
are influenced by the United States and Japan. The latter two are the
important variables in the equation. China is the major constant. I
take as given that China--for reasons of geography and history--is
the most important external power vis-Ã -vis the Korean peninsula and
that it desires a perpetuation of the status quo. Its policy is one
of "no unification, no war." (It is worth remembering that what the
United States calls the Korean War turned out actually to be a war
between the United States and China, fought on Korean territory. Had
it remained strictly a "Korean" war, the United States would have won
it and Korea today would not be divided.)

I also take it as given that China, Japan, and South Korea will never
join the United States in genuine sanctions against the North and
that the North knows this; that Japan will never join in the use of
force in the Korean peninsula, and that this effectively makes the
American military presence there both expensive and not credible; and
that the Americans will never staff their government with genuine
experts on the countries of East Asia, but will do so instead with
economic and military theorists who will always have trouble knowing
what is going on.

This last is the reason why virtually everything the Americans say
officially about North Korea lacks strategic insight into the world
as it appears from Pyongyang, as well as into what will be required
to prevent the many blunders of the past from exacting high costs in
the future. The U.S. news media have characterized North Korea as a
"rogue state" (whatever that might mean), and Kim Jong Il as "the mad
prince of North Korea whose troops (and nukes) make him the Saddam
Hussein of North Asia;" Secretary of State Christopher (testifying
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) argued very
implausibly that only the threat of UN Security Council sanctions
brought North Korea to the negotiating table.

It must be acknowledged that no one knows much about the North Korean
leaders and how their decisions are made. The only absolutely certain
facts to emerge from the dramatic events of 1994 were that Kim Il
Sung met Jimmy Carter in June and shortly thereafter died. Whether
there is any relation between these two occurrences or, indeed,
whether Kim died a natural death are still open questions. What we do
know about North Korea, combined with a general knowledge of
international relations, suggests that it is less a rogue state than
a desperate one. In response to being driven into a corner, however,
it offered the world a textbook example of how to parlay a weak hand
into a considerable diplomatic and economic victory over a
muscle-bound but poorly-informed competitor.

Without a Patron

The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991 precipitated an acute crisis in North Korea.
Even if it was not prepared to acknowledge that it had to reform its
economic system of juche (self reliance), North Korea still could not
help observing that the end-game of the Cold War was particularly
dangerous for players on the communist side. The former leaders of
Romania were put up against a wall and shot, the former leaders of
East Germany were tried and given heavy sentences by the courts of a
unified Germany, and the United States persisted in its boycott of
Cuba even though it no longer posed any kind of threat. (Recently
asked why Cuba was still being shunned, a "senior administration
official," speaking on condition of anonymity, said with a smile,
"To my knowledge they do not have a nuclear weapons program.")

This, in a nutshell, is the secret of how the two Kims caught the
Americans' attention. Kim Il Sung and his son appear to have spent
the first five years after the Berlin Wall came down thinking hard
about how to avoid the same fate as Nicolae Ceausescu, and how to
obtain some leverage over the big nations, chiefly the United States
and Japan, that were arrayed against them.

With the end of the Cold War, Korea lost the patronage of the Soviet
Union. For the previous forty years, Moscow had competed with the
People's Republic of China to curry favor in Pyongyang, allowing
North Korea to become independent of both. In 1974, following the
first OPEC oil crisis, North Korea's Soviet ally sponsored it into
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) so that the Soviets
could help North Korea develop a nuclear-power generating capability.
In 1985, North Korea adhered to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT), also at Moscow's behest. With the collapse of the Soviet
Union, North Korea lost not only Soviet nuclear aid and any
continuing reason to participate in Western-dominated atomic control
regimes, but it also lost its second most important source of fuel
oil.

The Chinese compounded these difficulties by asking North Korea to
begin paying in hard currency for Chinese oil imports, on which North
Korea suddenly depended (the Chinese have accepted some barter
payments since 1992, when they first asked for hard currency). North
Korea also imports smaller amounts of oil from Iran, Syria, and other
Middle Eastern countries for which it pays with shipments of its
Nodong i and Scud c missiles. It is worth noting that the amount of
crude oil previously supplied by Russia, approximately five hundred
thousand tons per annum, is the amount that the United States has now
agreed to supply well into the next century, under terms of the
October 1994 agreement. According to Japanese government estimates,
by the early 1990s North Korea had only a half-year's oil reserve.
The Japanese feared that when the North got down to only a three or
four months' supply, it would invade South Korea as a desperation
move.

By the early 1990s, it became clear to the North that it had to break
out of the trap in which the end of the Cold War had left it. The
first experimental efforts were directed toward South Korea and
Japan, not the United States, which it regarded as implacably hostile
and with a large expeditionary army--something considerably more than
the "tripwire" the Americans describe--in South Korea.

North Korea has long claimed greater legitimacy in the struggle
against Japanese colonialism than South Korea, a claim that many
students in South Korean universities accept. Moreover, until well
over halfway through the Cold War, North Korea was considerably
richer than South Korea in terms of per capita GDP. This situation
slowly changed with South Korea's extraordinary economic achievements
and the democratization set in motion in the 1980s.

As a result, as of 1994 it appeared that eventual unification on
South Korea's terms was almost certain. With the Seoul Olympics of
1988, the end of the Cold War and the discrediting of communist
ideology, the recognition of Seoul by both Russia and China, and
particularly the December 1992 election of Kim Young Sam as president
of the Republic of Korea and his subsequent implementation of liberal
reforms, the Korean peninsula had come to look like a case study for
Francis Fukuyama's thesis on the "end of history" (i.e., that
liberalism had become the only ideologically possible form of
government). The North did not like this, but it had also not totally
foreclosed adjusting to it. Ever since it began reacting to the end
of the Cold War, North Korea had very tentatively opened itself up to
discussions with unofficial South Koreans, while also trying to
protect itself from the much greater economic influence the South
could bring to bear. In 1990 a North Korean leader said to the
Chinese, "What we have hung out is not an iron curtain, but a
mosquito net. It can let in breezes, and it can also defend against
mosquitos." When Kim Il Sung died on July 8, 1994, he was scheduled
to meet with Kim Young Sam in an unprecedented Korean summit meeting.

Kanemaru's Last Hurrah

North Korea had also been trying to establish diplomatic and other
relations with Japan. The breakthrough in North Korean-Japanese
relations came about as a result of the Kanemaru Mission to Pyongyang
of September 1990. This is still one of the most controversial issues
in contemporary Japanese politics. Only a few weeks after President
Roh Tae Woo of South Korea had met with Mikhail Gorbachev in San
Francisco, the then vice president of the Liberal Democratic Party in
Japan, Kanemaru Shin, led a joint LDP-Socialist delegation to the
North Korean capital. This was entirely the initiative of Kanemaru
and was opposed by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However,
it was widely supposed in South Korea at the time that Japan was
trying to undermine the increasingly friendly relations between South
Korea and the USSR, just as it was assumed in North Korea that
Kanemaru, as the representative of Japan's long-standing one-party
government (in that sense, similar to the government of North Korea),
was an official Japanese spokesman.

It turns out that Kanemaru's visit was actually just a last hurrah by
one of Japan's most corrupt politicians to further line his pockets.
As Toshikawa Takao has put it:

"It was very much a personal initiative: a last chance for diplomatic
glory in old Shin's declining years, and also a brazen attempt to
generate huge kickbacks out of the flow of grants, yen credits,
etcetera, that would flow to Pyongyang once the principle of paying
reparations was established."

While in Pyongyang, Kanemaru, "drunk and slightly senile, is
suspected of having promised the North Korean strongman [Kim Il Sung]
grants and low-interest loans totaling ¥100 billion."

Ever since this meeting the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has
denied that what took place there was official Japanese policy and,
more specifically, has argued that the so-called "three-party
agreement" resulting from Kanemaru's visit must be abrogated before
any further steps are taken toward North Korean-Japanese diplomatic
normalization. That is more or less where things stood in early
1995--at impasse.

This impasse was complicated by the fact that the government of Japan
during North Korea's 1994 nuclear initiative was led by a left
socialist, Prime Minister Murayama, allied with the LDP, a party with
a long record of hostility to Pyongyang. Japanese political observers
have interpreted the Socialist-LDP alliance forged during 1994 in
various ways: as a sign of the utter degeneracy of Japanese politics,
as evidence that the Socialists are mere ornaments free-riding on the
LDP's uninterrupted rule, and as another example of the Japanese
establishment's use of domestic leftists for diplomacy with communist
regimes. Whatever the case, the Japanese Socialists still claim to
have direct access to Pyongyang and do not like being usurped by
conservatives holding direct talks with North Korea. As explained
below, the Socialists are also major sources of hard currency for
North Korea. This disarray within the Japanese government stymied
most efforts to continue the dialogue started by Kanemaru.
Nonetheless, all Japanese factions were concerned that the
breakthrough of October 1994 in U.S.-North Korean relations would
leave them out in the cold--except (as in the Persian Gulf War) for
the Americans sending them the bill.

Equally important from a North Korean point of view, Kanemaru began
losing influence in Japanese politics during the autumn of 1992,
culminating in his March 1993 arrest on bribery and corruption
charges. Japanese analysts believe that Kanemaru's downfall convinced
Pyongyang that its Japan initiative was not working. It therefore
began dealing directly with the United States, opening its campaign
with a brilliant stroke: in March 1993, North Korea gave notice of
its intention to withdraw from the NPT. The Americans, who had not
really thought about their basic strategy toward Korea for almost
fifty years, despite keeping a full division of troops there, woke up
with a start.

A Truly Audacious Ploy

American policy on nuclear non-proliferation has long been filled
with contradictions, and the officials in charge of it, through
overreaction and an almost total ignorance of their adversary, played
right into North Korea's hands. The Americans seem not to have
noticed that proliferation has already occurred in Israel, India, and
Pakistan; that South Korea, Japan, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina,
Algeria, and Taiwan have technologically already proliferated without
testing; and that Iraq was able to pursue a clandestine nuclear
weapons program while complying with IAEA inspections.

Non-proliferation also ignores the efforts of Iran and Libya to
purchase arsenals from the former USSR, the fact that four republics
of the former USSR now have thousands of nuclear weapons, and the
notion that there is something flawed--unprincipled, one might
say--about permiting some nations to have nuclear weapons but not
others. As Oh and Hassig have put it:

"This [was] a truly audacious ploy [on the part of North Korea]: an
isolated and bankrupt nation [pinned] its hopes for political
survival on a small nuclear program. . . The emphasis the United
States placed on the North Korean nuclear issue turned this into
Pyongyang's strongest bargaining chip."

The world does not actually know much about the history of the North
Korean nuclear power program or about whether it really has diverted
plutonium into weapons-building. North Korea has ample reason to
build a nuclear-power generating capacity, given its vulnerability to
a cut-off of crude oil. And, from a North Korean national security
standpoint, Japan's own nuclear power capacity, its fast-breeder
reactor program, and its plutonium stockpile could all plausibly
appear threatening to a country that was once colonized and exploited
by Tokyo. Japan has some forty-one nuclear plants generating 30
percent of its electricity, with another ten under construction. It
has set a goal of meeting 43 percent of its demand for electricity
through nuclear power by the year 2010. Many in Taiwan suspect that
North Korea is reacting to Japanese nuclear developments, or
conversely that Japan is using North Korea's attempts to gain energy
independence as a pretext for its own nuclear proliferation, or both.
"We cannot help suspecting," the China Times editorial page of July
18, 1994 stated, "that Japan's exaggeration of North Korea's nuclear
threat is for its pretext of rearmament or the development of nuclear
weapons."

Whatever the mix of reasons--including fears of Japan, energy
demands, and post-Cold War isolation--North Korea developed a small
nuclear weapons capacity, or at least convinced the IAEA that it had.
The initial American reaction was belligerent. The Pentagon talked
about "surgical strikes," Ã la the Israeli attack on the Iraqi
reactor at Osiraq in 1981, and transferred Patriot missile brigades
to Seoul. The U.S. military--and many civilian analysts and
commentators--seemed intent on using force on the Korean peninsula.

The Japan Factor

But a military option in Korea, particularly one initiated by the
United States, was and is wholly unrealistic. Not only was South
Korea bitterly opposed (Seoul is, after all, only thirty-five miles
from Panmunjom and was totally destroyed during the last Korean war),
but a new Korean war would almost certainly end the Japanese-American
alliance. Since the Americans would inevitably take casualties and
the Japanese would not participate at all militarily, the American
public would want to know why. The Japanese-American Security Treaty
was strained by a similar pattern during the Gulf War; a repetition
in Japan's "backyard" would snap it. The Americans therefore tacitly
gave up on a military option (since there actually never was a real
one) and started talking about sanctions against North Korea if it
did not rejoin the NPT regime and allow the IAEA to resume
inspections of its nuclear facilities.

The threat of sanctions also proved meaningless, although it did
reveal to the Americans how little their ideology fit the actual
complexities of the region. The legal basis for imposing sanctions
would have to be Articles 41 and 42 of the United Nations Charter,
and China would have vetoed the use of either. Moreover, it is not
clear that there ever was any legal basis for sanctions because North
Korea had formally declared its intent to withdraw from the NPT.

The actual use of sanctions would have involved some combination of
the following: interrupting telecommunications, cutting off
remittances of money, prohibiting people and vessels from going to
North Korea, and stopping trade. Pyongyang promptly announced that it
would regard any blockade as an act of war and would retaliate
directly against Seoul. This caused the South Koreans to lose some of
their enthusiasm for sanctions.

Even more clearly, the proposal that Japan join the use of sanctions
against North Korea proved acutely embarrassing to Tokyo, both
because it revealed the extent to which Japan was already involved in
propping up North Korea economically, and because of Japan's guilty
conscience about its own treatment of the resident Korean population.
Most Koreans living in Japan support North Korea as a matter of
traditional anti-Japanese nationalism. During the last days of the
Hosokawa administration, just as the Americans were starting to talk
about sanctions, the Japanese government ordered a full-scale
analysis of what might be involved. Though secret, this document was
subsequently leaked to the press and published in the monthly
magazine Bungei shunju. This study revealed that Japan is North
Korea's second most important trading partner, after China. During
1992 Japan exported to North Korea some ¥28.3 billion worth of
goods--textiles (27 percent), machinery (18 percent), electrical
equipment (11 percent), and transportation equipment (8
percent)--while it imported from North Korea some ¥32.7 billion worth
of apparel made from Japanese textiles. This trade earned for North
Korea a surplus in vitally-needed hard currency of ¥4.4 billion (44
million U.S. dollars). By contrast two-way trade between China and
North Korea was about $700 million, plus another $100 million of
uncontrolled trade along the Sino-Korean border.

More important than trade, the survey revealed that the organization
of Koreans in Japan allied with North Korea, Chosen Soren, remitted
huge amounts of foreign currency to North Korea, and that it also
made large shipments of prohibited cargo such as computers and
integrated circuits. All the large Japanese banks, including Daiichi
Kangyo, Fuji, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Sakura, Asahi, Sanwa, and the
Bank of Tokyo, have correspondence agreements with North Korean
banks. Individual contributions of money to North Korea amount to at
least ¥60 to ¥70 billion per annum--an amount equal to the trade with
China--and Korean operators of pachinko parlors (pinball machines),
many of whom are allied with the Socialist Party, have in the past
contributed as much as ¥100 million on Kim Il Sung's birthday. The
Ministry of Finance could attempt to freeze these assets in Japan
under Article 16 of the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Control
Law, but the government's report concluded that this would be
ineffective since most private remittances and shipments go to third
countries first and then through China into North Korea.

It must also be noted that during 1992 some 6,600 Koreans living in
Japan and 4,300 Japanese visited North Korea, while 510 North Korean
vessels visited Japan. Equally important, the Association of North
Korean Credit Associations in Japan (a federation of credit unions
where Koreans deposit their money) held assets worth ¥2.4 trillion
and is close to Ishii Hajime, former member of the Takeshita faction
of the LDP and today part of the opposition Shinshinto. Ishii is an
advocate of normal relations between Japan and North Korea. Thus,
even if the Americans had gotten UN approval of sanctions and avoided
a Chinese veto, Japan's report concluded that its government could
not have implemented them.

A Win-Win Solution

In this context Jimmy Carter undertook his personal diplomacy. His
mission was actually quite similar to the Nixon-Kissinger opening to
China undertaken twenty years earlier. Both missions reflected a
growing American understanding that communism in China, Korea, and
Vietnam was a vehicle for Asian nationalism, that Kim Il Sung wanted
recognition of his accomplishments as a guerrilla fighter against the
Japanese, and that the Americans had misjudged both the Chinese
Communist and North Korean (to say nothing of the Vietnamese)
revolutions--even if the Americans did not dare to say any of this
publicly.

The Carter visit achieved a breakthrough. Whether Kim Il Sung was
personally satisfied, we do not know. But clearly he did not want to
negotiate with the International Atomic Energy Agency, since it had
nothing to give him in return for his compliance with its inspection
requirements, whereas the Americans did. They could deliver some
goods North Korea needed, and they could also wring some more from
the Japanese and South Koreans. Kim Il Sung therefore froze his
nuclear program and opened negotiations on what he would require in
order to permanently stop his weapons project and shift to a
Western-approved form of nuclear-power generation.

So ended the first phase of one of the most serious confrontations of
the post-Cold War era. It should go into the textbooks as a cardinal
achievement of U.S. diplomacy and of successful nuclear blackmail. It
was an unusual example of a true "win-win" solution. Had the
Americans followed the advice of their military, they would have
produced only their own version of Chechnya; had the North Koreans
pursued their nuclear program (as they may still decide to do), they
would have achieved only a Libya-like status as the true pariah of
East Asia. The United States could have avoided this confrontation
had it opened some channel to Pyongyang years ago; North Korea should
also have quit playing the old Korean role of "hermit kingdom."

Talks to implement the Carter-Kim agreement opened on July 8, 1994,
the day Kim Il Sung died, and as a result were immediately suspended.
The death of Kim and the lack of credible information about his son,
Kim Jong Il, might have set back the negotiations but actually seemed
to have little effect on North Korea's discussions with the United
States. They did however create serious problems in South Korea. The
South Korean government prohibited any public expressions of grief,
banned a church-sponsored human chain of people holding hands up to
the demilitarized zone on the anniversary of liberation from Japan,
released letters that Boris Yeltsin gave to Kim Young Sam when he
visited Moscow in June that allegedly proved Kim Il Sung had started
the Korean War, and sent police into the elite Seoul National
University to arrest some fourteen hundred students who were calling
for U.S. troops to get out of Korea and quit blocking unification.

It is possible that South Korea feared the sudden death of Kim Il
Sung would lead to a political and economic collapse in the North and
a human tidal wave of refugees moving south. In any case, the South's
actual reaction to Kim's death was a disaster insofar as building
mutual trust was concerned and revealed a deep-seated lack of
confidence in itself. In retaliation, North Korea hardened its
position on relations with South Korea.

On August 5, 1994, talks between North Korea and the United States
resumed in Geneva. They led to a so-called "Agreed Framework" that
the two sides signed on October 21, 1994. According to this framework
the United States agrees to arrange for the construction by the year
2003 of two 1,000 megawatt light-water reactors in North Korea to
replace its current graphite-moderated reactors (a Soviet design from
which plutonium can more easily be extracted). It also agrees to
provide fuel oil to replace the energy lost by the closing of North
Korea's current reactors, and assures Pyongyang that it will not use
or threaten to use nuclear weapons in Korea. For its part North Korea
agrees to freeze and then dismantle its current reactors, ship its
used nuclear fuel rods out of the country, remain a party to the NPT,
and allow IAEA inspection of its nuclear sites. The agreement has a
self-enforcing quality in that either side can drop out at any time
if the other does not appear to be living up to the agreement.

The truly astonishing thing about this agreement is that the United
States negotiated a deal, in the words of Oh and Hassig, "whose
central incentives--LWRs [light-water reactors] and oil
deliveries--are to be paid for by other nations." The total cost of
the reactors is estimated in the range of $4- to $4.5 billion. Japan
at first balked, and opposition political strongman Ozawa Ichiro said
that disposal of any possible North Korean nuclear weapons should be
a precondition for financial assistance, especially since the
inspections the North agreed to will not actually occur for more than
five years. But by March of this year Japan and South Korea had
agreed to pay for the reactors; and all three countries--the United
States, the Republic of Korea, and Japan--had set up a new
organization called the Korean Energy Development Organization (KEDO)
to do the actual construction work. Ja

Essay Types: Essay