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."