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.

Essay Types: Essay