http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021209&s=cumings20021125
The Nation
November 25, 2002
Endgame in Korea
by Bruce Cumings
On a sparkling Indian Summer day fifteen years ago, I was waiting in
front of the Pyongyang Hotel with a British documentary producer. Our
North Korean "counterparts" were picking us up for another round of
"discussions" over when, where and what our film crew would be allowed
to shoot. "They're all a bunch of liars," we both agreed, after days
of bluff, prevarication, dissembling and bait-and-switch games using
even their own people: I was convinced that one of the men we dealt
with the week before had appeared with a different name card that
morning. We had run afoul of the most popular sport in North Korea,
rubbing foreign noses in the bloody-minded subjectivity of a regime
that answers to no one. Then our eyes were caught by a tall monument
across the street, an inlaid tile mural of a willowy, soft-featured
woman leaping forward in flowing, brilliantly colored traditional
dress. Koreans hold that women of the north country are more
beautiful; she matched the myth. In her right hand was a
military-issue revolver. That same female image is the "George
Washington" of their one-dollar (or won) bill. North Koreans live
every day amid violence at home from a repulsive family dictatorship,
and abroad from our half-century failure to engage in serious
diplomacy to end the Korean War. They suffered through years of
American carpet-bombing during that war, and the incessant threat of
annihilation by US nuclear weapons ever since.
When James Kelly of the State Department confronted them with evidence
of this activity in early October, according to him they at first
denied it and then admitted it, not without a certain belligerent
satisfaction. On October 19 a high-level US official said the 1994
Framework Agreement that froze the North's graphite nuclear reactor at
Yongbyon was null and void, a self-fulfilling prophecy since Bush's
people declared it a dead letter soon after taking office. Thus comes
to an end, it seems, the only diplomatic effort to solve a serious
problem in Korea since the 1953 armistice. (There is nothing in the
agreement prohibiting uranium enrichment, Bush spokespersons to the
contrary, but the North certainly violated the spirit of the
agreement.) This was a fully verifiable agreement under which
thousands of plutonium fuel rods, the makings of five to ten bombs,
were encased in concrete under UN inspection protocols. North Korea is
still in compliance with it. But if the Framework Agreement is indeed
dead, nothing prevents the North from extracting that fuel and making
even more weapons.
The United States, of course, never lies or violates anyone's
sovereignty. In 1957 the Eisenhower Administration deliberated
secretly about how to become the first power to introduce nuclear
weapons into the Korean peninsula even though the 1953 armistice
agreement prohibited such a qualitative leap into weapons of mass
destruction. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles worried that he
would need "publishable evidence confirming Communist violations of
the armistice sufficient to justify such action to our Allies and
before the UN." But it wasn't there; the Communist side had introduced
new weaponry but so had the United States, and neither constituted a
radical upgrade of capabilities. Washington went ahead anyway, and
from 1958 to 1991 maintained in the Korean theater hundreds of
nuclear-tipped rockets, atomic gravity bombs, battlefield tactical
nukes and atomic demolition mines. George Bush Senior removed them at
the end of 1991 because he couldn't pressure the North about its
reactor until he did. But that didn't end the nuclear threat.
Why did Pyongyang choose to begin importing the Pakistani technology
that created enriched-uranium bombs in 1998? After all, in February of
that year Kim Dae Jung announced his "sunshine policy," and in the
fall the State Department began an eight-month review that culminated
in Bill Clinton's decision to engage with the North. One plausible
reason: Documents obtained by Hans Kristensen of the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists show that in June 1998 the Pentagon staged simulated
long-range nuclear attacks on North Korea at the Seymour Johnson Air
Force Base in North Carolina. F-15E fighter-bombers of the 4th Fighter
Wing dropped dummy BDU-38 nuclear bombs on concrete emplacements
arrayed like the hundreds that protect Korean underground facilities.
Such "stand-off" nuclear attacks replaced plans to utilize nukes
stationed in South Korea. Kristensen emphasized that this new
strategy, targeting hardened underground facilities, was to be used
pre-emptively "as early in a crisis as possible."
In August 1998 the North launched its new three-stage rocket into the
stratosphere over Japan, a present to Kim Jong Il on the fiftieth
anniversary of his regime, but a provocation and an all-too-welcome
goad to Americans seeking national missile defense. Subsequently
Pentagon and CIA hard-liners, bent on thwarting Clinton's new
diplomacy, leaked Pentagon war plans to respond to any attack with
"regime change": The United States would "abolish North Korea as a
state" [see Cumings, "North Korean Buyout?" May 3, 1999]. Soon
thereafter a civilian smart aleck from the Pentagon told an audience
at my university that if Pyongyang dared to start anything, there
would be a "magnificent symphony of death" in the valleys of North
Korea. Americans live with violence, too-and an exterminist hatred of
North Korea.
In the current crisis, a nation that believes its interests are the
only ones worthy of respect confronts Pentagon hard-liners and Beltway
pundits who can't conceive of a single North Korean interest worthy of
their attention. After all, they say, Pyongyang should have folded its
hand and given up in 1989. (This is the dirty secret of the 1994 deal:
The light-water reactors would take a decade to build, and by that
time South Korea would have unified the peninsula.) But unlike our
hard-liners, the North is not a poor student of its own national
interest. Rather than play the hand that fate deals them, they will
overturn the table. And in the case of nuclear weapons, the law is on
their side: The Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the North adhered to
in 1985, gives to nations threatened by nuclear weapons the sovereign
right to possess their own. The 1994 Framework Agreement called upon
the United States to declare publicly that it will not threaten or use
nuclear weapons against the North: We have yet to do so, because our
war plans call for their use.
It was inevitable that one of the "axis of evil" countries threatened
with pre-emptive attack would pre-empt the center stage and call
Bush's bluff. Now a country with a patent on grandiose braggadocio
meets a foolish President just getting his toes wet in world affairs.
A harsh and bitter realism formed in the caldron of a fifty-years' war
meets a messianic idealism wanting to "rid the world of evil." The
White House gang that can't shoot straight accumulates enemies by the
day while dispersing our allies.
We have arrived all too quickly at the endgame of this
Administration's unwillingness to coalesce with our East Asian allies
and friends, finish the 1994 agreement, get Clinton's missile deal
done, normalize relations and thus garner, finally, a significant
measure of influence over North Korean behavior. In which country will
we find the "cooler heads" that must prevail, to avoid a war that will
destroy Northeast Asia?
about
Bruce Cumings
Bruce Cumings teaches at the University of Chicago. His book Parallax
Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations (Duke) has just
been republished, with a new introduction, in paperback.
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