Cumings: Endgame in Korea

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Nov 30 03:53:04 PST 2002


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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