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Anthony Paul

North Korea Crisis: The


Prequel Stark, the Sequel
Still Dark

FOR the past year or so Asia-Pacific chancelleries have


been turning to a book central to analysis of one of the
new century’s most disturbing geopolitical
developments -- North Korea’s acquisition of a
thermonuclear weapon and the ability to hurl it at the
United States.
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I refer to Going Critical: The First North Korean


Nuclear Crisis (Brookings Institution Press, 2004). The
book’s three authors were at the centre of events in
Washington when, in 1993, Pyongyang abruptly
announced its intention to become the first nation ever
to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NNPT).

At the time, Joel S. Wit had long served on the U.S.


State Department’s North Korean desk; Daniel B.
Poneman had been for nearly four years President Bill
Clinton’s special assistant for non-proliferation; Robert
L. Gallucci had led the team that negotiated the 1994
U.S.-North Korea Agreed Framework.

Don Oberdorfer, a distinguished former Washington


Post correspondent in Tokyo who wrote his own
workmanlike account of the North Korean nuclear
program in his book, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary
History, graciously noted Going Critical’s superiority
as a record of this highly dangerous time. Oberdorfer
covered the complex topic in 63 pages. Authors Wit,
Poneman and Gallucci devoted 408 pages to these
developments and included a good deal of inside
information that was previously unavailable.

In late 1993 U.S. intelligence had discovered that


Pyongyang was breaking solemn promises regarding
plutonium production. By U.S. estimates, North Korea
would soon be capable of building about 3 Nagasaki-
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sized nuclear weapons annually. When confronted with


their subterfuge, Pyongyang pulled out of the world’s
non-proliferation agreements.

The possibility of a reopening of the Korean War


loomed large. The Washington buzz-phrase for a
preemptive strike against North Korea (or Iran) is the
“Osirak Option”. This refers to the Israeli Air Force’s
destruction of Iraqi dictator Sadam Hussein’s nuclear
weapons laboratories at Osirak in 1981.

At a crisis breakfast meeting convened at the White


House on June 14, 1994, the name of this otherwise
obscure area near Baghdad was on everyone’s lips.

Two former senior officials in the previous


(Republican) administration – national security adviser
Brent Snowcroft and under-secretary of state Arnold
Kanter -- were about to publish in the Washington Post
a demand that the U.S. destroy the nuclear processing
plane at Yongbyon, North Korea.

“The stakes could hardly be higher,” said the article,


Korea: Time for Action. “The time for temporising is
over,” it said.

The White House meeting’s consensus was that if the


U.S. launched a strike, a violent North Korean reaction
was possible, even likely. As General Gary Luck, U.S.
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forces commander in South Korea, bluntly put it: “If we


pull an Osirak, they will come south.”

If Pyongyang opted for a full-scale attack across the


demilitarised zone (DMZ) dividing the two Koreas,
thousands of North Korean artillery tubes arrayed just
40 km north of Seoul would be heard from first.

Seoul accounts for a quarter of South Korea’s


population and almost half its economic output. U.S.
officials feared that a “spontaneous evacuation” of the
South Korean capital would erupt, “throwing the South
Korean government into a panic that wold have greatly
complicated allied military planning”.

North Korean special forces would add to the turmoil –


scattered attacks throughout South Korea by 65,000 or
so (today an estimated 110,000) commandos trained for
long-range penetration. South Korean and US units
would try to withstand the North Korean push for up to
15 days, allowing time for reinforcements to arrive.

The U.S. counter-offensive plan in 1994 would have


sent into action, over several months, 400,000 troops,
along with carrier battle groups, fighter squadrons and
marine amphibious units.

Later plans, which evolved from 1998 on, call for


690,000 troops and a more aggressive invasion. Instead
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of simply pushing back across the DMZ, the allies


would mount a full-scale assault on Pyongyang.

In a report fed to the press – undoubtedly for


Pyongyang’s consumption -- a Marine Corps general
was quoted as saying: “When we’re done, they will not
be able to mount any military activity of any kind. We
will kill them all.”

The revised plan’s goal, the report noted, is to “abolish


North Korea as a functioning state, end the rule of its
leader, Kim Jong Il, and reorganize the country under
South Korean control.”

The battlefield would be far more lethal than that of the


first Korean War (1950-53): Pentagon estimates in 1994
assumed that another war would kill at least one million
civilians.

It would cost more than $60 billion (triple that for


today’s dollar equivalent), devastate the South Korean
economy to the tune today of at least $2 trillion), cause
an Asian [and thus, of course, Australian] recession and
adversely affect the rest of the world’s economy.

Asked by Mr. Clinton whether the US would win the


war, General Luck turned the estimate into an
incantation: “Yes, but at the cost of a million and a
trillion.” Today that chant – for that is what has become
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in the region’s chancelleries -- would be “a million and


two trillion”.

How close did that White House meeting come to


proposing armed intervention? Far too close, Going
Critical tells us.

On June 6, senior US officials once again converged on


the White House to discuss moving troops to South
Korea and to deliberate further on the “Osirak option”.

In South Korea, rising tension matched the mood in


Washington. A US diplomat recalls that “on a scale of
one to 10 with 10 closes to panic, the situation in Seoul
was a six –and moving rapidly in the wrong direction.”

Almost by chance, the crisis was averted. Former US


President Jimmy Carter, who was in Pyongyang on a
private visit, discussed the nuclear stand-off with Great
Leader Kim Il Sung.

The Great Leader told Mr Carter that he was willing to


continue international monitoring in exchange for new
reactors much less suitable for nuclear weapons
production. Telephoned by the ex-president to the White
House, the news defused the 1994 crisis.

Both parties signed the so-called 1994 Agreed


Framework. Shepherded into existence largely by US
Ambassador Robert Gallucci, the Going Critical co-
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author, its central point was the provision to North


Korea by the US of two light-water nuclear reactors to
do away with weaponizing reactors.

To say the least, over the next few years, neither side
was as faithful to the agreement as they might have
been.

The light-water reactors were never built. The US-led


consortium that was supposed to build them was in
severe debt. Hawkish Republican congressmen charged
the Clinton administration with rewarding North
Korea’s aggressive behaviour and rejected funding.
The US also failed to meet deadlines for another
provision in the agreement: supply to the North of
500,000 tons annually of heavy fuel oil to compensate
for the energy to be lost from reactors that it was
abandoning.

North Korea also failed to comply. US intelligence


agencies discovered that in 1998 the North began…

SECTION MISSING….

Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis was the prequel.
TK years later our travail, outlined by the book, is still with us.

A military solution? The Congressional Research Service [CHECK] has


listed seven [check] alternative kinetic military approaches ranging from
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TKTK to TKTK There seems to be little point in detailing these, since


each concludes with the prequel’s melancholy reminder: a million;
trillions. The Quorum website, for example, quoted a former GI who had
taken part in a war game that replicated a North Korean artillery assault on
Seoul’s perilously close targets: QUOTE FROM QUORUM TKTKTKT

So, what is to be done? Short of some all-but-miraculous violent


intervention – a coup in Pyongyang possibly instigated by China? a strike
by some still-secret non-nuclear US weapon? – there is no recourse other
than diplomatic talks. The US Council on Foreign Relations has outlined
what it sees as their most promising shape:

The sequel thus has its own chant, this one courtesy of Winston Churchill
in TK: “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.”

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