The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Read online

  Sneider called his preferred alternative “durable partnership” with long-term guarantees for Korea, along the lines of the NATO and Japanese partnerships. He wrote, “The longer we stave off the inevitable decision as to whether our relationship, including our military presence, is temporary or durable, the more President Park and Kim Il Sung will pursue their premises that it is in fact temporary, adding further to the instability on the Korean peninsula.”

  As he saw it, an improved relationship would involve such things as greater Washington-Seoul consultation, a transition from economic aid to private investment (which was already happening), and a higher priority for Korea on the US negotiating agenda with China and the Soviet Union. However, the most important element he recommended was “a significant U.S. force presence with indefinite tenure . . . publicly projected with major reductions linked to changes in the security situation in Northeast Asia and arrangements between North and South reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula.”

  In the aftermath of Vietnam, Washington was wary of open-ended commitments. President Gerald Ford had told Park during a brief visit to Seoul in November 1974 that “we have no intention of withdrawing U.S. personnel from Korea.” However, this statement was interpreted by Ford’s National Security Council staff as applying only to total, not to partial, withdrawals. Responding to the South Korean fears of a US pullout during a visit to Seoul in August 1975, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger privately reassured Park that he foresaw “no basic changes over the next five years” in the level of US forces. But when this comment got back to the White House via a memorandum of the conversation, a National Security Council staff aide objected that Schlesinger had gone beyond administration policy.

  In any case, it was obvious that Ford would face serious Democratic opposition the following year, which could change the situation. Schlesinger told Park that “he expects President Ford to be reelected, but if not the Democrats are not likely to eliminate U.S. support for South Korea.” Schlesinger may not have known or cared that Democrat Jimmy Carter, then considered a long-shot contender for his party’s presidential nomination, was already advocating the complete withdrawal of American ground troops from Korea.

  With the election looming, no new American relationship along the lines of Sneider’s recommendation was instituted. Despite US attempts at reassurance, Park continued to feel a deep sense of vulnerability. In mid-1975 he put three laws through the National Assembly to set the nation on a wartime footing: a tightened public security law, coming on top of the issuance of Emergency Decree Nine, which in effect banned all political criticism of the government; a civil defense law creating a paramilitary corps of all males between the ages of seventeen and fifty; and a broad new defense tax.

  The government doubled defense expenditures in the 1976 budget and continued to increase them sharply for the next three years. In 1979 they doubled again, bringing them to four times the expenditure level of 1975. Although the South was devoting a far smaller percentage of its economic output to the military than the North, in absolute terms ROK military spending began outpacing that of the North in the mid-1970s, according to estimates of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Although military spending on both sides was rising, the South’s by the end of the decade was more than double that of the North’s.

  Following the fall of Saigon, Park gave high priority to his Heavy and Chemical Industries Promotion Plan, which had been initiated earlier to provide the sinews of enhanced military power. Between 1975 and 1980, more than 75 percent of all manufacturing investment in South Korea was committed to this industrial base. With these resources, Park created a mechanized army division and five special forces brigades for mobile warfare, doubled the size of his navy, and modernized his air force with faster, deadlier US jets and missiles.

  North Korea could not keep up with the South’s rapidly rising military expenditures or its increasing lead in military technology. On the other hand, North Korea continued to increase the numbers of its troops and to move more forces closer to the DMZ and therefore closer to Seoul, the fast-growing South Korean capital only thirty miles south of the dividing line. Increasingly, parts of Seoul were within range of North Korean heavy artillery and rockets. The upshot of all this was to heighten the military tension on the divided peninsula.

  THE SOUTH KOREAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM

  Park’s ultimate effort to secure the country’s future was to launch a secret and serious effort to develop a South Korean nuclear bomb. According to Oh Won Chol, a senior adviser to Park on nuclear and military production programs, Park created an Agency for Defense Development, which included a clandestine Weapons Exploitation Committee, answerable only to the Blue House, after faster and better-armed North Korean speedboats overwhelmed a South Korean patrol boat in June 1970 and forced it to the North. Only weeks later, Park was shocked by the decision of the Nixon administration to withdraw the US Seventh Division from Korea, despite his vehement protests. Park believed that the South Korean army was simply incapable of defending the country by itself with its outmoded arms and equipment, according to Oh. His nuclear adviser said that Park had not decided actually to produce a South Korean bomb, but that he was determined to acquire the technology and capability to do so on a few months’ notice, as he and many others believed the Japanese could do. “Park wished to have the [nuclear] card to deal with other governments,” Oh told me in 1996. In this field, the capability to produce nuclear weapons is almost as potent as possession of the bomb itself.

  A major element in Park’s effort was to acquire a reprocessing facility to extract plutonium from the irradiated uranium fuel produced in civilian power plants. Although most of South Korea’s ambitious civil nuclear power program was based on American equipment and technology, Park steered clear of Washington in seeking reprocessing equipment and technology, and in 1972 he began working with France in this high-priority effort. By 1974 the Korean-French collaboration produced the technical design of a plant to manufacture about twenty kilograms of plutonium per year, enough for two nuclear weapons with the explosive power of the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima.

  Work on an independent South Korean nuclear program and the rest of Park’s defense development was centered in Taeduk, a science center south of Seoul. In 1973 South Korea began a quiet drive to recruit ethnic Korean nuclear, chemical, and engineering specialists from the United States and Canada. It also began shopping abroad for exotic materials and equipment useful for nuclear weapons.

  India’s nuclear test in 1974, the first by a developing nonaligned country, jolted the world awake to the dangers of the spread of nuclear weapons. Suddenly, nuclear proliferation became a high-priority concern in Washington. US intelligence officials began giving renewed scrutiny to import data on sensitive materials, and “when they got to Korea, everything snapped into place,” an American analyst recalled years later. Based on these telltale hints, according to Paul Cleveland, who was a political counselor of the US Embassy in Seoul, “people were sent to work, and in a relatively short period of time developed absolute confirmation from clandestine sources” that South Korea was secretly embarked on a program to build the bomb.

  In November 1974, the embassy sent to Washington a highly classified intelligence assessment that South Korea “is proceeding with initial phases of a nuclear weapons development program.” This kicked off an interagency intelligence study in Washington that concluded that the ROK could develop a limited nuclear weapon and delivery capability within ten years, but that its efforts to build a bomb would become known well before that time, with significant political impact on neighboring countries. A secret cable to the embassy in Seoul from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, with the concurrence of the Ford White House, emphasized the gravity of the issue:

  In the case of Korea our general [proliferation] concerns are intensified by its strategic location and by the impact which any Korean effort to establish nuclear capa
bility would have on its neighbors, particularly North Korea and Japan. ROK possession of nuclear weapons would have major destabilizing effect in an area which not only Japan but USSR [Soviet Union], PRC [People’s Republic of China] and ourselves are directly involved. It could lead to Soviet or Chinese assurances of nuclear weapons support to North Korea in event of conflict. . . . This impact will be complicated by fact that ROK nuclear weapon effort has been in part reflection of lessened ROKG confidence in U.S. security commitment, and consequent desire on Park’s part to reduce his military dependence on U.S.

  American policy as set forth in the secret instructions was “to discourage ROK effort in this area and to inhibit to the fullest possible extent any ROK development of a nuclear explosive capability or delivery system.”

  The administration decided on a multifaceted approach, using both direct US pressure and the development of common policies with other nuclear supplier nations to inhibit South Korean access to nuclear weapons technology. The tough issue was how to accomplish this without a serious rift in the US-ROK alliance, especially at a time when Korean confidence in the United States was plummeting due to the developments in Vietnam.

  Initially, the emphasis was on persuading France to revoke its offers of nuclear cooperation. US ambassador Sneider cautioned the French ambassador in Seoul, Pierre Landy, that “the United States has no doubts that the Koreans have in mind putting to ulterior military ends what they can make use of such as plutonium.” The French refused to give up potential sales to Seoul, saying they would cancel their plans only if the Koreans asked them to do so.

  South Korean officials denied they were embarked on a nuclear weapons program. Many of those who denied it probably didn’t know the carefully hidden truth. “We have the capability,” Park told columnist Robert Novak in early June 1975, but he denied that his government was using it. He added, in a plea for continuing US support, “If the U.S. nuclear umbrella were to be removed, we have to start developing our nuclear capability to save ourselves.”

  US officials decided at the outset not to reveal to South Korea their certain knowledge of its clandestine program, but instead centered their attack on its openly acknowledged plans to import a reprocessing plant. In July 1975, Ambassador Sneider was authorized to begin taking the American objections about reprocessing directly to ROK officials. A National Security Council memorandum recognized that the campaign to persuade Seoul to forgo the planned reprocessing plant would approach the limit of what the South Korean government would accept from the United States. In order not to confront Park and to allow him to save face, Sneider took the case against the reprocessing plant methodically up the chain of command, first to the minister of science and technology, then to the foreign minister, and eventually to the secretary general of the Blue House. The US ambassador never made direct allegations that Seoul was embarked on a weapons program, recalled Cleveland, who accompanied him on the visits, but emphasized “how important it was that Korea not buy this because of the appearances of things and the kinds of suggestions this would make back in the United States and the difficulties that it would cause.”

  Sneider’s efforts were closely coordinated with those in Washington. On his morale-boosting visit to South Korea in August 1975, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger personally told Park that a South Korean nuclear weapons program was the one thing that could endanger US-ROK relations. In what he later called “an elliptical conversation,” Schlesinger did not refer to the US intelligence findings, and Park did not admit to a secret weapons program. The US defense secretary got the feeling, though, that “he knew that I knew.”

  In Washington that fall and winter, Assistant Secretary of State Philip Habib held increasingly intense conversations with South Korean ambassador Hahm Pyong Choon. By this time, the French contract had been signed; Habib demanded the Koreans cancel it. Through his ambassador, Park refused, declaring that this could not be done “as a matter of honor.”

  Washington concocted a number of incentives in return for cancellation of the French plant, including guaranteed access to reprocessing under US auspices when it was needed by the ROK civilian nuclear industry and access to additional American technology under a formal science and technology agreement. On the disincentive side, the administration, with congressional help, threatened to block Export-Import Bank financing of the next steps in Seoul’s ambitious civil nuclear power program if the proliferation concerns were not resolved. Finally, both Sneider and Habib were authorized to employ the heaviest threat ever wielded by the United States against South Korea: that the entire US security relationship would be put in doubt if Seoul went through with the plan.

  At the height of the campaign in December 1975, Sneider pointedly informed a senior ROK official that the “real consideration” for Koreans was “whether Korea [is] prepared [to] jeopardize availability of best technology and largest financing capacity which only U.S. could offer, as well as vital partnership with U.S., not only in nuclear and scientific areas but in broad political and security areas.” In deciding what to do, said Sneider, the ROK government “had to weigh the advantages of this kind of support and cooperation which USG [US government] could provide against the French option.” According to an ROK participant, Donald Rumsfeld, who succeeded Schlesinger as secretary of defense, bluntly told his ROK counterpart in May 1976 that the United States “will review the entire spectrum of its relations with the ROK,” including security and economic arrangements, if Seoul insisted on developing nuclear weapons.

  Faced with such adamant US opposition—all done in secret—Park reluctantly canceled the contract. The episode demonstrated that when the United States was determined—and when it believed its security interests on the peninsula were at stake—it retained the clout in the mid-1970s to overwhelm even the most determined intentions of the Seoul government.

  In the aftermath, Sneider worried that this was not the end of the affair. What concerned him most about Korea’s future, he told National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft in a White House meeting, was “Park’s emotionally charged drive to seek self-sufficiency and self-reliance through a program of nuclear weapons and missile development.” He recommended that after a decent interval, the United States begin confronting Park anew on the issue, lest the program be revived, resulting in the temptation for North Korea “to go the same route.” Sneider observed that “Park was guilty of sloppy thinking in believing he could somehow obtain greater security by these policies; yet, given U.S. attitudes, one had to admit that South Koreans had some reason for their concern over their future security.”

  Although Park was forced to give up the French reprocessing plant and later to forgo purchasing a new Canadian heavy-water reactor, the program refused to die. Rather than disband his clandestine nuclear team, Park gave it a new organizational parent, the Korean Nuclear Fuels Development Corporation, and a new objective, the manufacture of nuclear fuel rods for the country’s reactors. In 1978 South Korea once again began discussions with France about reprocessing facilities. Again Washington blocked the deal, this time with the personal intervention of President Carter with French prime minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

  Nonetheless, Son U Ryun, one of Park’s former press secretaries, later wrote that during a walk on a beach in January 1979, the president confided that “we can complete development of a nuclear bomb by the first half of 1981.” When this happens, Park went on, “Kim Il Sung won’t be able to dare to invade the south.” Son claimed Park said he planned to show the bomb to the world in the Armed Forces Day parade in 1981 and then announce his resignation as president. Son’s account is widely disputed by former officials who were close to Park. However, it is consistent with the testimony of Kang Chang Sung, chief of the powerful Defense Security Command under Park. Kang said Park told him personally in September 1978 that 95 percent of the nuclear weapons development had been completed by the Agency for Defense Development and that atomic bombs would be produced by South Korea in the
first half of 1981.

  MURDER IN THE DEMILITARIZED ZONE

  On the morning of August 18, 1976, five South Korean workmen, accompanied by a ten-man American and South Korean security detail, gathered around a prominent poplar tree near the western edge of the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom. The JSA, roughly circular and about eight hundred yards in diameter, was for decades the only part of the demilitarized zone without fortifications, barbed-wire fences, and land mines marking the division between the North and South. On that day, tension was unusually high due to recent frequent threats, obscenities, and shoving matches.

  The purpose of the work detail on that steamy August day was to trim a forty-foot tree that, in its summer foliage, obstructed the view between two guard posts manned by US and ROK forces within the Joint Security Area. As the work got under way, two North Korean officers and nine enlisted men appeared and asked what was going on. After first seeming to approve, the Korean People’s Army (KPA) commander, Lieutenant Pak Chul, a combative eight-year veteran of the JSA, demanded that the trimming stop, warning that “if you cut more branches, there will be a big problem.” The senior American officer, Captain Arthur Bonifas, a West Point graduate who was within three days of ending his one-year tour in Korea, ignored the protest. Lieutenant Pak then sent for reinforcements, who arrived by truck carrying metal pipes and ax handles, raising the KPA total on the scene to about thirty men. They surrounded the tree trimmers. The North Korean officer again demanded that the work stop, saying to the South Korean officer who served as the interpreter, “The branches that are cut will be of no use, just as you will be after you die.” Captain Bonifas told the interpreter that he believed the North Koreans were bluffing. He ordered the work to proceed.