North Korea's "Great Leader", Kim Il-sung,
was obsessed with nuclear weapons even before the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea was
proclaimed on September 9, 1948. At the end of
World War II, thousands of Korean workers were
repatriated from Japan, and ended up in the
northern, then Soviet-occupied, part of the Korean
peninsula. Many of them had been working in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and had been there when
American nuclear bombs fell on those cities in
August 1945. They brought with them stories of the
ultimate "doomsday" weapon, which the Americans
possessed, and had used with such devastating
outcomes.
The fear of nuclear weapons grew
even stronger during the Korean
War,
when the United States contemplated launching
nuclear strikes against the North. On December 9,
1950, the commander of the US forces, General
Douglas MacArthur, even submitted a list of
targets for twenty-six atomic bombs to halt the
advance of the North Korean army and its Chinese
allies.
Since then, North Korea has wanted
to possess nuclear weapons as a means of
countering what it perceives as a military threat
from the US and thus ensuring the continued
existence of the regime in Pyongyang. Kim
Il-sung's successor, his son Kim Jong-il, has also
always perceived nuclear weapons as an important
aspect of greatness. In 1998, the high-ranking
North Korean defector Hwang Jang Yop described the
reason behind North Korea's nuclear strategy:
"For one thing, they [the North Koreans]
will use them [nuclear weapons] if South Korea
starts a war. For another, they intend to
devastate Japan to prevent the United States from
participating. Would it sill participate, even
after Japan is devastated? That is how they
think."
In more recent years, there is
also another, more acute reason why North Korea
believes it must be armed with nuclear weapons:
the fear of becoming the next Iraq. In the October
3 statement announcing the plan to test a nuclear
bomb, the North Korean foreign ministry declared:
"A people without a reliable war deterrent are
bound to meet a tragic death and the sovereignty
of their country is bound to be wantonly infringed
upon. This is a bitter lesson taught by the
bloodshed resulting from the law of the jungle in
different parts of the world." On January 29,
2002, US President George W Bush lumped Iraq, Iran
and North Korea in an "axis of evil" and a threat
to American security. Shortly afterwards,
preparations for the invasion of Iraq began as
part of Bush's ongoing "war on terror".
North Korea began to do research into such
a deterrent only a few years after the end of the
Korean War. Alexander Zhebin, a former
Pyongyang-based correspondent for the Russian
newspaper Izvestiya, wrote in a 2000 paper: "In
1956, the United Institute for Nuclear Research
(UINR) was established in the city of Dubna near
Moscow to serve as an international science and
research center for the socialist countries. The
DPRK (North Korea) was among the institute's
original members." The UINR had laboratories and
research institutes specializing in high-energy
physics, neutron physics, and nuclear issues.
In 1965 a basic nuclear research reactor
became operational at Yongbyon, north of
Pyongyang, and the nuclear program had begun. The
center at Yongbyon was set up with Soviet
assistance and, apart from the research reactor,
included a radiochemical laboratory, a K-60,000
cobalt installation, and a B-25 betatron, a
sophisticated apparatus for accelerating electrons
in a circular path by magnetic induction. North
Korea was taking its first steps towards
developing its own nuclear power. The Soviets
provided all the blueprints, and soon Yongbyon was
a sprawling complex of circular buildings housing
the reactor storage facilities and a special
laundry to decontaminate protective clothing and
undergarments for the scientists and the workers,
and a boiler plant. Satellite images of the
reactor showed no attached power lines, which
would have been the case if it were meant for
electric power generation.
In the 1960s
and 70s, more than 300 North Korean nuclear
scientists were trained at the Moscow Engineering
Physics Institute, the Bauman Higher Technical
School, and the Moscow Energy Institute. Some
North Koreans even worked at the nuclear
scientific research complexes not only in Dubna
but also in Obninsk.
This training in the
Soviet Union came to an end when the communist
state collapsed in 1991, but East German and
Russian nuclear and missile scientists were
working in North Korea throughout the 1990s, most
probably in a private capacity. In December 1992,
Russian security minister Victor Barannikov
reported in a speech before the Russian parliament
that his men had blocked the departure of 64
Russian missile specialists to "a third country"
which had hired them to build military-purpose
missile installations capable of delivering
nuclear weapons. Barannikov did not specify what
country it was, but Russian journalists managed to
find some of the missile specialists and learned,
not surprisingly, that it was North Korea.
In an even more bizarre attempt to obtain
know-how from its former ally, two North Korean
intelligence agents were arrested near Vladivostok
in 1994 when they tried to sell eight kilograms of
heroin to raise money to acquire Russian military
secrets. In particular, they were interested in
buying technologies related to the dismantling of
nuclear reactors at one of the shipyards in the
Russian Far East. Now, any assistance - private or
otherwise - from the former Soviet bloc appears to
have stopped.
But North Korea has also had
other partners in its nuclear weapons program.
While plutonium suitable for nuclear weapons could
be extracted from the reactor in Yongbyon, North
Korea is also believed to be able to enrich
uranium, and that technology comes not from any
socialist or former socialist country, but from
Pakistan. For years Pakistan denied that its
cooperation with North Korea included nuclear
technology. But in late 2002, a US official stated
quite bluntly that North Korea was using uranium
enrichment technology with "'Made in Pakistan'
stamped all over it." The equipment included, at
the very least, gas centrifuges used to create
weapons-grade uranium. In October 2003, The
Economist quoted Pakistan critics as saying that
the country had "sold nuclear know-how to North
Korea in exchange for missile technology so that
Pakistan can deliver its nuclear warheads".
The question of the collaboration between
North Korea and Pakistan in missile and nuclear
programs was highlighted in a chilling manner on
June 7, 1998, when Kim Sa-nae, the wife of Kang
Thae-yun, a senior North Korean diplomat in
Pakistan, was shot dead in the capital, Islamabad.
Kang left Pakistan under mysterious circumstances
within a month of his wife's murder and his
whereabouts are unknown. Officially, Kang was
"economic counselor" at the North Korean embassy
in Islamabad, but press reports at the time stated
that he was, in fact, the local representative of
the Changgwang Sinyong Corporation. The plot
thickened when it was discovered that Kang and his
wife were close to Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the
director of the North Korean-Pakistani missile
program at his Khan Research Laboratories. Khan
was considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear
bomb - and the murder took place just a week after
Pakistan's first nuclear tests.
What was
the motive? Was there any connection between the
murder and the six tests that Pakistan carried out
at Chagai Hills in Balochistan on May 28-30, 1998?
According to diplomats who were based in Islamabad
at the time, there was. Agents from the US Central
Intelligence Agency had begun to cultivate a
friendship with Kim Sa-nae. One of them was a
Korean speaker, and it was obvious that the
Americans were trying to get information about
Pakistan's clandestine nuclear program, and the
extent to which North Korea was benefiting from
it. The relationship between Kim and the American
CIA operative caught the attention of Pakistan's
own intelligence service, the Inter-Services
Intelligence, which tipped off the North Korean
ambassador in Islamabad. Two North Korean agents
were assigned to deal with "the problem" and
entered the home of Kang and Kim shortly after
midnight on June 7. The agents fired repeatedly at
Kim. She died on the spot. The Pakistani
authorities later described the incident as "an
accident, not a murder".
Eventually,
Pakistan had to admit that it had assisted North
Korea in obtaining nuclear technology. On January
23, 2004, Pakistan's president, Gen Pervez
Musharraf, acknowledged that scientists from his
country had sold nuclear designs to other nations
probably "for personal financial gain". He denied,
however, that the Pakistani government knew of any
sales at the time. This claim was disputed by
several sources. A senior European diplomat said
that "it stretches credulity that proliferation on
this scale can occur without senior officials in
the government knowing about it". The transfer of
nuclear technology and hardware was also part of
an official deal. North Korea got nuclear know-how
in return for providing Pakistan with ballistic
missile technology.
Khan himself was
summoned for questioning and it transpired that he
had provided not only North Korea with nuclear
technology but also Iran and Libya. Khan confessed
to having visited North Korea on numerous
occasions, and taking with him centrifuges and
centrifuge parts. The Pakistani government claimed
that no transfers of nuclear know-how or equipment
took place after 1999. US intelligence sources,
however, are convinced the transfers continued at
least until 2002. Nevertheless, the US chose not
to confront Musharraf, an important ally in the
"war on terror", and praised him for "breaking up
what appears to have been one of the world's
largest nuclear proliferation networks".
It
is not clear what kind of nuclear device the North
Koreans tested in the morning of September 9, but, ironically, it could have been made possible
by the transfer of technology from a country that
now is a close US ally in the
war on terror. More likely, however, is that it
was plutonium-based. In May 1994, North Korea shut down the reactor at
Yongbyon and removed about 8,000 fuel rods, which
could be reprocessed into 25-30 kilograms of
plutonium, or enough to make 4-6 bombs. The
reactor was operating again from February 2003 until April 2005, when
another 8,000 fuel rods were believed to have
been removed.
And North Korea seems to
believe it needs those bombs. Its foreign ministry
said on October 3: "The DPRK's nuclear weapons
will serve as a reliable war deterrent for
protecting the supreme interests of the state and
the security of the Korean nation from the US
threat of aggression and averting a new wa r…on
the Korean peninsula." Given the reaction of the
outside world to North Korea's test, others would
argue that peace, stability and detente on the
peninsula have become the latest casualties in the
"war on terror".
(Copyright 2006 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
.)
