Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

The Japanese government supplied an initial $5.8 million so that KEDO could go into operation, but it has since regularly suspended funds whenever something has happened in North Korea that has not met its approval. In addition, elements in the U.S. government keep undercutting the agreement. U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen, for instance, said in Seoul in April 1997 that the United States intends to keep its forces stationed in Korea even if the two Koreas reunite. He gave no reason for this astonishing one-sided commitment, which implies an unending American imperial role in East Asia. He also predicted that North Korea was on the verge of collapse, which may explain why the United States has been so slow to implement the agreement. Instead of delivering fuel oil, as promised, or opening diplomatic and economic relations, as the North Koreans expected, the U.S. government has vacillated, often blaming Congress for its failure to fund the new relationship. Its impulse seemed to be to provide North Korea with just enough food to keep it from starving while hoping that its collapse would be “soft,” relatively nonviolent, and controllable. Unexpectedly, with the onset of the global economic crisis in 1997, South Korea itself came close to collapse and proved incapable of paying its share of the new North Korean reactors. The American government made no effort to find or raise replacement funds.

It is important to understand that the war scare of 1994, temporarily relieved by Jimmy Carter’s mediation and the subsequent Agreed Framework, sprang from two sets of related causes. The first was, of course, North Korea’s flirtation with nuclear brinkmanship in the context of the collapse of the Communist world that had sustained it since its creation. The second was a kind of military machismo on the part of the Pentagon and its assorted cronies and clients around the world. Without any regard at all for Korean and East Asian realities, the American military leadership and its political backers seemed intent on having another “splendid little war” in Korea, a rerun of the 1991 Gulf War, with all of its medals, promotions, and new post–Cold War assignments for the armed forces. Needless to say, the Pentagon strategists who abstractly think of Korea as a potential East Asian Iraq give no heed at all to Korea as a real place in time and space—it is not, for example, an uninhabited desert, and any use of force there will produce catastrophic casualties on all sides. Despite its being one of the most heavily armed places on earth, there is no plausible military “option” in Korea. The temporarily favorable resolution of the 1994 threat of nuclear proliferation in North Korea, once direct negotiations and diplomacy were given a chance to work, did not eliminate either of the contending forces that had caused it, and at the end of the 1990s they reerupted to produce a festering politicalmilitary sore.

Frustrated by the failure of the United States to deliver on what Pyongyang expected to get from the Agreed Framework, North Korea continued development of a medium-range and potentially an intercontinental-range missile force. The North had long worked on copying, improving, and manufacturing the Soviet-designed Scud short-range liquid-fueled battlefield missile, which it then exported to earn hard currency or barter wherever it could. Throughout the 1980s, it traded weaponry to Iran for oil, accounting for as much as 40 percent of all Iranian arms imports during the Iran-Iraq War.⁸

After the Scud, the North’s next big project was to build an intermediate-range missile that conceivably might deter the massive forces the United States arrayed against it at bases in Japan and on the ships of the Seventh Fleet. It is not clear whether this effort was technologically serious or whether it merely aimed at deterrence by raising anxieties. The first North Korean IRBM (intermediate-range ballistic missile), the Nodong 1, was a Scud with additional engines bolted to its waist, giving it enough thrust to reach parts of Japan. The North only tested the Nodong once, in June 1993, when it went three hundred miles into the Sea of Japan. The accuracy of the Nodong and how many it has are unknown. Equally unknown is whether North Korea has even one nuclear warhead that it might attach to one of its missiles. The presumption is that the Agreed Framework interrupted its movement toward a nuclear device and that its missiles, even if they conceivably might arrive over their targets, are not armed with nuclear weapons.