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Pyongyang's 60-Year Obsession

By Bertil Lintner

10 October, 2006
Asia Times Online

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.


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