The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [143]
The first indigenous reactor at Yongbyon was a relatively modest plant rated by the North Koreans as producing 5 megawatts of electric power. But in June 1988 a much larger reactor, eventually described by the North Koreans as intended to produce 50 megawatts of power, was photographed under construction at Yongbyon. Such a plant, in combination with the huge reprocessing facility under construction, convinced most Washington officials with access to the closely held photography that North Korea was launched headlong on a drive to create its own nuclear weapons, and a highly ambitious drive at that. In what had been the middle of nowhere-a place famous in Korean poetry for its budding azaleas and little more-a stark and imposing industrial works of more than one hundred buildings was rising, surrounded by high fences and antiaircraft weapons and heavily guarded. As these facilities progressed toward completion and North Korea moved closer to being able to produce weapons of immense destructive power, the busy construction site at Yongbyon became increasingly an international problem that could not be ignored.
THE ORIGINS OF THE NUCLEAR PROGRAM
Korea's involvement with nuclear weapons goes back to the dawn of the nuclear age. During World War II, Japan was vigorously pursuing a nuclear weapons program, though it lagged behind the all-out campaigns of the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union. As U.S. bombing of the home islands increased, Japan moved its secret weapons program to the northern part of its Korean colony to get away from the attacks and take advantage of the area's undamaged electricity-generating capacity and abundance of useful minerals. After the division of Korea in 1945, the Soviet Union mined monazite and other materials in the North for use in its own atomic weapons program.
During the 1950-53 Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur requested authority to use atomic weapons and submitted a list of targets, for which he would need twenty-six A-bombs. His successor, General Matthew Ridgway, renewed MacArthur's request, but such weapons were never used. In early 1953 the newly inaugurated U.S. president, Dwight Eisenhower, began dropping hints that the United States would use the atom bomb if the deadlock persisted in the negotiations to conclude an armistice ending the war. Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and Vice President Richard Nixon all claimed later that the nuclear threats had played a major role in bringing about the truce, although recent revelations from Soviet archives cast doubt on that analysis.
Following the end of the war, the Soviet Union and North Korea signed two agreements on cooperation in nuclear research, and a small number of North Korean scientists began to arrive at the Soviet Union's Dubna Nuclear Research Center near Moscow. The Soviet Union also provided a small experimental nuclear reactor, which was sited at Yongbyon. At Soviet insistence, the reactor was placed under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that material was not diverted to weapons, even though at that time North Korea was not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The Soviet Union maintained that its assistance to North Korea did not include weapons development but was limited to civilian activities.
In its own quest for nuclear weapons, North Korea had turned to China shortly after its giant neighbor detonated its first atomic blast in 1964. Kim Il Sung sent a delegation to Beijing asking for assistance to mount a parallel program and, in a letter to Mao Zedong, declared that as brother countries who shared fighting and dying on the battlefield, China and North Korea should also share the atomic secret. Two former Chinese officials and a Japanese expert familiar with Chinese affairs told me that Mao turned down the North Korean request. "Chinese leaders thought this was a very expensive project," said an official who was in the Korea section of the Chinese Foreign