The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [146]
After an article that I wrote about the briefing appeared in The Washington Post, the North Korea Mission to the United Nations issued a press release denying any nuclear weapons activity and calling my report "an utterly groundless lie." Despite the denial, the intelligence briefing and the notoriety it attained launched the public and political tumult over the North Korean nuclear program.
The issue was to dominate U.S. policy regarding the divided peninsula for five years to come, at times to the exclusion of almost anything else.
The North Korean response to growing pressure to permit IAEA inspections was to insist it would never agree while being threatened by American nuclear weapons, especially those based in South Ko rea. The argument had undeniable logic and appeal. As officials in Washington studied the issue, they also realized it would be difficult to organize an international coalition to oppose North Korean nuclear weapons activity as long as American nuclear weapons were in place on the divided peninsula. A Bush administration interagency committee on the North Korean nuclear issue kept coming back to whether the American nuclear deployments should be removed but was unable to reach a decision.
American nuclear weapons had been stationed on the territory of South Korea for more than three decades, since President Eisenhower authorized the deployment of nuclear warheads on Honest John missiles and 280-millimeter long-range artillery in December 1957. As South Vietnam was faltering in the early 1970s, creating fears about South Korea's future, American deployments became notably more prominent. By 1972, according to U.S. documents obtained by nuclear researcher William Arkin, 763 nuclear warheads were deployed in South Korea, the peak number ever recorded.
In 1974 congressional committees began raising questions in public about the security and usefulness of the atomic weapons. As a correspondent who often visited Korea, I learned and reported at that time that American nuclear weapons were stationed uncomfortably close to the DMZ and that nuclear warheads had been flown by helicopter almost routinely to the edge of the DMZ in training exercises.
Public threats to use nuclear weapons were part of the U.S. response to nervousness in Seoul following the fall of Saigon. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, publicly acknowledging the presence of American atomic weapons in Korea, declared in June 1975 that "if circumstances were to require the use of tactical nuclear weapons ... I think that that would be carefully considered." He added, "I do not think it would be wise to test [American] reactions." A year later, well-publicized temporary deployments of nuclearcapable U.S. warplanes to Korea in February 1976 and the first of the annual U.S.-ROK Team Spirit military maneuvers that June involved large-scale movements of troops and practice for use of nuclear weapons. In August 1976 nuclear-capable air and naval assets were massively deployed to Korea after the killing of the two American officers in the DMZ tree-cutting episode.
Thereafter, the trend reversed as the Carter administration reduced the number of American nuclear weapons deployed in Korea to about 250 warheads. Part of the reduction was due to Carter's withdrawal policies and part to the replacement of some obsolete nuclear weapons by highly accurate conventional weapons. By the onset of the Bush administration in 1989, the Korean deployments had been reduced to about 100 warheads. The cutbacks had been made without public notice, in keeping with the long-standing U. S. policy to "neither confirm nor deny" deployments of nuclear weapons abroad.
American military commanders saw little practical requirement in Korea