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By Root 1945 0

for the remaining weapons, which were artillery warheads and gravity bombs stored at Kunsan air base on the west coast, south of Seoul. In October 1990, U.S. ambassador Donald Gregg, after consulting General Robert RisCassi, the U.S. military commander in Korea, and also the general's two immediate predecessors, recommended to Washington that the weapons be removed to facilitate the negotiations with the North and to avoid their emergence as a serious political issue in the South. The following spring, Admiral William J. Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an Asia expert, publicly recommended that the nuclear weapons be withdrawn as part of a deal with North Korea. Crowe spelled out in public what others were saying in private, that due to the mobility of U.S. forces, "the actual presence of any nuclear weapons in South Korea is not necessary to maintain a nuclear umbrella over the R.O.K."

These recommendations, however, ran into deep reservations in Washington. President Bush's national security adviser, retired Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, was strongly opposed to removing the American weapons as a concession to the North on grounds that Pyongyang had done nothing to earn this reward. Equally serious was concern that removal of the weapons would be seen by the South, and especially by its military, as weakening both the U.S. deterrent against the North and the U.S. commitment to defense of the South.

In the spring of 1991, the topic of the nuclear weapons was broached, gingerly at first, in a series of intimate meetings in Seoul involving Gregg, RisCassi, and several senior officials of the Blue House and ROK Defense and Foreign ministries. Under previous U.S. practice, only the South Korean president-with no aides present-had been briefed on the nature and location of American nuclear weapons in the country. Until the highly confidential "inner circle meetings" began in Seoul, a Korean civilian participant recalled, "it was taboo even to talk about the American tactical nuclear weapons; for us, they were shocking to consider."

The discussions deepened in a two-day meeting of American and South Korean military and civilian officials at U.S. Pacific Command headquarters at Honolulu, Hawaii, in early August. While other issues were mentioned, Washington's real purpose was to be sure that the Koreans would be comfortable with removal of the remaining American nuclear weapons. At the high point of the sessions, the representative of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff announced the Pentagon's conclusion that the nuclear deployments in South Korea were not necessary for the country's defense. While no strong objections to removal of the weapons were raised by the Koreans, some suggested that they be used as a bargaining chip for concessions from Pyongyang. The meeting concluded without formal agreement.

What finally broke through the inertia in Washington was a dramatic and unexpected development in a different part of the world: the failed coup in mid-August 1991 of hard-liners against Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Although the plotters were arrested, the coup marked the transfer of real power from Gorbachev to his rival, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and the beginning of the rapid move toward dissolution of the Soviet Union. On September 27, in an initiative calculated to bring forth reciprocal steps from Moscow, Bush announced the removal of all ground-based and seabased tactical nuclear weapons from U.S. forces worldwide. The withdrawal of the nuclear artillery from South Korea would leave in place there only some sixty nuclear warheads for air-delivered gravity bombs.

After consulting his advisers, Bush secretly decided to remove these last American nuclear deployments on the peninsula. He also decided in principle to permit North Koreans to inspect the U.S. base at Kunsan where the nuclear weapons had been stored, to meet another of North Korea's demands. "We were able to hook a ride on a Soviet-related decision," said Richard Solomon, who as assistant secretary for East Asian and