The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [150]
A complicated issue for both Koreas was nuclear reprocessing, or obtaining plutonium from spent reactor fuel by chemical separation. Koreans were acutely conscious that nearby Japan operates reprocessing facilities for its civil nuclear program under arrangements with the United States that predate the time when Washington had focused on reprocessing as a proliferation risk. Some in the South were also eager not to foreclose the option of a future reprocessing plant on economic grounds and, some Americans suspected, as a potential source of weapons material. However, Roh agreed under heavy U.S. pressure to an unqualified commitment to forgo nuclear reprocessing, on grounds that it would better position the South to bargain against the North's then-suspected reprocessing capability. As for the North, the giant structure being built to house its reprocessing plant at Yongbyon was nearing completion-the most recent U.S. intelligence estimate was that it could be producing plutonium by mid-1992-but this did not seem to faze Pyongyang's negotiators when agreeing to ban reprocessing. When Representative Stephen Solarz met Kim 11 Sung on December 18 in Pyongyang, the Great Leader declared, pounding the table at the end of a long and contentious meeting, "We have no nuclear reprocessing facilities!"
Under the bilateral deal as negotiated, the South agreed to cancel the 1992 U.S.-ROK Team Spirit military exercise in return for North Korean willingness to permit outside inspection of its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. In retrospect, cancellation of Team Spirit was a ROK concession of crucial importance to the country's powerful military, which had consistently resisted compromises affecting the nuclear weapons program.
In the final agreement signed on December 31, both North and South pledged not to "test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons" and not to "possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment facilities." Moreover, they agreed to reciprocal inspections of facilities of the other side, to be arranged and implemented by a Joint Nuclear Control Commission.
To achieve the agreement, which apparently had been ordered by Kim II Sung, North Korean negotiators were uncharacteristically willing to compromise. While the South was exultant at the results, some of its officials felt in retrospect they had pushed the North too hard. Riding together in a car from Pyongyang to Kaesong nine months later, after signing protocols flowing from the December accords, DPRK Major General Kim Yong Chul complained to his counterpart, ROK Major General Park Yong Ok, that 90 percent of the language originated on the southern side and therefore "this is your agreement, not our agreement." At that moment, the South Korean officer began to doubt whether the concessions that had been made could be actually implemented.
At the time of the signing of the agreement on New Year's Eve, however, Kim 11 Sung portrayed the North-South nuclear pact as a great victory. In a display of his enthusiasm, he dispatched a helicopter to bring his negotiators home from Panmunjom to Pyongyang in triumphant style. At the dawn of 1992 The Economist, the British weekly on international affairs, proclaimed that "the Korean peninsula looked a little safer this week."
MEETING IN NEW YORK
Three weeks into 1992, the United States rolled out its biggest contribution to the positive trend-a bilateral American-North Korean meeting at the political level. Pyongyang had long sought direct discussions with senior levels in Washington, seeing the United States as the heart and head of the West, the superpower overlord of South Korea and Japan. Pyongyang also saw relations with the United States as an important victory in its zero-sum game with the South. Its leaders hoped that the beginning of a relationship with Washington could,