The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [159]
The day before the exercise, North Korea announced that Kim Jong Il, who had been supreme military commander for a little over a year, had ordered the entire nation and armed forces to "switch to a state of readiness for war" in view of the Team Spirit "nuclear war test aimed at a surprise, preemptive strike at the northern half of the country." Senior military officials, told that an attack might be imminent, were ordered to evacuate to underground fortifications. All military leaves were canceled, the heads of all soldiers were shaved, steel helmets were worn, and troops were issued rifle ammunition. In Pyongyang armored cars were drawn up in rows near security headquarters, and armed police checked military passes, while in the countryside the civilian population was mobilized to dig trenches near their homes as protection against air attack. In a message to the IAEA headquarters in Vienna, North Korea refused again to accept the special inspections, due to the Team Spirit exercise and the "state of semi-war" in the country. Blix rejected those excuses and repeated the inspection demand.
On March 12, North Korea announced it was withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, citing the treaty's escape clause on defending supreme national interests. It gave two reasons: the Team Spirit "nuclear war rehearsal," it charged, had violated the spirit of the NPT and of the North-South denuclearization accord; and the IAEA demand for special inspection of two suspect sites, which it described as "an undisguised strong arm act designed to disarm the DPRK and strangle our socialist system." Pyongyang recognized that under the treaty its withdrawal would not take effect until after a three-month waiting period. If and when it became effective on June 12, North Korea's action would be the first withdrawal by any nation from the treaty.
Although there had been abundant hints that North Korea might withdraw from the NPT, many officials who had not been monitoring the North Korean nuclear situation were unaware of them. Most governments and publics were blindsided. The announcement of the withdrawal was treated as an incomprehensible act of defiance and an ominous sign that North Korea was hell-bent on the production of nuclear weapons. As the world reacted with shock and dismay, North Korea's nuclear program suddenly leaped to the top of the international agenda.
12
WITHDRAWAL AND ENGAGEMENT
he first nuclear proliferation crisis of the post-cold war era came as an unwelcome surprise to the newly installed governments of Kim Young Sam in Seoul and Bill Clinton in Washington, which were both barely organized to deal with routine business, let alone a complex and dangerous confrontation with North Korea.
The South Korean government was in its fifteenth day in office on March 12, 1993, when the new foreign minister, Han Sung Joo, received word of North Korea's announcement that it intended to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. A former professor of international relations with a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, Han was an expert on regional and global issues but a neophyte in governmental service. After trying in vain to reach the new South Korean president, who was attending a naval graduation ceremony outside Seoul, Han sat down to assess the potential consequences of North Korea's precipitating act.
The major concerns, as Han saw them, lined up in this order: first, the possibility that North Korea would actually produce nuclear weapons, thereby changing the strategic situation on the divided peninsula; second, the possibility that the United States and other nations would react so strongly that war would break out in Korea; third, the expectable demand inside South Korea to match the North Korean bomb program, touching off an arms race that could spur Japan as well as South Korea to become nuclear weapons powers and destroy the international