The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [167]
On the way home from Seoul, Aspin gave a background briefing to journalists aboard his plane that inadvertently gave rise to alarmist reports that war was on the verge of breaking out. Reuters news agency, which filed the most breathless dispatch, quoted a senior U.S. defense official as saying, "We may be entering a kind of danger zone," because North Korea had massed 70 percent of its military force near South Korea (which in fact was nothing new) and might launch a desperate conventional attack on the South sparked by hunger and economic frustration in Pyongyang. In a precursor to concerns which later were to be widely discussed, Aspin told the reporters, "These guys are starving" and may feel that "you can either starve or get killed in a war." The Aspin briefing gave rise to a full-scale journalistic war scare-to the surprise and dismay of most officials who had been following the situation.
On November 5 a passionate column by Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post demanded that Clinton "stop talking to the North Koreans-it is time for an economic blockade-and start talk ing to the American people" about a military emergency in Asia. The administration was so jarred by Krauthammer's column that a State Department meeting was convened to discuss it. Two days later, President Clinton threw oil on the fire by warning on NBC's Meet the Press that "North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb," implying that the United States would take military action to stop it. Weeks later, after various U.S. officials speculated that Pyongyang already had at least one bomb, the White House said Clinton had misspoken.
Suddenly North Korea was at the top of the news in the United States. An NBC/ Wall Street Journal public opinion poll reported that North Korea's development of a nuclear weapon was considered the nation's most serious foreign policy problem by 31 percent of a nationwide sample-a larger proportion than any other single issue they picked.
On November 11, amid the war scare and in the absence of diplomatic movement, the chief DPRK negotiator, Kang Sok Ju, made public the proposed "package solution" in Pyongyang. Without revealing its earlier history, he set out the main elements of the handwritten paper that had been given to Quinones a month earlier and discussed inconclusively ever since.
On November 15, after fifteen midlevel meetings in New York and a host of letters back and forth to Pyongyang, the administration finally decided to put its own "package deal" on the table. The essence of the immediate bargain was North Korean resumption of regular IAEA inspections and a renewal of dialogue with the South, in return for cancellation of the 1994 Team Spirit military exercise and the convening of the long-delayed third round of U.S.-DPRK negotiations. Phase two, to be bargained in detail when American and North Korean negotiators finally began their third round, would deal with IAEA inspections of the two disputed Yongbyon waste sites, diplomatic recognition of North Korea, and trade and investment concessions from the United States, South Korea, and Japan.
The new administration proposal immediately leaked to The Washington Post's R. Jeffrey Smith, who was following the maneuvering closely. The publicity was a bombshell in Seoul, which was always extremely sensitive to American concessions to North Korea, and especially to suggestions that South Korea was not the dominant force in policy toward Pyongyang. In addition, the proposal was anathema to President Kim Young Sam for another and highly personal reason: a "package deal" similar in name and concept had been publicly suggested in spring by his longtime rival in domestic politics, Kim Dae Jung. If he was for it, Kim Young Sam was