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By Root 1939 0

conveyed the heart of the American president's message with its emphasis on North Korea's nuclear program, Kim became visibly angry, speaking loudly and shaking his fist. He harked back to the foreign policy pronouncements of his New Year's address, when he charged that the United States had raised "the nonexistent nuclear issue" and was itself to blame for bringing nuclear weapons into the Korean peninsula to threaten the DPRK. "Pressure and threat cannot work on us," Kim said in his address and repeated to Graham. The two countries needed to communicate with each other, Kim said, not confront each other-but if the United States used the language of threats, he declared, it would drive the situation to catastrophe.

As Graham was en route, a development in the United States had made North Korea's mood much less conciliatory. On January 26, the day before he arrived, The New York Times reported preparations for highly visible reinforcement of American forces in the Korean peninsula: deployment of Patriot missiles, the antimissile weapons used by American forces in the Gulf War. When Graham and his party landed in Pyongyang, antiaircraft missiles could be seen moving into place around the airport. Troops could be seen digging trenches in the capital, even in the subzero cold of the depth of winter. "The tension crackled," observed a Graham aide.

Deploying the Patriots had been under consideration since December, when they had been requested by the U.S. military commander in Korea, General Gary Luck, as a precautionary measure in case war broke out and North Korean Rodong missiles were fired against American military targets. Luck's December request had been temporarily shelved because of State Department objections that the deployments could upset the negotiations with North Korea over resuming the international inspections. But when Michael Gordon, the Times Pentagon correspondent, made a reporting trip to the South and returned with information about the potential Patriot deployment, "the White House went into a panic," Gordon recalled later. Fearful that the administration would be charged with withholding vital military equipment from American troops-as had been the case when a U.S. peacekeeping unit had been overwhelmed in Somalia the previous October-the White House immediately began briefing members of Congress on the Patriot request, and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake telephoned Gordon to tell him that Luck's request was in the process of being approved-giving rise to an exclusive story in the Times.

News stories and commentaries about the likely Patriot deployments were replete with references to their use by U.S. forces in Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf. While North Korea was absorbing this decision, the South Korean Defense Ministry announced that the Team Spirit military exercise, which always brought a fierce reaction from Pyongyang and had been a factor in the breakdown of negotiations the previous year, would be held again in 1994 unless North Korea agreed to pending proposals for resumption of international nuclear inspections.

At this point, the tone of North Korean statements shifted from optimistic about the outcome of U.S.-DPRK talks to bitterly accusatory. American experts believed this reflected a shift in the preponderance of opinion among the North Korean leadership. "United States Must Be Held Totally Responsible for Catastrophic Consequences Arising From Its Perfidy" was the headline on the English-language version of a statement issued January 31 by the North Korean Foreign Ministry. The statement cited the decision on the Patriots and reports of the impending decision on Team Spirit as "new war maneuvers the United States has been pursuing behind the screen of the DPRK-USA talks." North Korea threatened to break off the talks, pull out of the NPT, and accelerate its nuclear program-threats that were repeated in a letter to Gallucci from DPRK chief negotiator Kang Sok Ju, one of a series of missives that had been going back and forth in private between Washington and Pyongyang.