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Since the early 1993 encounter, Pyongyang had been using its nuclear program as a bargaining chip to trade for recognition, security assurances, and economic benefits from the United States. A failing and isolated regime with few other cards to play, Pyongyang enhanced its bargaining power whenever its cooperation with the IAEA diminished and the threat increased that it might proceed to manufacture nuclear weapons. At the same time, such troublemaking actions, if they went too far, also increased the risk of being confronted and possibly overwhelmed by external forces. By this time, North Korea had become skilled at brinksmanship, increasing its leverage by playing close to the edge of the precipice; the problem was that it wasn't always clear just where the edge was.

In 1994 the crisis was intensified by serious military dimensions. As the United States and its allies pushed for UN Security Council sanctions against Pyongyang, North Korea repeatedly declared that "sanctions are a declaration of war." In response, the Pentagon accelerated a U.S. military buildup in and around Korea that had quietly begun several months earlier. Preparations were being made in Washington for a much more powerful buildup of men and materiel, with great potential for precipitating a military clash on the divided peninsula.

For Robert Gallucci, the spring of 1994 had an eerie and disturbing resemblance to historian Barbara Tuchman's account of "the guns of August," when, in the summer of 1914, World War I began in cross-purposes, misunderstanding, and inadvertence. As he and other policy makers moved inexorably toward a confrontation with North Korea, Gallucci was conscious that "this had an escalatory quality, that could deteriorate not only into a war but into a big war." Secretary of Defense William Perry, looking back on the events, concluded that the course he was on "had a real risk of war associated with it." Commanders in the field were even more convinced. Lieutenant General Howell Estes, the senior U.S. Air Force officer in Korea, recalled later that although neither he nor other commanders said so out loud, not even in private conversations with one another, "inside we all thought we were going to war."

THE DEFUELING CRISIS

The issue that precipitated this showdown was the unloading of the irradiated fuel rods from the 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon, North Korea's only indigenous reactor so far in operation. Such rods, each a yard long and about two inches wide, could be chemically treated in the plant in the final stages of construction at Yongbyon to separate plutonium for atomic weapons from the rest of the highly radioactive material.

Based on satellite surveillance of smoke coming from the containment vessel of the reactor, the CIA estimated that it had been shut down for up to 110 days in 1989, during which period about half of its eight thousand fuel rods could have been replaced and thus been made available for fabrication into plutonium. North Korea said the reactor had been down only about 60 days and that only a few rods had been removed because they were damaged. Based on the higher figure, the CIA estimated at the end of 1993 that North Korea might have obtained enough plutonium for one or two bombs of about ten kilotons of explosive power each, similar to those exploded by the United States at Hiroshima in 1945. This CIA estimate was the basis for a December 1993 National Intelligence Estimate that there was a "better than even" chance that North Korea already had the makings of a bomb (though State Department and U.S. national laboratory analysts hotly dissented), and it was the basis for numerous public statements along similar lines by the secretary of defense, the CIA director, and other senior U.S. government officials. (Much later, after the crisis was over, the CIA "reassessed" its methods of observation and concluded that the lower figure cited by North Korea, 60 days, could well have been right. If this were the case, the theoretical weapons potential of North Korea's plutonium was considerably