The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [207]
As tensions rose again, talk in Seoul and Washington turned again to a show of force to pressure North Korea. This time the adoption of sanctions by the UN Security Council seemed unlikely because the issue boiled down to North Korean pride versus South Korean pride. Moreover, Chinese cooperation was less likely because the United States and China were embroiled in a dispute over a U.S. visit by Taiwan's president.
To exert pressure on the North, ROK foreign minister Gong Ro Myung suggested bringing U.S. aircraft-carrier battle groups into both the seas around the Korean peninsula. Gong's idea was rejected, but officials in Washington began reconsidering the options for major augmentation of U.S. forces in Korea, such as had been on the table at the White House when Jimmy Carter met Kim Il Sung during the June 1994 crisis. According to a military officer who was involved, some senior administration officials, frustrated by the lack of agreement in April 1995 and angered by Pyongyang's threats, were saying, "Here we go again. There's only one way to play with North Korea, and that's very hard. Send in the troops." One option under active consideration at the Pentagon and in interagency discussions would have dispatched 75,000 additional U.S. troops-roughly double the 37,000 already stationed in Korea.
Once again, Ambassador Laney and the U.S. commander in Seoul, General Gary Luck, were more reluctant than some of their superiors in Washington to risk the beginning of rapid reinforcement, given that the reaction of the North Korean military was unforeseeable. On April 28 they sent an unsolicited joint message to Secretary of State Christopher and Secretary of Defense Perry strongly arguing that no emergency was at hand that justified a major augmentation of American forces. "Gen. Luck clearly viewed flowing lots of things as a precursor to war and that could lead to a conflict," said a Washington official familiar with his views. Luck's cabled objections arrived while Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General John Shalikashvili and senior aides were meeting on the subject. It abruptly halted the drift toward large-scale reinforcement.
Unlike the crisis of the year before, this tension was unknown to the public, but it added salience to the diplomatic effort to resolve the LWR identity issue. The principal effort was negotiations held from May 19 to June 12 between U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state Thomas Hubbard and DPRK vice foreign minister Kim Gye Gwan in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. While nominally between the United States and North Korea, in reality much of the bargaining was on the sidelines between the United States and South Korea, which repeatedly rejected proposals that would permit North Korea to save face.
In the end, Washington persuaded Seoul to accept a sleight-ofhand solution. North Korea formally agreed, at Kuala Lumpur, that the project would consist of "two pressurized light-water reactors with two coolant loops and a generating capacity of approximately 1,000 megawatts each ... the advanced version of U.S.-origin design and technology currently under production." This description perfectly described the South Korean standard reactors and no others in the world. Without explicitly mentioning South Korea, the agreement stipulated that KEDO, the U.S.-led consortium, would finance and supply the LWR reactors. However, as the accord was announced, the KEDO board, in a coordinated action that had been made known to the North in advance, announced simultaneously in Seoul that the state-run Korean Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) would be the prime contractor for the project