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Sitting with Soviet leaders in the Kremlin, Kim volunteered to discuss his relations with China and declared them to be good. Yes, it was true that China was flirting with the Americans and Japanese, but Kim declared that this was because "China is a poor country with a population of one billion people and its leadership is seeking help with modernization from the United States and Japan." At another point in his tour, Kim said that despite his confrontation with the United States and Japan, his greatest fear was "of socialism not being maintained in China." With Deng Xiaoping moving rapidly into market economics and hosting Reagan, "we must all insure that they follow a socialist way and none other," Kim told an Eastern European communist leader.

In the Kremlin, Kim told Chernenko that North Korea had no intention of attacking the South and spoke of his recent proposal for three-way talks with the United States and South Korea. While Washington was insisting on bringing in the Chinese to make a fourparty negotiation, Kim said that "China is against such an arrangement." Kremlin officials responded that "the Americans are urging the Chinese toward a solution that suits them and their allies, but which creates the danger of the Korean problem being solved behind the backs of the Koreans themselves." Not surprisingly in view of the acute Korean sensitivity to outside interference, "we got the impression that the approach of China to solving the Korea problem was also causing some anxiety in Pyongyang," wrote a Soviet official who made notes on the Kremlin talks.

Kim assured Chernenko that in the future North Korea would give closer study to "the experience of the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union." Then, having refurbished high-level Communist Party and government ties between the two countries, Kim asked for more Soviet economic and military assistance. He was remarkably successful.

The Soviet Union had been North Korea's main source of external economic support since the creation of the DPRK, regardless of the ups and downs of political relations. By 1983, however, Soviet trade had fallen to less than 40 percent of Pyongyang's exports to all countries and about 25 percent of its imports. After Kim's 1984 visit, the flow of goods to and especially from the Soviet Union increased rapidly. Due initially to an extensive aid package approved as a result of Kim's visit, imports from the USSR jumped from $471 million in 1984 to $1,186 million in 1986 and $1,909 million in 1988, when they accounted for roughly two-thirds of North Korea's imports from all countries. Moscow not only financed a growing trade deficit with Pyongyang but also provided Soviet coal and oil at cut-rate prices, well below those of the world market.

On the military side, Chernenko was equally forthcoming. Since the early 1970s, Moscow had refused to provide sophisticated war planes to North Korea despite supplying them to such nations as Egypt, Libya, and Syria, because of a Soviet fear that Kim might use the planes rashly. However, on the basis of the newly improved USSR-DPRK relationship and because the Reagan administration was supplying the South with high-performance F-16s, Chernenko promised to supply North Korea with sixty MiG-25 fighters-probably no match for the F-16s but a quantum jump beyond the DPRK's previous weapons. The planes began showing up in North Korean skies the following spring. The Kremlin's military aid package also included SAM-3 surface-to-air missiles, and Soviet surface-to-surface SCUD missiles with a fifty-mile range.

In return, Soviet military aircraft were permitted to begin regular overflights of North Korean airspace before the end of 1984. By the end of the following year, they had flown twenty-one missions over North Korea. Soviet warships also began making port calls in North Korea. Even before this flowering of Moscow-Pyongyang military cooperation, the U.S. Command in South Korea was sufficiently concerned that it notified American forces whenever