By 1994 North Korea’s nuclear programme
had raised fears and tensions between North and
South and the South’s ally, the US, to new
heights. Japan also felt threatened by the situa-
tion’s volatility. Reductions in the large armies
and numerous weapons, a tremendous burden
especially to the North, a lessening of tension and
more intercourse between North and South
nevertheless brought their own tangible benefits
to a people who had suffered so much in the
twentieth century.
North Korea remains one of the last unrecon-
structed communist dictatorships. Its ‘Dear
Leader’ lives in luxury while the people starve.
Famine in 1997 caused the deaths of possibly as
many as 2 million. The population survives at
subsistence level at best, the gap in its grain made
up mainly by China and also the West. This does
not deter Kim Jong Il from diverting scarce
resources to a million-strong army, a missile and
a nuclear programme at the Yongbyon nuclear
complex. The 1993/4 crisis, when North Korea
threatened to produce bomb-usable plutonium
by reprocessing fuel rods, was resolved by Clinton
concluding a ‘Framework Agreement’. The US
would build two Light Water reactors less ca-
pable of plutonium production and supply oil
until they were built, and in return North Korea
undertook to freeze plutonium production.
North Korea also signed the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty. In October 2002 a new crisis
erupted. North Korea threatened to reactivate
the plutonium reactor at Yongbyon and process
fuel rods enabling it to make nuclear weapons. In
December the international supervisory inspectors
were thrown out and Kim threatened to discard
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The timing was well chosen as Bush was
preparing for war against Iraq. The response from
Washington in partnership with South Korea and
Japan was to stop the supply of fuel oil essential
to North Korea as the construction of the two
reactors promised in 1994 had hardly begun. As
a member of Bush’s ‘axis of evil’, a regime that
could not be allowed to acquire weapons of mass
destruction, North Korea’s challenge could not
have been more direct. The US went to war with
Iraq to destroy Saddam’s weapons of mass
destruction which he had not been proven to
possess, but resorted to diplomacy with North
Korea which almost certainly had nuclear bombs
already. The apparent inconsistency is not difficult
to understand. South Korea is exposed to a North
Korean army of overwhelming strength. The
37,000 US troops can act as no more than a trip
wire in the event of an invasion. The US would
have to risk a nuclear war in defence of the South.
By sacrificing the welfare of the people to build
his military arsenal Kim believes himself safe from
attack. He demonstrated his defiance in 2003 by
firing a cruise missile into the sea of Japan and
sending fighters to force down a US spy plane.
His regime may one day implode, but this is
something China is anxious to avoid as it would
upset the strategic balance. The reactivation in
2003 of the nuclear bomb programme was
causing the greatest worry. The disarmament and
neutralisation of the Korean peninsula is a distant
hope.
In the South the political leaders and the bosses
of the big conglomerates, the chaebols, are being
called to account for misrule and corruption.
President Kim Young Sam was elected on an anti-
corruption platform. His two predecessors were
1
THE PROSPEROUS PACIFIC RIM I 661
North and South Korea, 2000
Population (millions) GDP per head (US$) GDP per head, Purchasing Foreign trade
Power Parity (US$) (US$ billions)
Exports Imports
South Korea 46.7 9,670 17,300 174.0 163.2
North Korea 22.3 1,000 800 – –
