The peacemaker.

• Author: Oberdorfer, Don
• Position: Role Jimmy Carter played in 1994 North Korea crisis

For Robert Gallucci, assistant of secretary of state for politico-military affairs, 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 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.

Unloading the reactor in 1994 was of great importance for two reasons, one having to do with the past and the other with the future. Regarding the past, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts believed that systematic sampling and careful segregation of rods from particular parts of the reactor's core under its supervision would disclose how long the fuel had been burned and at what intensity. Satellite surveillance had indicated that in 1989 the reactor had been shut down for 110 days, during which time about half of its fuel rods could have been replaced and made available for fabrication of plutonium. By monitoring the reactor's unloading, the IAEA could thus compile a verifiable record of its operating history, confirming how many fuel rods had been previously removed, and therefore identifying the outer limit of the plutonium that might have been produced.

Such a disclosure would be a major step toward eliminating the ambiguity about the DPRK's (North Korea's) past acquisition of nuclear weapons material. From Pyongyang's viewpoint, however, this was a nowin proposition: If it was established that Pyongyang had not diverted nuclear fuel clandestinely to manufacture plutonium in the past, its nuclear threat would diminish and with it the country's bargaining power; but if the supervised unloading established that Pyongyang had lied and produced more plutonium than it had admitted, it would lose face and the hunt would be on for the missing nuclear material.

The future of the 8,000 fuel rods that would now be unloaded from the reactor was of even greater importance. Secretary of Defense Perry estimated that this entire load of rods could be converted into enough plutonium for four or five nuclear weapons. While the United States was not prepared to go to war to clarify the past, it was determined to do so, if necessary, to prevent North Korea from converting these and future irradiated fuel rods into plutonium for nuclear weapons.

On April 19, Pyongyang notified the IAEA of its' intention to defuel the reactor "at an early date," and it invited agency inspectors to witness the unloading operations -- but without specifying what procedures would be followed or what the inspectors would be able to see and do. There followed weeks of sparring over the procedures, with Pyongyang offering to permit inspectors to observe and take some measurements but not to segregate or sample the fuel rods in a way that would make it possible to determine their past history. The IAEA refused to send any inspectors unless its procedures for sampling fuel rods were fully accepted. Washington backed the IAEA, though some officials believed the agency was being too rigid.

Removal of the spent fuel rods began on May 8 without international observation or approval. On June 2, when more than 60 percent of the fuel rods had been removed, IAEA Director General Hans Blix sent a strong letter to the UN Security Council that was an implicit call for international action. Blix's letter was the opening gun in the long-discussed drive for UN sanctions against the recalcitrant, often-maddening DPRK.

North Korea issued a formal statement on June 5 announcing that "sanctions mean war, and there is no mercy in war." Undeterred, Washington proceeded with diplomatic consultations aimed at a sanctions vote in the Security Council and, in parallel, with plans for a stepped-up U.S. military presence in and around Korea, preparing for the possibility of war.

The Deepening Conflict

The...