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North Korea and the Legacies of the Cold War
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by Joshua H. Pollack
Defense Policy Analyst
Washington, District of Columbia
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| | Providing Historical Context
How can educators relate the current crisis in American relations with North Korea to the larger history of the Cold War? This question raises other issues about how we teach the Cold War in general. As a guest lecturer a few years ago, I had an opportunity to observe firsthand one of the most serious challenges for college-level U.S. history classrooms: the generational barrier between teachers and students. The students, for all their interest, had little comprehension of the era of the hydrogen bomb. They had never pondered the meaning of the fallout shelter signs or routine testing of air raid sirens still in evidence on their campus. One student confessed to falling asleep while watching Dr. Strangelove. (None of the others had seen it.) These sorts of concerns and anxieties were simply outside of the students' experience. They scarcely could have imagined that even now, the United States and Russia maintain several thousand nuclear warheads and the bombers and missiles to dispatch them.
Today's crises of terrorism and nuclear proliferation have certainly reengaged public curiosity about the origins of these national predicaments. Unfortunately, there is relatively little to satisfy student interest on these subjects in many U.S. history courses, in the newer collegiate textbooks, or even in the handful of general histories of the Cold War currently available. What follows is offered as a means of getting a better purchase on some of the often-overlooked historical themes lurking in the background, both geopolitical and technological, to America's confrontation with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program.
The Yalta Conference and the Division of Korea
How was Korea divided to begin with? The "Yalta Agreement" struck between the powers of America, Britain, and the Soviet Union in February 1945 is most often recalled as part of the settlement of the affairs of postwar Europe -- in the McCarthyite view, the "sellout" of Eastern Europe to the Soviets. Less frequently noted is the subsection entitled "Agreement Regarding Japan," which set the terms for Soviet intervention in the Pacific war. Japan's mainland colony of Korea was not mentioned in the final text, but unpublished notes show that Stalin and Roosevelt did discuss a joint "trusteeship" (originally with China as a third partner). (Links to related Web sites are provided below in "More.")
The division of the peninsula between Soviet and American occupying forces, and later into two states, thus came as a result of the historical accident of the Soviets' last-minute entry into the war with Japan, producing the split between North and South that persists to this day -- a fine illustration of the contingent nature of history.
Directly or indirectly, Yalta also contributed to two other enduring oddities in East Asian geopolitics. First, the agreement stipulated the Soviet annexation of the southern half of Sakhalin Island and the Kurile Islands. As a result, to this day Japan and Russia have yet to reach a peace settlement ending the Second World War. Second, in reply to North Korea's invasion of the South in June 1950, the U.S. Navy intervened to prevent any Chinese Communist offensive against Formosa (Taiwan), which retains de facto independence from the mainland.
The "Forgotten War" and the Nuclear Arms Race
Less often recalled than the dramatics of the early phase of the Korean War (1950-51) is the grinding stalemate of 1952-53 and its toll on public sentiment. In political terms, the war hurt President Harry S. Truman's Democratic party and its 1952 nominee for president, Adlai Stevenson. Saying "I shall go to Korea," Republican nominee (and retired Army general) Dwight D. Eisenhower hinted that he would seek a quick conclusion to the war if elected. Stevenson, on the defensive, warned that an American withdrawal "would risk a Munich in the Far East, with the probability of a third world war not far behind."
Eisenhower was unprepared to call for anything of the sort. Instead, he balanced his rhetoric with talk of an American commitment to "the far corners of the earth" for the sake of "materials essential to our industry and our defense." In reality, the United States fought in Korea for very different reasons, particularly the perceived need to show determination in the face of Communist aggression.
For this reason, the Korean conflict played an essential role in spurring the nuclear arms race. Stevenson's remark about World War III recalled the widespread belief in 1950 that the outbreak of war in the Far East was a prelude to open U.S.-Soviet hostilities in Europe. (Superpower hostilities in Korea, though unacknowledged at the time, were nevertheless a reality: not until the 1990s did former officials admit that during the course of the Korean War, the U.S. Air Force had fought Soviet aircraft painted in Chinese colors.) In Washington, North Korea's invasion of the South led to the reconsideration and ultimate acceptance of a secret policy paper, NSC-68, which sought to prepare the United States for an impending conflict with the Soviet Union.
Against previous arguments that the Soviet Union was too weak to launch a global campaign of aggressive Communist advances, NSC-68 declared that the Soviets might be ready for all-out war with the United States as early as 1950, with 1954 as the "critical date" for launching a nuclear war. In the face of the threat, it argued for a massive campaign of rearmament, including a nuclear buildup -- measures that had seemed prohibitively costly before the North Korean military crossed the thirty-eighth parallel. The U.S. defense budget more than tripled in 1951. Numbering just a few hundred warheads in 1950, America's nuclear arsenal reached 20,000 warheads a decade later. The Soviets spent the next few decades catching up with, and eventually surpassing, the United States.
Another legacy of the Korean War was the American practice (later adopted by the Soviet Union as well) of hinting that it might use nuclear weapons to end conventional conflicts. In November of 1950, Truman indicated that nuclear weapons might be employed in response to China's intervention in the Korean War. While seeking a cease-fire with the Chinese in 1953, Eisenhower communicated, through a third party, his willingness to use nuclear weapons to achieve victory in the war. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles later cited this nuclear threat to the Chinese leadership as having brought about the end of the war; in his so-called "massive retaliation" speech, Dulles used the episode to justify the new administration's declaration that it would henceforth rely largely on nuclear weapons and regional allies to counter Communist power -- a policy sometimes described as "no more Koreas."
Eisenhower's policy depended on America's near-monopoly on nuclear weapons, and it was not lost on him that their further spread could invalidate the ability of the United States to use them as a deterrent to other powers. Even if it was soon apparent that the United States could not maintain this level of nuclear dominance against the Soviet Union, it long remained a key assumption of American foreign policy that other states be precluded from coming up with nuclear weapons programs of their own. Nevertheless, the very American emphasis on the value of nuclear weapons in fact encouraged other states to develop such programs in their turn. The American dilemma over what to do about them is thus far from new: in 1964, for example, the Johnson administration contemplated disrupting the Chinese nuclear program with a preemptive attack.
Atoms for Peace and the Spread of Nuclear Technology
Recognizing its dilemma, the Eisenhower administration initiated America's lengthy campaign to stop or slow the proliferation of nuclear weapons programs. Eisenhower's 1953 "Atoms for Peace" speech unveiled a new initiative: the United States and the other nuclear powers would actively promote the dissemination of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes (i.e., research, industry, and the generation of electricity), overseen by a new "international atomic energy agency." Recipient countries, having been spared the expense and trouble of developing these tools and techniques independently, presumably would accept the limits imposed by international oversight. (This hope was not always borne out: the nuclear weapons program developed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s and 1990s reportedly benefited from American-provided documents from the Atoms for Peace era.)
Eisenhower's vision was realized in 1957 with the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) under the aegis of the United Nations. But by this time, other countries had already decided to pursue nuclear arsenals of their own. China set down the nuclear path at some point in the mid-1950s, having faced a series of nuclear-backed American ultimatums regarding both Korea and Taiwan. France and Israel are believed to have made the fateful decision in 1956, after Soviet nuclear threats during the Suez Crisis. France tested its first nuclear device in 1960, and China followed suit in 1964.
Rise of the Multilateral Treaty Regimes
In response to both nuclear testing by the original nuclear powers and the emergence of new nuclear arsenals, lengthy negotiations eventually produced the Partial (or Limited) Test Ban Treaty (PTBT or LTBT) in 1963 and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968. The PTBT banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater, leaving only underground tests. It was partial in another sense as well, since the new nuclear powers, France and China, did not join. The negotiation of the follow-on Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) would be completed in the 1990s, only to be rejected by the U.S. Senate in 1999.
The NPT represented a compromise: countries that had already tested nuclear devices would pledge to disarm themselves in due course, whereas nonnuclear states were to accept a binding commitment not to acquire nuclear weapons of their own. Each member of the latter group was obliged to sign a safeguards agreement with the IAEA, assuring that international inspectors would be able to confirm that nuclear materials were not being diverted to a weapons program. To encourage more countries to join, parties to the treaty would be allowed to withdraw upon issuing 90 days' warning.
Over the decades, the NPT has won gradually greater acceptance, helping to suppress regional nuclear arms races, such as in Latin America, where Argentina and Brazil joined the treaty in the 1990s, abandoning their competing weapons programs. Israel, India, and Pakistan never signed the treaty, leading to the emergence of three de facto nuclear weapons states outside the NPT system, only selectively accepting IAEA safeguards. (In the 1980s and 1990s, two other countries -- South Africa and Iraq -- managed to evade safeguards by creating parallel nuclear infrastructures undisclosed to the IAEA.)
France and China finally joined the treaty in 1992, rounding out the full complement of five official nuclear weapons states. By the late 1990s, however, momentum toward disarmament had ground to a halt. The possession of nuclear weapons had become synonymous with great-power status, an impression reinforced by the coincidence of identity between the five permanent, veto-bearing members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China, the so-called P-5) and the five nuclear weapons states recognized under the NPT (the same group, sometimes called the N-5 in this context).
The Present Crisis
The United States has thus long pursued its interest in blocking the spread of nuclear weapons by spreading the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology to developing nations. Just such a strategy was adopted toward North Korea in the 1990s. The Stalinist enclave, which joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985, threatened to withdraw during a dispute over inspections in 1993. The Clinton administration struck a bargain replacing North Korea's plutonium production reactor with "proliferation-resistant" power reactors and requiring the U.S. to supply heavy fuel oil in the meantime.
The present crisis reached its current, most volatile phase in December 2002, when the Bush administration, accusing the North Koreans of circumventing the deal, cut off heavy fuel oil supplies. The North Koreans responded by taking steps to restart their plutonium production reactor and to extract plutonium from its spent fuel. The next month, North Korea proclaimed itself to have withdrawn from the NPT, something no state had done before.
A knowledge of this historical context is essential for any discussion -- in the classroom or otherwise -- of the present Korean crisis. In addition to showing how the dilemmas of the present are rooted in the conflicts of the past, the standoff with North Korea illustrates how today's policymakers face decisions that are not so different from those faced by previous generations of leaders.
For Further Reading
A list of Web sites is available below in "See also." Some of these sources, which include documentation, chronologies, and bibliographies, may be useful for you or for your students.
Josh Pollack is a Washington-based defense policy analyst. In addition to a number of articles on foreign policy issues, he has authored American history textbook chapters on the history of the Cold War.
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