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The first thing I do when I get a new book on North Korea is turn to the footnotes and references. With limited information, much of what is written simply rearranges the puzzle pieces we all have at hand.
In the case of Jonathan Pollack’s No Exit: North Korea, Nuclear Weapons and International Security, the synthesis is a very useful one. Pollack’s footnotes are a goldmine of what is available in English, drawing on a wide array of historical materials, including the invaluable work of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s North Korea International Documentation Project as well as other Russian and Chinese sources.
The book recounts North Korea’s nuclear ambitions from independence forward. A few highlights:
- Pollack dates the likely timing of the decision to go nuclear to the mid-1970s. As in the 1990s, fears of abandonment by their socialist patrons and a succession played a role. But Pollack argues that South Korea’s nuclear program—which they dallied with for six or seven years before the US finally shut it down—was also probably a factor.
- Kim Il Sung’s nuclear ambitions made both Brezhnev and Gorbachev nervous. But for mysterious reasons Chernenko was willing to offer North Korea a generous package of reactors, weapons transfers and a cancellation of outstanding debt. Pollack speculates that the ailing Soviet leader was looking for overflight rights and access to the port at Wonsan. But the Chernenko gifts really show how dotty the Soviet leadership had become; Gorbachev quickly moved to control the damage.
- Pollack argues that Kim Il Sung was more flexible with respect to his nuclear ambitions than Kim Jong Il, and saw more clearly the economic as well as security costs of pushing the Clinton administration to the wall. In an interesting passage from Kim Il Sung’s Collected Works, the Great Leader acknowledges that the controversial light-water reactors were a white elephant—inferior to oil-fired power plants—and were thus largely of symbolic value.
- Pollack uses CIA Open Source data on joint appearances of the two Kims to suggest a possible rift between the two by the first half of 1994, as both the famine and the nuclear crisis were breaking. After appearing in public 25 times in 1992 and 17 times in 1993, father and son only appeared together once in 1994 before Kim pere’s death.
As the story comes forward, it is more familiar and there are fewer surprises. Pollack accepts that the invasion of Iraq bears some responsibility for Kim Jong Il’s nuclear ambitions. But the long nuclear history, ties with Pakistan, and the course of the Six Party Talks leads Pollack to the conclusion that the breakout came early and was at no point likely to be fully reversed. He is particularly dismissive of the idea that the negotiations of 2007-8 had any chance of leading to real abandonment.
The conclusion trails off a bit, as Pollack runs through the unattractive options facing South Korea, China and the US. Pollack believes that we have to keep at it, but offers little practical advice on how to move forward. But that position is understandable if you believe—as Pollack rightly does—that the North Koreans do not have any real interest in abandoning their nuclear weapons at this point; as he argues, strategy toward North Korea at this point is really a defensive game.
In the name of fairness, a couple of other efforts to track North Korea’s nuclear ambitions deserve a shout-out. Etel Solingen’s sweeping Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East remains the most theoretically ambitious account of the decision to acquire and abandon nuclear weapons that we have had in recent years; there are chapters on both North and South Korea. We are sympathetic because of its political economy focus on the underlying political coalitions supporting nuclear weapons programs. Jaques Hymans’ The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy also looks at domestic factors, but more social-psychological in nature: how nationalist ideologies of a particular sort increase the likelihood of going nuclear.
On sources, two papers provide excellent introduction to the material uncovered through the Soviet and Eastern European archives. Balazs Szalontai and Sergey Radchenko, “North Korea's Efforts to Acquire Nuclear Technology and Nuclear Weapons: Evidence from Russian and Hungarian Archives” from the International Cold War History Project and Walter Clemens, “North Korea's Quest for Nuclear Weapons: New Historical Evidence," Journal of East Asian Studies 10, 1 (January-March 2010), pp. 127-154, which can be downloaded from the East Asia Institute website here.
