the United States, it had galloped past the North in economic development.
And yet, ironically, world events only seemed to confirm the prudence of North Korea’s self-imposed isolation and repressive practices. In the late 1980s, as the USSR started to crumble, Kim Il Sung’s old friends in the Soviet bloc were overthrown and killed by their own people, as in Romania, or began opening up to the West. In South Korea, the dictator Park Chung-hee was murdered by his own intelligence chief and the last authoritarian president, Chun Doo-hwan, eventually stepped down. Democracy prevailed, albeit in fits and starts. South Korea also vaulted past the North in conventional military capabilities. The Soviet Union and China had been important sources of matériel as well as economic assistance on which Pyongyang had relied. As their aid began to dissipate, the Kims were no longer able to continue modernizing their military or feeding their people. A December 1991 National Intelligence Council (NIC) memorandum stressed that “shortages of food and fuel were widespread, due largely to a meager harvest and the breakdown of concessionary trade arrangements with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.” China, too, facing its own more pressing domestic problems and tired of North Korea’s shenanigans—such as the Burma bombing—had begun to tamp down its aid.
North Korea was alone, and it could rely on no one else for its survival. Kim Jong Il almost certainly realized that given these circumstances, it would be to North Korea’s detriment to integrate too much with the outside world. Instead, he and his father isolated the country and made it a priority to safeguard internal stability through strengthening security mechanisms to root out and discourage dissent at the local and national levels, maintain a culture of fear to ensure loyalty, and keep support among the elite by tethering their livelihood to the sustainment of the Kim family dynasty.
Terror, repression, and isolation were not enough, however. As Jonathan Pollack, an expert on Northeast Asia, cogently argued, “Kim Il-sung viewed nuclear power as a talisman that would affirm the country’s standing as an advanced scientific and industrial power,” and might have started his nuclear ambitions as early as the 1960s, doggedly requesting information or assistance from East Germany, the Soviet Union, and China. And why shouldn’t North Korea have nuclear capabilities? Kim Il Sung and his son undoubtedly asked. By the late 1960s, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, and China had nuclear weapons, followed by India and Pakistan in 1974 and 1998, respectively. And South Korea had also made advances in the nuclear realm. South Africa had operated a nuclear weapons program since the 1970s, but dismantled it in 1990.
Throughout the 1990s, the intelligence community in the United States and South Korea sounded the alarm about North Korea’s covert nuclear weapons program and developing ballistic missile capabilities. In February 1993, the director of the CIA said that North Korea might have produced enough fissile material for at least one nuclear weapon, and a 1999 NIC paper assessed that, after Russia and China, North Korea was “most likely to develop ICBMs capable of threatening the United States” by 2015. The defector Hwang Jang Yop said in 1997 that North Korea was capable of “scorching South Korea with nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and rockets.”
Compounding the concern was that North Korea exported ballistic missiles, conventional weapons, and laborers to countries in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, creating “an immediate, serious, and growing threat to US forces, interests, and allies…and…significantly alter[ing] the strategic balances [there],” according to the 1999 NIC analysis. Not that the regime was hiding its missile sales to these countries. In 1998, after denying U.S. charges for years, the North Koreans boldly declared that “we will continue developing, testing and deploying missiles” and demanded that the United States lift sanctions and “make a compensation for the losses to be caused by discontinued missile export.”
The nuclear and missile programs provided North Korea with added insurance for regime survival at a critical moment in the country’s history, given the succession from father to son and the challenging strategic environment following the end of the Cold War. Luckily for North Korea—and unluckily for the United States, its allies, and the vast majority of North Koreans who continued to suffer under the Kim regime—nascent nuclear weapons capabilities gave this tiny country strategic relevance on the international stage. Through alternating cycles of provocation and diplomacy, North Korea sought to maintain the element of surprise,