to defuse tensions and provide a forum for nuclear negotiations. The group first met in August 2003 and convened for five more rounds of talks. When North Korea announced that it possessed nuclear weapons “for self-defense” in February 2005, experts at the time estimated that the country had around six plutonium bombs. There was a brief moment of hope in September 2005, when the six parties reached a breakthrough with the historic Joint Statement in which the countries pledged to work toward verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, cooperate on regional security, and promote economic collaboration. Washington and Pyongyang also endorsed taking steps to normalize ties. Most important, Pyongyang committed to “abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.”
The optimism engendered by the Joint Statement eroded quickly, however. Almost concurrent with the nuclear negotiations, the Bush administration had placed restrictions on U.S. financial transactions with Banco Delta Asia (BDA), a bank in Macau, which it accused of laundering money for the Kim regime and other financial crimes. BDA responded by seizing more than fifty North Korea–related accounts, totaling $25 million, and began an extensive audit to stem the run on the bank and repair its reputation. An angry North Korea refused to continue nuclear negotiations and proceeded to test the Taepodong 2—a long-range ballistic missile—on July 4, 2006. The missile failed about forty seconds into the launch but was theoretically able to carry a nuclear warhead to the western United States. A few months later, in October, the regime tested its first nuclear weapon. These actions elicited quick condemnation from the international community and U.N. sanctions, but President Bush ultimately authorized the return of those funds to try to wrest some progress on denuclearization.
Despite the overwhelming military power of the United States, sanctions, international opprobrium, and isolation, Kim Jong Il faced down Washington and relentlessly pursued his nuclear weapons program. He used dialogue to buy time and extract political and economic concessions. In the meantime, he conducted tests to experiment with and improve the weapons and to reinforce his military-first grand strategy that drove Pyongyang’s internal and external relations.
It’s not clear if Jong Un was aware of the tortuous background of negotiations, if he appreciated how close North Korea and the United States came to a military conflict, or if he knew what factored into his father’s courses of action. But as a student living in the age of his father’s military-first policy, and studying at the Kim Il Sung Military University, where he wrote a thesis entitled “A Simulation for the Improvement of Accuracy in the Operational Map by the Global Positioning System,” Jong Un was no doubt keenly interested in North Korea’s nuclear development. His father would later laud his son’s thesis for its incorporation of “the great military strategy theories” of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, laying the groundwork for publicly highlighting Jong Un’s education and commitment to the revolutionary ideals based on self-reliance.
If Jong Un began his formative years in the thick of the United States’ implied and explicit threats in 2002, by the time he was just two months away from graduation, on October 9, 2006, North Korea had defied all odds and conducted its first nuclear test. The Foreign Ministry declared, “Our strong revolutionary might [has] put in place all measures to counter a possible U.S. pre-emptive strike….[A] pre-emptive strike is not the monopoly of the United States….We made nuclear weapons because of a nuclear threat from the United States.” After the test, regime media proudly proclaimed this major milestone as “an historic event that brought happiness to our military people” and called it a “great leap forward in the building of a great prosperous, powerful socialist nation.”
The aggressive rhetoric of the first term of the George W. Bush administration probably reinforced the regime’s decision to pursue nuclear weaponry, to continue its self-imposed isolation, and to engage the West on its own terms. Jong Il’s style of coupling defiance with selective engagement throughout the decade was primarily driven by a fundamental defensive need. The Congressional Research Service suggested a range of motivations for the nuclear test in 2006 that could be broadened to cover his general commitment to the nuclear weapons program as a whole, including a desire to increase North Korea’s leverage in potential bilateral negotiations with Washington, to ensure security of the regime against a U.S. attack, and to test technical capabilities. Ultimately, the George W. Bush administration ended up in the same place that the Clinton administration