Kim’s fat little son, Kim Jong-il, quickly matched his father’s near immortality, and loudspeakers proclaimed his undisputed family Greatness on the streets, in cities and towns throughout the land. Undisputed, that is, unless you didn’t mind jail or even execution. The twenty-first-century regime of Kim Jong-il did not tolerate dissent in any form whatsoever. Which at least simplified the issue—Love the Dear Leader or else…
The Army truck driver was a true and faithful representative of a terrorized population. And behind his enigmatic half-smile there was the zombified blank expression of a people whose morale had been shattered, whose self-respect was gone, and whose only chance of survival was to toe the line and worship the earthly god Kim — always making certain there was a large portrait of him in the house, ready for inspection, as laid down by the law.
North Korea was an Orwellian nightmare, forever on the borders of outright famine, with hundreds of thousands already dead of malnutrition. This was Russia in winter a half-century ago, Stalinesque in its procedures. And still the populace thronged the streets, cheering the Dear Leader, as the tubby little monster drove past, the living Tsar of one of the worst-run sovereign nations since the Dark Ages. And every day, all day, and all night, if you were listening, the Government of Kim Jong-il broadcasted the “true knowledge” that this country was intrinsically, ethnically superior to any other.
General Ravi was appalled by North Korea. And he really hated doing business with them. But in his game, there were very few places to do business at all. For part of his job made him an international arms dealer, and one of a rare breed: a nuclear arms dealer, an arena near-silent, clandestine, and illegal, in which hardly anyone admitted wanting to buy, and certainly no one admitted wanting to sell.
Aside from a somewhat seedy part of Bosnia, North Korea was very nearly the only game in town. This dastardly, friendless little pariah of a state, trapped between China, Russia, and Japan, had been making the components for nuclear weapons for many, many years, and cared not a jot for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
For years, since back in 1974, when they first joined the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Korea had been a clear and obvious problem to the West, constantly trying to produce plutonium, endlessly trying to produce SCUD missiles for sale to the Middle East.
But in 1985, against everyone’s most optimistic forecasts, Kim il-Sung signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), promising not to produce a bomb, and to open all nuclear sites to inspection.
That same year, the North Koreans started to build a 200 MWt reactor that could produce enough plutonium to make seven to ten bombs a year. Separately that same year they started to build a large plant to process plutonium into weapon-ready form.
Twelve months later, they had a 30 MWt reactor on line, producing plutonium. In 1987, they missed the first eighteen-month deadline for international inspection. A few months later, they delivered one hundred SCUD-B missiles to Iran.
For the next two years, they refused inspections and continued to build reactors, which would create plutonium. They consistently sold SCUD missiles to Syria and Iran.
By 1992, the IAEA concluded the latest nuclear declarations by North Korea — some 90 grams of plutonium! — were fraudulent, and demanded access to Yongbyon, the ultrasecretive underground nuclear plant that lies 50 miles north of the capital city of Pyongyang. They did not get it.
A year later, both China and Russia had cut off all aid to the Republic of North Korea. And the U.S. demanded that Kim il-Sung come clean and show his nuclear hand like everyone else. North Korea immediately barred all IAEA inspectors, and threatened to drop out of the NPT altogether.
Finally in mid-1994, North Korea quit the IAEA. President Clinton, ever eager for compromise, agreed that the U.S. would provide North Korea with two light-water reactors and 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil per annum, if only the new Dear Leader, the hideous Kim Jong-il, would rejoin the IAEA and the NPT, and “normalize economic relations” between North Korea and the United States.
It would end up costing the U.S. taxpayer $20 million to $30 million per year, and they called it the “Agreed Framework.”
In 1995, less than one year after the Clinton deal, the head of the CIA, John Deutch, estimated that North Korea’s new Nodong-1 missile would be deployed within a year, and that the North Koreans were continuing under the most secretive circumstances to work on nuclear, chemical, and biological warheads. The constant warnings of the U.S. Intelligence community were essentially ignored by the Administration.
By the spring of 1997, the situation had deteriorated. It was obvious that Kim Jong-il was producing plutonium.
Evidence was building. A defector, a high-ranking North Korean General, fled to China and published an essay confirming that his former country did have nuclear weapons that could be used against South Korea and Japan. The brilliant U.S. satellite QuickBird picked up sensational pictures of heavy activity in the sprawling Yongbyon nuclear facility, much of which is located underground. The warnings of a new defector, Choon Sun Lee, a senior official in North Korea’s giant military infrastructure, of top-secret underground plutonium production and weapons development were almost certainly correct.
In June 1998, Kim Jong-il’s government declared it would continue to develop and export nuclear-capable missiles. The U.S. Intelligence community, almost beside itself with concern, issued warning after warning that North Korea had built a huge underground facility that may be either a nuclear reactor or reprocessing plant, and a report from Bill Richardson’s Department of Energy claimed evidence that North Korea was undoubtedly working on uranium-enrichment techniques — which meant, broadly, turning that lethal substance into weapons-grade nuclear explosives.
Four months later, the National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, headed by the aggressive Admiral Arnold Morgan, practically bellowed down the phone to the President that North Korea had between 25 and 30 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium, enough to make several nuclear warheads.
By the year 2002, things were on their way from moderate to diabolical. It was now clear that Kim Jong-il had already produced a formidable arsenal of SCUD missiles for sale to anyone who needed them.
The writings of Choon Sun Lee came rushing back to haunt everyone involved. Choon had sworn that the great Mount of Chun-Ma had been hollowed out to house a secret uranium processing plant. He described a massive tunnel, extending more than a mile into the mountain, opening into underground facilities housed in chambers carved out of the rock. In one of them there was a plant to turn uranium ore into yellowcake, the first step towards enriching it into weapons-grade material.
U.S. Intelligence considered Choon’s observations to be too detailed to be false, and it all stacked up accurately with their own satellite observations of the existence of vast, mysterious excavations, twenty-two of them, in the mountains of North Korea. If you believed Choon, the West was staring quite literally at a nuclear empire operational under the reign of Kim Jong-il.
And Choon was by no means finished. He described every aspect of the ore’s removal by truck and helicopter to an underground facility in a hidden valley. A third major defector came forward, announcing in 2002 that the great mountain of Kwanmo-bong, 270 miles to the northwest of Pyongyang — and at almost 8,000 feet the second highest peak in the country — had been hollowed out by an army of thousands, at night, sandbag by sandbag, to house yet another secret nuclear plant.