alternatehistory.com

Here's the first chapter of my new TL that I've been working on for a while.


Clinton’s Korean War


Chapter I: The North Korean Nuclear Crisis, 1985-1994.

By the end of the administration of President George H.W. Bush there were mounting concerns about North Korea’s nuclear program. Starting in 1989, the Bush administration had begun conducting a quiet diplomatic effort to persuade the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as North Korea was officially known, to turn over its nuclear installations to international safeguards. On October 25th 1989, administration officials confirmed their concerns that North Korea was in fact trying to acquire nuclear weapons.

During a news conference on January 6th 1992 that Bush held with South Korean President Roh Tae Woo, Woo told reporters that the two leaders had “jointly reaffirmed the unshakeable position that North Korea must sign and ratify a nuclear safeguard agreement and that the recently initiated joint declaration for a non-nuclear peninsula must be put into force at the earliest possible date.” Bush called for both North and South Korea to implement bilateral inspection arrangements under the joint non-nuclear declaration from the previous month and stated North Korea’s obligation with these terms would result in the United States and South Korea wilfully forgoing the Team Spirit exercise that year. Roh said the US and South Korea would partner in efforts to end nuclear weapons development in North Korea and have the country abandon nuclear processing plants and reduce enrichment facilities.

The US Presidential elections held on November 3rd 1992 were won by popular Democratic candidate Bill Clinton who hailed from Arkansas. He won 43.0% of the popular vote and won 32 states plus Washington DC, raking in 370 electoral votes. His rival Bush won 37.4% of the vote, eighteen states and 168 electoral votes (Independent candidate Ross Perot got 18.9% of the popular and carried no states and therefore zero electoral votes). Long story short, Bill Clinton was sworn in on January 20th 1993 as the 42nd President of the United States of America. The concerns of the Bush administration carried over into the new Clinton administration.

In 1985, North Korea had become a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and its Safeguards Agreement entered into force in April 1992. Inconsistencies emerged between North Korea’s initial declaration and the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), focusing on a mismatch between declared plutonium product and nuclear waste solutions and the results of the agency’s analysis. The IAEA wanted further access to find answers that could explain the discrepancies, but on March 12th 1993 the DPRK announced its decision to withdraw from the NPT, denying inspectors further access.

On April 1st 1993, the IAEA concluded that North Korea was in non-compliance with its Safeguards Agreement, and passed this on to the UN Security Council. Following UN Security Council Resolution 825, which called upon North Korea to reconsider its decision to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allow weapons inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) into the country, North Korea “suspended the effectuation” of that withdrawal in June 1993. We know now that that was a meaningless stalling tactic as the North was determined to obtain nuclear weapons to prevent American aggression.

In November 1993, North Korea proposed to the United States that the two governments negotiate a “package solution” to all of the issues dividing them. The Clinton Administration accepted this in principle but conditioned such “comprehensive” talks on North Korea acting first to allow a resumption of IAEA inspections and to re-open negotiations with South Korea over nuclear questions (North Korea had broken off talks with South Korea in late 1992). North Korea approached the IAEA in January 1994, offering them a single inspection, less comprehensive than those they had carried out in 1992. The US government wasn’t particularly impressed by that offer and insisted on unimpeded IAEA access to North Korean nuclear installations.

Former President Jimmy Carter was prepared to engage in private diplomacy on behalf of the US (an idea South Korea opposed based on the fear that Kim Il-sung would mislead Carter). That never came to pass as a result of Carter being caught up in a car crash in January 1994 on an icy, slippery road that left him seriously injured and partially invalid, confronting him with the inability to walk without crutches and the priority of physical rehabilitation with intense guidance from physical therapists. He would walk again without crutches in under a year, but at the cost of being unable to carry out the private diplomacy he had intended in order to de-escalate the crisis that continued to mount in the summer of 1994.
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