The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

If Powell was embarrassed by Bush’s stance, Kim Dae-jung was humiliated. KDJ, as Korea-watchers called him, was a new type of South Korean leader, a democratic activist who, during his country’s authoritarian period, had spent years in prison for his political beliefs and had run for president promising a “sunshine policy” of opening up relations to the North. During the Clinton years, South Korea’s ruling party had been implacably hostile to the North; efforts to hold serious disarmament talks were obstructed at least as much by Seoul’s sabotage as by Pyongyang’s manipulations. Now South Korea had a leader who could be a partner in negotiations—but the United States had a leader who was uninterested in negotiating. In Bush’s view, articulated openly by his vice president, Dick Cheney, to negotiate with an evil regime was to recognize that regime, legitimize it, and—if the talks led to a treaty—prolong its reign. Bush told a reporter, on the record, “I loathe Kim Jong-il.” He held Kim Dae-jung in contempt as a naïf. KDJ had also committed what Bush took as a personal insult: before his Washington trip, he’d met with Russian president Vladimir Putin and issued a joint statement endorsing the preservation of the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty.