North Korea's Leader Is Cagey, Not Crazy

Put yourself in Kim's (platform) shoes. In 1994 he inherited a country from his father, Kim Il-sung, that was already in acute crisis. The centralized Stalinist economy had been failing for a decade, and in 1991 post-Soviet Russia domestic product cut off the flow of subsidized oil, fertilizer and food, effectively halving North Korea's gross Yet Kim needed the support of the military and the party officials who controlled North Korea's command economy and derived their power and privileges from it. Radical economic reforms would threaten their positions. Kim's inheritance was far from secure, so he left the economy alone and used the threat of going nuclear to extort aid from foreign countries. The younger Kim had been put in charge of North Korea's nuclear weapons program by his father in the late 1980s. By 1993, Washington was so concerned that it offered Pyongyang a deal: Stop the program, and the United States would give North Korea huge amounts of foreign aid. Kim Il-sung died in July 1994; that October his son approved the "Framework Agreement" with the United States in which Washington promised to send Pyongyang oil and eventually to build two nuclear reactors for the North Koreans http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1012-22.htm

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