Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea
Mon Sep 10, 2007 at 01:50:38 PM PDT
Crossposted from SmokeyMonkey.org
According to the NY Times, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill announced that North Korea has agreed to international inspections of nuclear facilities they intend to decommission.
Mr. Hill said the North had proposed several methods of disabling its plants; the experts will spend four days examining the "scope and the technical feasibility" of those plans. They will report back to the six parties, who reconvene in mid-September, Mr. Hill said. The administration is hoping the North’s entire program will be dismantled by Dec. 31.
Given the history of negotiations with North Korea, I know not how to take this announcement. After all, they have detonated a nuclear weapon, demonstrating that North Korea has joined the nuclear club. Therefore, I want to present a brief history of negotiations with nuclear North Korea.
North Korea and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
North Korea signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985. Since then, it has had diplomatic showdowns over nuclear capability several times. During the Clinton administration, it threatened to withdraw from the NPT in 1994. Former President Jimmy Carter was sent to negotiate with North Korea. Those negotiations eventually resulted in an accord in October 1994.
That pact remained in place despite continued difficulties until 2003. What changed? The President of the United States, of course.
The differences between the administrations' approaches is easily summed up by contrasting Clinton's agreement with the DPRK to Bush's declaration that North Korea is a part of the "axis of evil". It can, also, be mentioned in one word: diplomacy.
The US-DPRK Agreed Framework
After the threat by North Korea to withdraw from the NPT in June 1994, the Clinton administration sent former President Jimmy Carter to negotiate a deal that resulted in the Agreed Framework between the United States of America and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, effective October 1994. This was a pact under UN sanction and not a treaty subject to US Senate approval.
This pact prevented the DPRK from withdrawing from the NPT in exchange for the US providing conventional fuel as well as light-water nuclear reactors (LWRs) to North Korea. This would compensate for what electricity demand would be lost by sacrificing the existing nuclear power generated by reactors whose fuel cycle can produce plutonium for weapons.
The Bush Administration
Soon after taking office, George W. Bush was faced with North Korea threatening to abandon the NPT again. The pattern is consistent, and so the US response had been for some time: They threaten to withdraw from the NPT, and we make some concessions in order to restore inspections. Yet Bush soon abandoned any regard for the Clinton-era agreement. By the following year, the neo-conservative agenda was justified by the 9/11 attack, and the Bush administration declared North Korea an enemy by a number of actions.
Bush, himself, declared North Korea a member of an "axis of evil".
States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.
The administration, then, sent Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, John Bolton, to North Korea in August 2002. The "shared challenge" that Bolton presented could not be mistaken for anything but neo-conservative war-mongering.
...[L]et me provide a panoramic view of North Korea's WMD activities -- chemical, biological, and nuclear as well as the export of missiles and missile technology -- and thus explain to you here in South Korea why we are so concerned and the nature of the challenge I believe we face together.
In regard to chemical weapons, there is little doubt that North Korea has an active program...
The news on the biological weapons front is equally disturbing...
Let’s turn our attention now to the nuclear question. [snip] In a recent report to Congress, the U.S. Intelligence Community stated that "North Korea has produced enough plutonium for at least one, and possibly two nuclear weapons."
Then, in October 2002, Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly led a delegation to North Korea to confront them with evidence of their nuclear weapons program.
James A. Kelly and his delegation advised the North Koreans that we had recently acquired information that indicates that North Korea has a program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons in violation of the Agreed Framework and other agreements. North Korean officials acknowledged that they have such a program. The North Koreans attempted to blame the United States and said that they considered the Agreed Framework nullified. Assistant Secretary Kelly pointed out that North Korea had been embarked on this program for several years.
On January 10th, 2003 North Korea threatened to withdraw from the NPT again.
BBC In its statement, North Korea denounced what it called US aggression, saying: "We can no longer remain bound to the [non-proliferation] treaty, allowing the country's security and the dignity of our nation to be infringed upon".
In explaining its decision, North Korea issued via the state-controlled Korean Central News Agency a history of its grievances with the diplomatic process of the US. It is actually quite an informative read if you keep in mind it is written by DPRK propagandists.
There is no such case in the history of recent DPRK-US relations as the US President personally making an open aggressive threat against our nation, an independent and sovereign state, through his policy speech. This is, in fact, little short of declaring war against us.
North Korea formally left the NPT on April 10th, 2003. Their concerns have always been the militarisation of South Korea by the US nuclear power. Specifically, a joint military exercise called "Team Spirit" was essentially updated and revised under the Bush administration after being prohibited under the 1994 Clinton-era pact. In fact, Nicholas Kristof reported in the NY Times (subscription only) on February 28th, 2003 that military plans had been drawn up for nuclear pre-emptive strikes against several nations, including North Korea. Perhaps this was the threat that broke the DPRK's will to come to the table?
North Korea then embarked on a militarization of its own, testing ballistic missiles and eventually detonating a nuclear device in October 2006. One year later, negotiations with Russia, China, the US, Japan, and North and South Korea have once again quelled the specter of a nuclear North Korea. However, without the full NPT and IAEA safeguard regime, I'm not sure how far you can trust the DPRK. There is nothing in the current announcement that would suggest decommissioning is really going to occur, only that feasibility reports will be drawn up.
Summary
George W. Bush doesn't have a diplomatic bone in his body. That is why in a recent conference with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, he was flabbergasted by the suggestion he would support a peace treaty (of pretty much any kind). His philosophy is that of the bully: 'When they do what I want, I might consider liking them.'
Diplomacy is achieved through long, boring deliberations that never end. The very concept of the ultimatum is foreign to diplomacy; there must never be an end to negotiations. Does the concession from North Korea to have some of its dual-use reactors inspected for decommission represent a diplomatic step by the DPRK? Yes, I think it does. Our president had better return the gesture. He missed one opportunity to discuss peace already. Don't miss another simply because you are running out of boogeymen.
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