WITH NORTH KOREA’S announcement Friday that it is withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), Pyongyang’s nuclear defiance is no longer just an American or Korean problem. It is a world problem. It requires an international rejoinder, one that treats Pyongyang as a violator–not of any deal reached with Seoul or Washington, but of the NPT. This might not block Pyongyang from making more bombs, but anything less risks unraveling such restraints as remain on other would-be bomb-makers.
Our choices are much starker than most diplomats suggest. We can face the reality that Pyongyang is a nuclear violator and treat it as such. Or we can engage in another round of self-delusion, in the face of nearly two decades’ experience, hoping that a U.S.-brokered deal will finally get Pyongyang to surrender its nuclear weapons capabilities. The latter course will signal to proliferators that they have nothing to worry about from the world at large once they get a nuclear weapon. All of them are watching how we handle this.
Unfortunately, most Asia hands see matters differently. Many of those who criticized the United States for not letting the United Nations handle Saddam Hussein insist the United States should come to an accommodation directly with Kim Jong Il. In this, they side with Pyongyang, which wants the United States to accept it as a legitimate nuclear state. That is the meaning of its withdrawal from the NPT and its demand for a “non-aggression pact.” In making this plea, Pyongyang gives no hint of being willing to surrender its nuclear weapons (it regards them as vital to its survival), only to refrain from brandishing them. Pyongyang knows that if it can get the United States to formally renounce its “hostile intent” and accept a nuclear standoff as a legitimate state of affairs, no other country is likely to protest the North’s violation of any international agreement. The door to foreign aid would then reopen, and the grim, militaristic regime once again would get a new lease on life.
Pyongyang can smell the weakness of South Korea and Japan, which want to “mediate” direct talks between Washington and Pyongyang to “resolve” North Korea’s plutonium and uranium bomb-making projects. That suits Pyongyang, which knows that verifying the elimination of its covert uranium program is an impossible task, and that a negotiating partner anxious to reach an agreement will not press too hard. Pyongyang might give up something for suitable rewards, only to continue building bombs covertly. In any case, it will not permit effective inspections or searches.
Another suggestion is to return to the status quo ante–a favorite of Russia, China, and South Korea. This would mean no penalty for repeated violation of agreements. Construction would continue of the two large power reactors we promised North Korea under the 1994 Agreed Framework. After a year’s operation, each reactor could generate 50 or more bombs’ worth of weapons-grade plutonium. Offering to complete these reactors might be a quick way to restart negotiations, but it’s a crazy way to respond to a serial violator of the NPT.
Sadly, we have been down this road before. As far back as 1985, when Washington first learned of Pyongyang’s construction of a military production reactor, the United States worked with Russia to get Pyongyang to join the NPT. As an inducement, Moscow promised to sell North Korea three light water reactors. Pyongyang had to reach a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by 1987. It didn’t until 1992. Then, to fill the gap, Washington helped arrange a North-South agreement to forbid either Korean nation from having nuclear weapons or plants to separate plutonium or enrich uranium. To sweeten the pot, the United States withdrew its tactical nuclear weapons from Korea. But for Pyongyang the agreement was just a piece of paper: It secretly proceeded to reprocess enough material to make one or more weapons. When the IAEA, after its first inspection in 1992, announced that Pyongyang might have covertly separated plutonium in violation of the NPT, Pyongyang threatened to withdraw from the treaty.
President Clinton then cut a deal with Pyongyang, the 1994 Agreed Framework. The United States promised annual fuel oil shipments equivalent to the energy output of all the nuclear plants Pyongyang had under construction. The United States also promised to build two U.S.-type nuclear power reactors with an electric generating capacity ten times as large as that of the ones North Korea was building. In return, Pyongyang was supposed to freeze its plutonium production facilities and not make nuclear explosives (with plutonium or highly enriched uranium). Unfortunately, our diplomatic body language also gave Pyongyang the idea that it could pocket all the gains and cheat on this agreement, too. We now know Pyongyang developed a covert uranium bomb project in violation of the NPT and its other nonproliferation pledges. When called on this last October, North Korea responded by kicking out the IAEA staff monitoring compliance with the Agreed Framework’s plutonium production freeze and threatening to restart plutonium production.
So much for cutting nuclear deals directly with Pyongyang.
Now we have to stick to certain fixed points. IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei put it well in his advice to North Korea: “It is very important,” he said, “that every country understand that not through defiance of its international obligations can it get political gains or strategic advantage. It is through dialogue, but dialogue has to be based on respect for international rules.”
The international rules ElBaradei is talking about flow from the NPT. Enforcing that treaty should no longer be open to negotiation. At a minimum, we have to back the IAEA in taking North Korea’s noncompliance to the U.N. Security Council. The alternative is to allow Pyongyang to violate the NPT and withdraw with impunity, which will only accelerate the spread of nuclear weapons. We can be sure Iran is watching. Do we want Iran and other would-be nuclear states to conclude that there are penalties only for those who try and fail to get nuclear weapons?
At a minimum, we should announce that, having violated past agreements, North Korea is no longer eligible ever for the power reactors we agreed to supply (and which South Korea is now building and mostly paying for). That is not only common sense, but is required by U.S. nonproliferation law. We should close the project down, something the administration seems to have overlooked. U.S. parts and technology are necessary to complete the plants.
Finally, we must stop kidding ourselves that any deal is possible that will prompt Kim Jong Il and his generals to surrender their nuclear ambitions. What would they be without their bomb? We will have to wait them out. We should use the IAEA in Vienna and the U.N. Security Council in New York to confront the world with North Korea’s defiance of international agreements and to gain broad support for the demand that its violations cease. If the world cannot draw a nonproliferation line in this egregious case, is there any hope that it will ever do so? This question, rather than how to get to yes with Pyongyang, must be our guide.
Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington and author of “Best of Intentions: America’s Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation” (Praeger, 2001). Victor Gilinsky is an energy consultant and former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
