North Korea’s nuclear weapons program may already be too far advanced to thwart diplomatically, according to a Republican senator.
“It’s going to be very difficult, short of going in with a military strike,” Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., told the Washington Examiner.
Flake doesn’t want to invade North Korea. “That’s just not a good option,” the Foreign Relations Committee member said.
The regime has told South Korean officials they are willing to discuss dismantling their nuclear weapons program, for the first time, even as American intelligence officials believe the regime is mere months away from acquiring the ability to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon.
And so U.S. officials and allies face a high-stakes question: Is this latest olive branch a sign of success, or will the talks allow North Korea to buy the last amount of time they need to perfect their nuclear weapons and ballistic programs?
“I was there in South Korea two weeks ago [and] this very question came up,” Idaho Sen. James Risch, a Republican member of the Intelligence Committee, told the Washington Examiner. “And that happened to us once before.”
North Korea agreed in a 1994 international accord to shutter a plutonium plant, but they cheated on the pact by pursuing nuclear weapons through another means — highly enriched uranium — even with international monitors in the country. With that in mind, any negotiation hinges on the ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to protect diplomats from getting duped.
“In all likelihood, there is no way to be 100 percent sure; however, we do have ways and means,” Risch said. “I can’t really go into the ways and means, but, we’re in a substantially better position now than we were then. The world has changed dramatically, and [there have been] technological advances, and I really can’t talk about that.”
In the meantime, the United States plans to avoid making any one-sided concessions.
“All options are on the table and our posture toward the regime will not change until we see credible, verifiable, and concrete steps toward denuclearization,” Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday.
Flake thinks it’s too late for that to happen.
“This talk that we could somehow by threatening them or by sanctioning keep them from getting to a point where they sit down at the table as a legitimate nuclear threat was unreasonable, kidding ourselves,” he said. “By the time we get down to sitting at the table with them and actually have negotiations, then, they may be all the way there [as a nuclear power].”
That would shift the task of U.S. negotiators from dismantling the nuclear program to containing the threat.
“They’re at a point right now where we don’t want to risk a broader conflict, even if its just conventional weapons going after South Korea,” Flake said. “It’s a cliche, but, there are no good options. I don’t think they’re going to agree to anything that, in the end, that they don’t end up sitting at the table as some kind of nuclear power. It’s not going to be anything on the level where we are, but enough of a level where we treat them like a nuclear power.”
