Fighting ProliferationChapter 10
*Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, hearings on the North Korean nuclear accord, 25 January 1995.
With the North Korean nuclear agreement, a great deal is at stake. This agreement not only affects the danger that North Korea—a state with a record of brutal use of force and reckless export of dangerous weapons technologies—may acquire nuclear weapons. It also creates precedents for our ability to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons to other dangerous states—most notably Iran and Iraq. No less important, our handling of this agreement could affect profoundly our relations with the principal nations of Northeast Asia. Those relationships—particularly the ones with our democratic allies, Japan and South Korea—will determine our ability to maintain peace in that vital part of the world in the next century.
So it is not too much to say that this agreement and our handling of it will affect future prospects of war and peace. It is appropriate for the United States Congress to study this agreement very carefully and to deliberate thoroughly over any actions that it may take.
This agreement is not the foreign policy triumph that the Clinton administration claims it to be, and it does not solve the North Korean nuclear problem. It simply postpones that problem and may, in the process, make its solution ultimately more difficult. Perhaps even more important, it does nothing to change the North Korean policies that are the fundamental cause of tension on the Korean Peninsula.
Unfortunately, however, Congress cannot simply reject this agreement and go back to where we were before. The very fact of this agreement has altered the situation irretrievably. It has shifted the burden from North Korea to live up to its earlier agreements—including the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the North-South nuclear agreement of December 1991—and has created a potential pretext for North Korea to proceed with its nuclear program if it can claim that others are not living up to this agreement. By blocking implementation of the agreement, Congress would create just such a pretext.
Moreover, nonimplementation would create a damaging split with our Japanese and Korean allies, who have endorsed the agreement—however reluctantly. Preserving the strength of those relationships is one of the most important stakes the US has in the entire issue—one that has suffered in the course of these negotiations. It would be a mistake for Congress to further weaken our allies’ confidence in American consistency and reliability by yet another unilateral change of course. We have little alternative, therefore, to proceeding with the agreement.
To be fair, a perfect agreement would not have been possible, given whom we are dealing with and given the risks and limitations of military options. However, one of the mistakes the administration made in negotiations was to foster the notion that the only alternative to an agreement like the present one was war. The real alternative was to be prepared, if necessary, to continue and even intensify the economic pressure on North Korea—to present it with the fundamental choice of ending the basic confrontation on the Korean Peninsula or facing a potentially catastrophic economic decline.
Instead, we have paid a rather high price for relatively small gains and have encouraged North Korea to continue to think that it can have the important economic benefits of good relations with the US and Japan without any change in its persistent refusal to recognize and deal with South Korea or to end the military confrontation on the Peninsula. Fortunately, however, the strong economic, military, and diplomatic position of both the US and our South Korean ally still gives us a great deal of leverage on the situation if we use it properly.
What Congress can do is endeavor to ensure that the North Koreans live up to their commitments, to protect the leverage necessary to enforce the agreement, to guard against attempts by the North Koreans to continue the kind of pressure tactics that have proved effective for them since 1993, and—most important of all—to advance the other important interests of the US and its allies that were so badly neglected by the exclusive focus of these negotiations on nuclear issues. North Korea must accept the legitimacy and equality of South Korea as the essential step toward a true peace on the Korean Peninsula and the indispensable precondition for the reduction of military threat. To achieve these objectives, we must understand what the agreement accomplishes and what it does not.
If fully implemented, the agreement would achieve some important limits on the North Korean nuclear program, including the dismantling of large nuclear production reactors now under construction and related reprocessing facilities.* But these gains come at a price: the $4 billion price tag associated with the two large light water reactors (LWR) the North Koreans will receive; the price of legitimizing the pretense that the purpose of the North Korean nuclear program is to provide energy; and, even more consequential, the price of legitimizing the sale of similar reactors to other countries of proliferation concern. Indeed, this agreement is already creating difficulties for the administration’s commendable efforts to discourage the Germans and Russians from selling reactors of a similar type to Iran. That price might be worth paying, given the dangers posed by the North Korean nuclear program, except for three important drawbacks.
*For a detailed treatment of the nuclear aspects of the agreement, see Victor Gilinsky's "The Nuclear Deal: What the South Koreans Should be Concerned About" (chap 9).
First, many of the most important gains come far in the future. Second, as long as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is unable to conduct special inspections (the agreement delays such inspections until the first LWR is ready to receive “key” nuclear components), we will have no handle at all on covert nuclear activities in North Korea. This is more than a matter of determining the past history of the North Korean program—as important as that question is. It is also the only way of detecting and deterring North Korean nuclear development that may proceed in secret while the known facilities remain frozen. Given the North Korean track record and the extraordinary secrecy surrounding everything in that country, there is every reason to suspect that the North Koreans will continue with some kind of nuclear development in secret, as other countries like Iraq and Pakistan have done while pretending to observe nuclear commitments.
Third, the agreement is silent or ambiguous on a number of crucial questions. For example, although the agreement is ambiguous when it speaks of disposing the spent fuel from North Korea’s existing reactor “in a manner that does not involve reprocessing in the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea],” it is silent about the disposal of the much larger quantities of spent fuel that will eventually be produced by the LWRs. (Although the plutonium in this fuel is described as not “weapons grade” and presents difficulties for handling and weapons design, it can nonetheless be used to make weapons.) Moreover, the agreement says nothing about North Korea’s continued development of nuclear delivery systems—which may be the most important question, given our ignorance about how far the North Korean program has already proceeded.
Thus, the most important gains from the agreement do not come for some time and, in some cases, not until considerable ambiguities have been resolved. True, the agreement does achieve an immediate freeze on the known North Korean facilities, but this is a two-edged sword. As long as the North Koreans retain the ability to restart those facilities, we much expect continued attempts to threaten withdrawal as a means of wringing further concessions. Given the North Korean record of ignoring its past obligations, we have no reason to be optimistic about actual implementation of the agreement.
That is why the larger context in which the agreement will be implemented is as important as the details of the agreement. That is, what the agreement implies about the realization of economic pressures on North Korea and what it fails to do in addressing the questions of North-South relations and the conventional military threat on the Peninsula, not to mention the manner in which it was negotiated, are as important for the future as the details of the nuclear arrangements.
Defenders of the agreement commonly argue that North Korea’s desire to obtain LWRs will assure compliance. We should be skeptical about the notion that a regime facing the kind of immediate crisis that North Korea faces will be heavily influenced by the prospect of additional electricity supplies five to 10 years (or more) in the future—all the more so because it is quite obvious that the purpose of the North Koreans’ nuclear program, from the start, has not been to generate electric power. Moreover, if that were their real need, it could be met much more quickly by the construction of fossil fuel plants. In fact, North Korea may find it useful to delay completion of the LWRs if for some reason it wishes to delay the implementation of the agreement. We should not be surprised to find that Western companies involved in the project are more eager to complete it than are the North Koreans.
The most important gains for North Korea could come very quickly in the form of rapidly developing economic relations with the US and, even more lucratively, with Japan. Indeed, North Korea seemed on the verge of such a breakthrough with Japan in 1991, in the wake of the visit to Pyongyang by the then-powerful Japanese politician Shin Kanemaru. But concerns about the nuclear issue—in both Japan and the US—put that process on hold. Although the commitments the US makes in the nuclear agreement to improving political and economic relations with North Korea are vague, pressures to interpret them liberally are likely to grow rapidly. Unless we can achieve extraordinary coordination with Japan, even more rapid expansion of that country’s relations with North Korea is likely, to include not only trade and investment but foreign aid as well.
Once these relations develop, reimposing restrictions for anything short of the most egregious North Korean behavior will be difficult if not impossible. This stands to be North Korea’s greatest gain from the agreement. We may be creating a life-support system for a regime that would otherwise be facing the possibility of economic collapse.
In this context, the failure to obtain any reduction in the North Korean conventional military threat or any significant progress in North-South relations is a major flaw in the agreement. To argue that this negotiation was only about nuclear issues and not about political and military confrontation on the Peninsula misses two major points.
First, we are using political and economic leverage that is critical to any successful resolution of the larger issues. Unless we can maintain control over the development of North Korea’s economic relations with the outside world, our leverage over these issues will disappear.
Second, as long as North Korea refuses to recognize the South or deal with it on equal terms and continues to maintain a huge, offensively structured armed force for the purpose of unifying the Peninsula by force, it is difficult to see how there could be much confidence in any solution to the nuclear problem. Conversely, if real progress occurs in reducing the risk of war in Korea, ambiguities about North Korea’s nuclear status will be much less threatening.
The manner in which the agreement was negotiated creates serious problems for the future. Most important, the failure to give serious emphasis to South Korean concerns in the negotiations has strengthened the North Koreans’ belief that they can develop their relations with the US and Japan while continuing their dangerous refusal to deal with the South.
In addition, these inconsistencies will haunt us if we need to rally international support for a stronger policy in the future. In particular, by allowing former president Jimmy Carter to cut the ground out from under even the very mild sanctions effort that our key allies had signed up to, the Clinton administration made it virtually impossible to mobilize that kind of effort a second time. In fact, once President Clinton allowed President Carter to reverse US policy in the way that he did, the outcome of the negotiations was virtually foreordained by our loss of leverage.
Finally, the appearance that the US has yielded in the face of North Korean pressure will lead to more such pressure in the future. Unless we are prepared to face a breakdown of the agreement, North Korea will continue to threaten it. We cannot put ourselves in a position in which the only alternative to agreement is war; nor can we permit the North Koreans to think that they can continue to make gains by threatening war.
Since Congress at this point cannot produce a better agreement by overturning the present one, it is better to think about how the overall context might be shaped so that (1) the agreement is implemented strictly and (2) the deficiencies in the agreement—particularly the important issues that it fails to address—can be corrected over time. In doing so, we must define our overall objectives.
What we want—as well as what our South Korean allies want—is not to squeeze the North Korean regime until it collapses. It may collapse in any case of its own failures, but the South Koreans are understandably fearful of the problems and dangers that would present. What they would most like to see—and what we should support—is the gradual transformation of North Korea and an end to North-South confrontation.
To achieve this, however, we should confront North Korea with a clear choice: If it will abandon its preparations for unification of the Peninsula by force, recognize South Korea and deal with it directly, and reduce the military threat it poses to the South, it can expect to have support from other countries, including the US and Japan as well as South Korea, to achieve a “soft landing.” However, if it continues its confrontational policies toward the South, it faces real dangers of economic collapse. What it cannot do is have it both ways. At a time when North Korea is facing major decisions about its future leadership, we must present it with a clear choice.
If North Korea wishes to have the kind of economic relations with the West that give it a chance of surviving, we should insist that (1) most important, it recognize South Korea, accept its permanence and legitimacy, and deal with it directly as an equal; (2) it take steps to reduce the conventional military threat on the Peninsula and to develop confidence-building measures to reduce the risk of war; (3) it cease the development of delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction; (4) it take early steps to implement the regime of mutual inspections envisioned in the North-South agreement on denuclearization; and (5) it stop exporting missiles and other destabilizing weapons. If we are to support these objectives, Congress should consider insisting on a number of things as part of the implementation of the nuclear agreement.
First, to ensure that North Korea cannot continue to reject dealings with the South, we should make clear that the provision of the LWRs must come from South Korea. Moreover, specific agreements for supply of the reactors must provide for continued control over the spent fuel. We should insist on these conditions in any circumstances, but particularly if the US is to take even a modest share in funding the reactors.
Second, further development of US and Japanese relations with North Korea—particularly those steps that would provide significant economic support—cannot take place without meaningful progress in North-South relations. North Korea must understand that progress with the South will set the pace for its relations with the outside world.
Third, we need to make clear that continued development of delivery systems for nuclear weapons—particularly long-range missiles—will put the entire nuclear agreement in question. Further, the issue of special inspections—whether under IAEA auspices or under the terms of the North-South agreement of 1991—cannot wait for “significant completion” of the first LWR if North Korea wants to have meaningful development of relations with the US and Japan.
Fourth, although the precise timetable may be difficult to specify, the provision of heavy fuel to North Korea—which in effect frees up other fuel supplies for use by the North Korean military—cannot continue indefinitely without some significant progress in reducing the military threat.
Fifth, Congress should insist on regular reports on North Korean compliance with the agreement, to include evidence of progress in North-South relations and progress in reducing the military threat on the Peninsula, as well as reports on measures taken and measures under consideration for improving US and Japanese relations with North Korea.
Finally, we need to make preparations to deal with the prospect of a North Korean effort to threaten withdrawal from the agreement. This should include the development of agreed measures with our allies and other concerned outside countries as well as preparations to strengthen South Korean and US defenses on the Peninsula in order to reduce North Korean attempts to threaten war as a means to blackmail.