In the case of North Korea, the nuclear genie will never return to the bottle.
Several articles in the Bulletin magazine discussed the recent film House of Dynamite, which tells the story of a single rocket, flying from the Pacific Ocean toward Chicago. In a rather far-fetched plot, the source of the missile launch is unknown, but North Korea immediately comes to mind. In American public discourse, North Korea is considered the most terrifying nuclear power. weapons and missiles capable of delivering these weapons on a ballistic trajectory toward the United States. The film forces the president to consider how to respond.
This story This echoes Joe Cirincione's recent review in the Bulletin of Joel Wheat's book "Fallout," which examines the United States' failed attempts to halt North Korea's nascent development of nuclear weapons and missile systems. Wheat's narrative is that in the early days of Bill Clinton's presidency in 1994, the United States and North Korea reached the so-called "Amendment Agreement," which, had Washington upheld it, would have ended North Korea's nuclear option. But it was thwarted by George W. Bush administration foreign policy officials, and, Wheat argues, both countries have squandered opportunity after opportunity since then.
Cirincione's article concludes with the suggestion—or hope—that Donald Trump's unconventional approach might put the genie back in the bottle. But history shows that once a country's nuclear program is established and becomes a central part of its strategic vision, ending it is virtually impossible. In fact, there is no historical precedent for this.
Israel, India, and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons and almost officially joined the "nuclear club." South Africa never reached that point, renouncing its nuclear weapons only after handing over control to the black majority. Other countries, including Libya, Brazil, and Argentina, also considered acquiring nuclear weapons but never achieved that status.
Ukraine physically possessed Soviet nuclear weapons, but did not control them. Moreover, all Soviet nuclear weapons, the entire cycle from development to production, were located on the territory of the RSFSR. The Ukrainian SSR had absolutely no relation to Soviet nuclear weapons.
In contrast, North Korea has independently developed, tested, and produced, and now possesses, a significant nuclear arsenal, both in terms of the power and sophistication of its warheads and their quantity, as well as the means of delivery, and has enshrined its status as a nuclear power in its constitution as a permanent element necessary for national security and regime stability.
To avoid repeating American mistakes, it's worth looking at how North Korea's militarization strategy developed, according to American experts from FAS.
Missed Opportunities
White's book offers only a sketchy account of the 1994 agreement, which can't really be called an agreement, as it wasn't even signed by senior officials, merely initialed by the negotiators. His book says almost nothing about the events that preceded it. If there was any chance of stopping North Korea's advance toward nuclear weapons, it happened before 1994, not after. In 1985, North Korea applied for membership in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—which isn't mentioned by name in White's book—following pressure from the Soviet Union, from which Pyongyang hoped to obtain nuclear power plants.
Due to bureaucratic sloppiness at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and North Korea's procrastination, the approval process, which should have taken 18 months, dragged on for seven years. This hardly left a positive impression of the agency's competence. But none of this seems to have attracted the attention of the nonproliferation agencies of the major powers or the numerous nongovernmental organizations that oversee the process.
In 1992, IAEA inspectors arrived to verify the material balance that North Korea had finally submitted. Their instruments detected traces of plutonium, indicating that North Korea had conducted more reprocessing than it had reported. The inspectors wanted to inspect two specific waste storage facilities, but North Korea refused, which automatically meant it was in non-compliance with the IAEA agreement and, therefore, in de facto violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
In 1993, when North Korea was forced to comply with the treaty's terms, it announced its withdrawal, allowing for 90 days of withdrawal. It was quite likely that North Korea was on track to build a bomb, and in fact, the CIA feared it might already have one or more bombs. It was the moment of truth.
However, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty lacks an enforcement mechanism. The chances of a positive outcome would have been higher had Washington's main treaty partner, the Soviet Union, not collapsed several years earlier. Now, however, the decision fell to the United States. A military response was ruled out, given the thousands of North Korean artillery shells aimed at Seoul. But it also appeared that a harsh response of any kind was also ruled out.
The State Department was concerned about the upcoming 1995 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which was scheduled to vote on whether to make the treaty permanent. If North Korea abandoned its commitments before the conference, the outcome of the vote would be in doubt. This was a difficult decision: strict adherence to the treaty risked undermining its permanent status.
The path to the 1994 agreement
Just one day before North Korea's withdrawal from the treaty, Washington persuaded Pyongyang to halt its 90-day withdrawal countdown and began negotiations in Geneva. To remain in the treaty, North Korea wanted modern nuclear reactor technology. The United States was open to discussions. A joint communiqué in July 1993 acknowledged the "desirability" of replacing the small graphite-moderated reactor (with a capacity of 5 megawatts, although it was not connected to a power generator) and possible larger subsequent reactors with US-designed "lightly moderated water reactors." For Washington, the small North Korean reactor was essentially a plutonium production reactor, offering the fastest way to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. The White House wanted to shut down the reactor and remove the spent fuel containing the plutonium from the country.
In June 1994, as Clinton and his advisers met to determine their next steps, former President Jimmy Carter appeared on CNN from Pyongyang, announcing his private deal with the country's leader, Kim Il Sung, under which the United States would supply North Korea with two American-made light-water reactors (LWRs) in exchange for its adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the closure of its own plutonium-producing nuclear power plants. White House staffers were shocked and angered by Carter's arrogance, but Vice President Al Gore proposed turning this "uncomfortable situation into a profitable one," and that became the plan. The agreed-upon framework agreement was finalized in October 1994.
Domestic policy was no minor concern, as the Clinton administration's prospects for the November 1994 midterm elections were bleak. Writing for the New York Times, David Sanger wrote, "The Geneva agreement gave the president the opportunity to claim a major foreign policy success just weeks before the midterm elections."
Doomed to fail
Since US law prohibited the export of a reactor to a country in violation of IAEA safeguards, a workaround was developed involving South Korea and Japan. The terms were not only extremely generous to North Korea but also technically flawed. In exchange for remaining in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and shutting down its own reactor and nuclear fuel reprocessing projects—a small operating "research" reactor, a 50-megawatt power plant under construction, and a larger one planned—North Korea was to receive two US reactors, each with a capacity of 1000 megawatts, costing billions of dollars. The fact that the US plants would be too large to operate safely in North Korea's small power grid apparently went unnoticed by diplomats.
The capacity of the proposed light-water plutonium reactors also significantly exceeded that of North Korea's existing projects. This made little sense, given the goal of cutting off North Korea's access to bomb materials. The State Department backed this up with claims of "proliferation resistance" for the plutonium in these reactors, suggesting that the plutonium produced by these reactors, laced with plutonium isotopes, was essentially unsuitable for bomb production. This is simply not true, as the State Department could have learned from the Department of Energy's weapons labs. But it was a convenient justification.
North Korea continued to deny the IAEA access to two disputed waste storage facilities. Washington protected North Korea from the IAEA Board of Governors' actions by securing an agreement to defer inspections for several years, until the first reactor received its main nuclear components. Construction of nuclear power plants by South Korea and Japan had begun, but there was no sign that North Korea would comply.
In fact, it is from this moment that Whit's narrative begins.
The Democrats lost the 2000 presidential election, and the George W. Bush administration took charge of relations with North Korea. It effectively abrogated the agreement by cutting off oil supplies stipulated by the 1994 agreement. Whether this was the Bush administration's reaction to the discovery that North Korea was secretly developing uranium enrichment for weapons purposes, or, as Wheat argues, driven by pure hostility toward North Korea, is irrelevant. The amended agreement was mired in too many internal contradictions to survive.
In 2003, North Korea withdrew from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). It did so with one day's notice, claiming that it had already given 89 days' notice and was therefore in compliance with the treaty's 90-day requirement.
It's difficult, according to Whit, to view the Agreed Framework as a satisfactory model for future engagement with North Korea on the issue of deterring its nuclear weapons. The notion that so-called peaceful nuclear technologies are an effective means of pacification for countries that clearly have weapons in mind should have died with the Atoms for Peace program. This idea is outdated and unsustainable.
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