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Weapons of Mass Destruction and North Korea MARCH 2002 Donald G.
Gross, Adjunct Professor Introduction North Korea's potential for developing weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles has been a concern for the United States and the international community for more than a decade. In 1994, the U.S. almost went to war with North Korea out of fear that its nuclear capability would become a sword of Damocles hanging over America and U.S. allies in the region. In August 1998, North Korea's test of a long-range Taepo Dong missile sent shock-waves through the U.S. intelligence community, which did not then believe that North Korea's capabilities were so advanced. And in the last several years, the advocates of National Missile Defense have repeatedly cited North Korea's potential for attacking the U.S. with long-range missiles as justification for a rapid and expensive build-up of defensive anti-missile systems. Clearly, many experts in the U.S. take very seriously the North Korean WMD threat1, even though countries like China regularly accuse the U.S. of highly exaggerating the danger that a poor, small and isolated state like North Korea actually poses. From the 1994 Geneva Agreement to the present time, the U.S. has used diplomatic means to constrain North Korea's capability for developing WMD. In fact, one could even say that the raison d'etre of U.S. policy toward North Korea (beyond deterring a conventional attack on South Korea) has been to reduce and ultimately eliminate North Korea's WMD capabilities. Former Defense Secretary William Perry's fundamental review of North Korea policy in 1999 reaffirmed that eliminating the potential North Korean WMD threat was the primary objective of U.S. policy toward that country. From hindsight, it seems remarkable that the Perry Review almost totally excluded a broader consideration of the security benefits that could flow to the U.S. from a process of inter-Korean reconciliation. But, in fairness, one must recall that at the time the Perry Review occurred, North and South Korea had no apparent negotiating channels and the prospects for inter-Korea reconciliation seemed remote. The Bush Administration, after conducting its own policy review, announced in June 2001 a modified approach to security issues with North Korea. Unlike previous policy, the Bush policy does not solely focus on WMD but puts greater emphasis on negotiating with North Korea the question of conventional force deployments on the Peninsula. Perhaps ironically, this overall approach to security issues with North Korea is more likely to bring positive results on WMD than a policy focusing exclusively on WMD. With even the modest progress toward inter-Korean détente that has occurred since the historic June 2000 Summit, the opportunity now exists for the U.S. and South Korea to reach a package agreement on security issues with North Korea. As part of a settlement that addresses North Korea's fundamental security concerns, North Korea is much more likely to abandon fully its WMD aspirations than if the U.S. simply offers aid (particularly food and energy) in exchange for North Korea's WMD constraint. U.S. Focused Approach on North Korean WMD During the Clinton Administration In many respects, the issue of North Korea's nuclear weapons potential was unexpectedly thrust upon the Clinton Administration and became a major foreign policy crisis during the first term. Following a series of disputes with the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1993, North Korea announced its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Relying on its own intelligence reporting, which assessed that North Korea was developing a nuclear weapons capability, the U.S. took the lead in moving toward international sanctions at the United Nations. Although North Korea announced that it would consider such sanctions the equivalent of a declaration of war (and the U.S, according to former Secretary Perry, was within days of mobilizing for that eventuality), former President Jimmy Carter reached an understanding with North Korean leader Kim Il Sung that made possible the 1994 Geneva Agreement, negotiated by Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gallucci. This first WMD-related agreement that the Clinton Administration concluded with North Korea has been largely successful. Under the agreement, North Korea agreed to replace its graphite-moderated reactors (which had the potential to produce nuclear weapons material) with proliferation-resistant light-water reactors (LWRs) that have yet to be constructed. To compensate the North for its loss of energy from the existing plutonium reactors, the U.S. explicitly agreed to supply heavy fuel oil and implicitly agreed to provide more humanitarian food aid to the famine-stricken state. This trade-off - North Korean agreement not to reprocess spent fuel and not to proceed with construction of the reactors in exchange for U.S.-provided incentives and benefits - set the pattern for the remaining years of the Clinton Administration's negotiations with North Korea on WMD. Even though the Geneva Agreement was a means of preventing North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, it opened up the Clinton Administration to attacks from conservative Republicans in the U.S. Congress. Conservatives did not like the distasteful appearance of "paying" a so-called rogue state not to acquire WMD. On most occasions, critics called such payment "appeasement." But in the world of nonproliferation diplomacy, providing incentives to suppress a WMD threat to the United States was entirely legitimate because it successfully reduced the threat of nuclear attack to the American people. The Perry Report, released in September 1999, and the process leading up to it, were in good part designed to blunt this political criticism from the Republican right-wing. The Perry Report established the legitimacy, in mainstream congressional opinion, of pursuing a process of WMD threat reduction with North Korea that would draw on both diplomatic incentives and disincentives. After a period of probing and delay (following Perry's visit to Pyongyang in Spring 1999) the Perry process - and the diplomatic threat reduction approach it endorsed -- culminated in several concrete achievements. First, it arguably laid the basis for the U.S. agreement with North Korea, negotiated by Ambassador Charles Kartman, to send inspectors to the suspect reactor or reprocessing site at Kumchang-ri. North Korea only agreed to this unprecedented on-site U.S. inspection after receiving the promise of additional U.S. humanitarian food aid. The inspection was able to lay to rest U.S. fears that North Korea was secretly circumventing the 1994 Geneva Agreement by planning to produce nuclear weapons material in an underground reactor at Kumchang-ri. Second, the Perry Process led to a North Korean diplomatic commitment to observe a moratorium on the testing of long-range missiles while U.S.-North Korean negotiations on related security issues were on-going. Third, in both the communiqué issued during the visit of Marshall Jo to Washington in October 2000 and in Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's visit soon after to Pyongyang, North Korea reaffirmed its commitment to the Geneva Agreement. This reaffirmation, six years after the agreement was originally concluded, had significant diplomatic value in preventing a prospective North Korean violation. Finally, the Perry approach led to the conclusion of a draft agreement, negotiated by Assistant Secretary of State Robert Einhorn, whereby North Korea would give up its production of long-range and medium-range missiles exceeding MTCR limits, in addition to agreeing to halt all missile exports. Reportedly, the agreement left unresolved some significant issues, including verification and the status of already deployed missiles. This November 2000 draft agreement, reached during a meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was ultimately caught up in the transition to a new Administration in the U.S., and remains in limbo. Inherent Problems in the Clinton Administration Approach to North Korea's WMD The irony in the virtually exclusive focus on North Korea's WMD by the Clinton Administration is that it limited the ability of U.S. negotiators to reach comprehensive agreements and in some ways conferred greater diplomatic leverage on North Korea. This singular focus, largely forced upon the Administration by historical circumstances, also arguably made it harder for the U.S. and South Korea to coordinate their broad diplomatic security policy toward North Korea. Why is this so? In the first place, the narrow approach to negotiations with North Korea meant that the incentives the U.S. could bring to bear in the diplomatic negotiations were highly circumscribed. U.S. negotiators started from the established principle of U.S. policy that the U.S. does not and will not compensate another country in dollars for curbing its WMD programs. On more than one occasion when the North Koreans agreed to abandon their export missile program altogether, if the U.S. agreed to make up for the consequent financial loss, the U.S. flatly refused. This U.S. principle meant that American negotiators had to rely on creative incentives within the constraints of existing policy. So, for example, the U.S. proposed or supported programs i) to rapidly increase North Korea's output of potatoes, ii) to organize a "clearinghouse" of information for foreign investors, and iii) to provide other forms of technical development assistance. It subsequently tried to trade off these incentives with North Korea in exchange for WMD constraints. The U.S. was also prepared to offer security guarantees to North Korea consistent with the declaration of "no hostile intent" in the joint Communique issued during the October 2000 visit of Marshall Jo to Washington. If any of these incentives had exceeded a certain point, they would have subjected Clinton negotiators to attacks from the Republican right-wing in the Congress. As importantly, some of them could have violated legal constraints (a number of which still exist) on trading and investing in North Korea. The upshot of this situation was that U.S. diplomats seeking to curb pernicious North Korean behavior went into WMD negotiations carrying "shriveled carrots" (in diplomatic parlance) and minimal incentives. More often than not, these negotiators lacked the tools they needed to achieve broad diplomatic success. In the largest sense, since only WMD was on the table, U.S. negotiators could not address North Korea's fundamental security concerns, which would have given the U.S. side considerably more leverage. Nor could the U.S. side hold out the promise of large-scale international development assistance through the World Bank and IMF that would arguably have induced much more North Korean negotiating flexibility. It also seems apparent that the singular U.S. focus on the WMD threat from North Korea gave the North Koreans additional leverage over the United States in diplomatic negotiations. Each time North Korea wanted to play brinkmanship games to improve its negotiating position, it only had to threaten to stop canning spent reactor fuel, as required by the 1994 Geneva Agreement, or prepare to carry out some missile-related test (such as the ground-based test firing of missile engines). Such measures greatly heightened concerns within the U.S. government about North Korea's WMD intentions and capabilities. To the extent the U.S. diplomatic focus on WMD unnecessarily magnified the extent of North Korea's threat to the United States, it effectively strengthened North Korea's negotiating position. Surely, this was not the intention of U.S. policy, but U.S. policy inadvertently had this effect. Lastly, a singular U.S. focus on North Korean WMD arguably made it harder to develop a joint and comprehensive U.S.-South Korean approach to security issues with North Korea. Instead of the U.S. and South Korea pursuing common and overlapping concerns vis-à-vis the North, a diplomatic "division of labor" occurred. South Korea acknowledged that the U.S. had the lead in negotiating WMD-related issues bilaterally with North Korea; and the U.S. confirmed that South Korea had the primary role in negotiating conventional arms control and "tension reduction" measures with North Korea at the Four Party talks. Rather than strengthening U.S.-South Korean diplomatic coordination, this "division of labor" arguably weakened the position of both sides in achieving their intended goals. South Korea often paid lip-service to the North Korean WMD threat in its diplomatic policy, but effectively did little to assist the U.S. in addressing it in on-going negotiations.2 More often than not, South Korea expressed concern that any new crisis over WMD could cause a conventional military confrontation on the Peninsula. In the area of conventional tension reduction, lack of high-level U.S. attention to this issue virtually guaranteed that no progress could be made. As importantly, deep distrust of North Korea's intentions - and a consequent unwillingness to pull U.S. and South Korean forces back from the DMZ - limited the perceived possibilities for draw-downs and drawbacks of forces. The Bush Administration Policy Toward North Korea In a sense, it is premature to assess the Bush Administration's policy toward WMD and security issues with North Korea, because that policy has yet to be put into practice. For almost a year, North Korea resisted resuming bilateral negotiations with the United States, and the two countries sparred on a rhetorical level, exacerbated by the tensions deriving from the U.S. war against terror in Afghanistan.3 Now that it appears the U.S. will resume its bilateral negotiations with North Korea, following the early April visit of South Korea's Special Presidential Envoy Lim Dong-won to Pyongyang, it seems especially worthwhile to judge the potential benefits of the Bush policy. To a large extent, the changed nature of U.S. policy toward North Korea on WMD and security issues has been obscured by the Administration's own rhetoric. In June 2001, the Bush Administration reaffirmed the importance of pursuing diplomatic threat reduction talks with North Korea and in so doing continued the broad Perry approach. While it underlined the importance of addressing U.S. WMD concerns, the new policy specifically added the issue of conventional force deployments to the agenda for U.S.-North Korea negotiations. The decision to include this issue, following an intensive policy review, means that for the first time in nearly a decade U.S. security policy toward North Korea will not focus solely on WMD. WMD and conventional force issues, presumably having equal importance, will be viewed together in the context of a more holistic U.S. approach to security issues on the Korean peninsula. Both before and after the announcement of this policy, President Bush made critical remarks about North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, which led many observers to believe the U.S. has adopted a "hard line" policy toward North Korea that relies more on military coercion than diplomatic negotiation. But President Bush's rhetoric (especially his January 2002 State of the Union address, when he called North Korea part of an "axis of evil") should not obscure the fundamental policy direction of his Administration. Since announcing this policy in June 2001, senior U.S. officials reiterated numerous times that the U.S. was prepared to resume unconditionally newly broadened negotiations with North Korea. U.S. spokesmen have specifically clarified that the addition of conventional force issues to the U.S. negotiating agenda was not a precondition to resuming the process of diplomatic threat reduction. The essential promise of the new Bush policy toward North Korea is this: it seeks to transform the overall security situation and thereby lay the basis for long term peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula. It charts out a policy direction that could lead to a package deal with North Korea on both conventional forces and WMD. Ultimately, by approaching the security situation in a more holistic way, I believe the Bush Administration policy is likely to be more effective than the Clinton policy in addressing critical WMD issues. This is so for several reasons. To begin with, approaching security issues as a whole allows the U.S. to benefit from the process of inter-Korean reconciliation that has occurred in fits and starts during the last 18 months. On a political and economic level, the two Koreas have laid the basis for long-term détente on the Peninsula at the very least. President Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il in June 2000 reached a compromise on a new political framework for the Peninsula that can lead to a mutually acceptable North-South political structure. Under this structure, North and South Korea would acknowledge the unity of Korea while maintaining their separate political and economic systems for the foreseeable future. On economic issues, North Korea has made it clear that it welcomes foreign investment and large-scale economic development just as South Korea and major South Korean business groups have expressed strong interest, over the long-term, in investing in North Korea. Although a major flow of investment into North Korea has not occurred in the last 18 months, the two Koreas have tried to clear away legal and practical obstacles to its occurrence. Once political and security conditions improve and the remaining obstacles are removed (especially those that prevent financing by international development institutions) there is every reason to believe that the economic development of North Korea can proceed apace. The progress of inter-Korean political and economic relations since the June 2000 summit arguably makes it easier for the U.S. and South Korea to pursue a major change in the security situation on the Peninsula. They can now have greater confidence that important factions in North Korea have a stake in a future of peace and prosperity of the Peninsula and are willing to reach a compromise on the core inter-Korean political issues that have given rise to military conflict and provocations in the past. On the one hand, the U.S. and South Korea can assess that North Korea now has strong reasons to seek a far more normal security situation which would allow it to move forward with economic development. On the other hand, the U.S. and South Korea can feel assured that a North Korea which is willing to reach an acceptable compromise with the South on political issues will not seek to use military force to overthrow the new arrangements. Rather, North Korea would view these prospective political arrangements both as desirable for their own sake and for their value in facilitating large-scale economic development. If the U.S. assesses that peace and stability can and will exist on the Korean peninsula at diminished force levels, the U.S. is more likely to show significant flexibility on re-deploying and reducing the numbers of its troops in South Korea. U.S. strategic planners have already expressed the desire to reconfigure U.S. forces in Korea within the context of a re-shaped U.S. military presence in East Asia during the coming decades. The long-range vision of these planners can begin to be implemented through an agreement on significant tension reduction measures for the Korean Peninsula that would result in lower risk of surprise attack and lead to redeployments and reductions of forces. With this goal in mind, and in the context of the new Bush policy, the U.S. could offer material security incentives to North Korea that were not possible during the Clinton Administration4 - and thus make it far more likely to achieve an agreement with North Korea. Even aside from the context of greater inter-Korean reconciliation, the Bush framework for security issues allows negotiators to more effectively address North Korea's security concerns. Doing so, I believe, is critical for the U.S. to achieve the security changes it seeks on both conventional forces and WMD. U.S. officials often underestimate the fear and apprehension that North Korea has of the United States. Although the U.S. has no plan to pursue the military conquest of North Korea unless North Korea threatens the U.S. with WMD or attacks South Korea, North Korean leaders deeply fear a surprise attack by U.S. forces at any time. (This fear has been magnified several times over by the U.S. war against terror in Afghanistan and the accompanying U.S. rhetoric about the threat from North Korea). A negotiating agenda that includes conventional force issues allows the U.S. to offer pullbacks, redeployments and reductions of its own forces as a way of inducing corresponding threat reduction by North Korea. A broader negotiating agenda on security issues also allows the U.S. to more easily offer the kind of security guarantees against U.S. attack that North Korea has sought from the U.S. at least since October 2000. The Bush negotiating approach thus provides two major benefits as a matter of diplomatic strategy. In the first place, it generally gives the U.S. a lot of "bang for the buck" in security negotiations because the value of any redeployment of U.S. forces on the Peninsula counts heavily in the minds of North Korea's leaders. Kim Jong Il and others are more likely to support fundamental changes in North Korea's military posture if North Korea's own core security concerns are addressed. Second, this induced North Korea flexibility on security issues in general (made possible by greater U.S. flexibility on conventional force issues) can specifically be applied to WMD. The U.S. would make it clear that while it is willing to offer new security guarantees and conventional force redeployments, the U.S. expects not only conventional threat reduction vis-à-vis South Korea, but an end to the North Korean WMD threat as well. If and when North Korea puts both these security issues on the negotiating table, the U.S. would feel justified in offering major economic incentives to North Korea. Simply by agreeing to give the "green light" to World Bank and IMF programs to facilitate economic development in North Korea, the U.S. could trigger major international capital inflows to North Korea over time. Providing these economic incentives makes good sense in the context of a negotiation to reduce the overall North Korean threat to the U.S. and South Korea. The reluctance that the U.S. has shown in the last several years to offering such incentives to North Korea (even for the sake of reducing the WMD threat) could be overcome if the security benefits the U.S. and South Korea receive from any new agreement, in reducing both the conventional and WMD threat, are considerable. The new Bush approach to North Korea potentially allows the U.S. to overcome the three obstacles noted earlier that hindered Clinton Administration diplomacy. While Clinton negotiators could only bring to bear minimal negotiating incentives (largely in form of humanitarian aid, limited technical assistance and deliveries of fuel oil), the Bush Administration will be able to put on the negotiating table security guarantees, significant tension reduction measures (including redeployments and reduction of forces) and the provision of access to international development assistance. The Bush Administration would be justified in offering these incentives in the context of a package deal that significantly reduced the overall North Korean security threat. Second, the new approach puts North Korea's WMD capability in the context of broader security issues. U.S. perceptions of the WMD threat will now more closely correspond to the reality of the danger these weapons actually pose. As mentioned previously, to the extent that the virtually exclusive U.S. diplomatic focus on WMD unnecessarily magnified the extent of North Korea's threat to the United States, it effectively strengthened North Korea's negotiating position. More accurate perception of the WMD threat will in turn reduce North Korea's ability to exert diplomatic leverage over the U.S. Third, an overall U.S. approach to conventional force issues and WMD allows the U.S. and South Korea to overcome their so-called "division of labor" in negotiating security measures with North Korea. Instead of minimizing and even undercutting the pursuit of the other country's primary security aims, the Bush policy should strengthen the ability of U.S. and South Korea to put their full diplomatic weight behind a fully-shared set of common negotiating objectives. The diplomatic clout of each country can now be applied to all these objectives, not just the specific objectives assigned through the "division of labor." Doing so will reduce the chance of misunderstanding between South Korea and the United States and should increase the diplomatic coordination between them. It will also make it harder for North Korea to pursue its traditional strategy of "driving a wedge" between the two allies in diplomatic negotiations. Conclusion After the nuclear crisis with North Korea in 1993 and 1994, the Clinton Administration began a lengthy effort to reduce the threat posed by North Korea's WMD capability to the United States. Using a limited set of negotiating tools and facing constant criticism from the Republican right-wing in the U.S. Congress, U.S. diplomats forged a series of agreements that helped to contain North Korea's WMD capability. The 1994 Geneva Agreement continues to serve as a barrier to any possible nuclear weapons program. Other agreements negotiated by U.S. diplomats include the highly-intrusive inspection of a suspect nuclear site, a moratorium on North Korea's long-range missile tests and, in draft form, an end to North Korean missile exports together with the imposition of MTCR limits on North Korea's missile development program. Having said that, there is still major controversy today over whether the 1994 Geneva Agreement will remain in force and whether the U.S. will ever conclude a missile deal with North Korea. Some U.S. officials have raised new concerns about North Korea's biological weapons stocks.5 Rather than pursue the Administration's broader approach to security issues with North Korea announced in June 2001, it seems that certain officials would again like to focus on a narrower set of exclusively WMD issues, which have defied full resolution for years. Now that bilateral negotiations with North Korea on security issues will likely begin again in earnest, the new Bush Administration policy should stand the U.S. in good stead. With a broader focus on both conventional and WMD issues, U.S. diplomats will be well positioned to address North Korea's deep-seated fears about U.S. force deployments on the peninsula. In seeking a package deal that covers conventional forces, WMD and international financial assistance to North Korea, U.S. negotiators are far more likely to obtain the changes the U.S. seeks in North Korea's military posture than they would through an approach focusing solely on Pyongyang's prospective WMD capabilities. FOOTNOTES
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