4
THE UNRAVELING OF NORTH KOREA’S PROLIFERATION BLACKMAIL STRATEGY
SINCE THE END of the Cold War, North Korea has repeatedly attempted to compel concessions from the United States by wielding the threat of nuclear proliferation. In the early 1990s, North Korea threatened to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons unless Washington provided energy assistance.1 During the Six-Party Talks a decade later, the North Koreans returned to concession-seeking diplomacy by restarting their mothballed plutonium facilities, producing large quantities of fissile material, and testing a nuclear device.2 After these negotiations reached an impasse, North Korea avoided using its nuclear program as a bargaining chip until February 2012, when it agreed to a moratorium on “missile launches, nuclear tests and nuclear activities” in exchange for food aid.3 But a satellite launch in April 2012 and another nuclear test in February 2013 left US officials wondering “why Pyongyang would edge close to a deal and then rip it to pieces within days.”4 Subsequent efforts in New York to privately broach terms for resuming denuclearization talks also came to an abrupt end when North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear weapon test in January 2016.5
North Korea’s steady development of nuclear weapons raises the question of why Pyongyang used its underlying nuclear program to pursue coercive diplomacy at all. North Korean decision making is notoriously difficult to estimate, but the historical record suggests that the ruling Kim regime long desired nuclear weapons to offset conventional inferiority.6 As the Cold War ended, Pyongyang needed to ensure its continued survival amid a dramatic loss of power and Soviet protection. Nuclear weapons offered a robust and efficient deterrent shield.7 Furthermore, North Korea was isolated from the international economy and community, so the material consequences and normative opprobrium associated with nuclear proliferation were probably of little concern for the pariah regime.8 Finally, North Korea had invested considerable sums in its nuclear program for decades but received few material benefits from using this technical capacity to proliferate as a form of compellence against the United States.9
Despite these strong drivers of proliferation, North Korea appears to have employed its nuclear program as a bargaining instrument for two reasons. First, diplomacy allowed North Korea to protect and enhance its emerging nuclear program during a critical period of development. By cutting a deal with the United States in 1994, for instance, North Korea reduced the threat of preventive military action against the vulnerable Yongbyon plutonium complex and opened up room to develop other strategic assets— notably ballistic missiles and uranium enrichment—at other undeclared sites. Second, the ruling Kim regime’s survival came to depend on extorting concessions from foreign governments to sustain the military and political elite.10 After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pyongyang needed fresh sources of foreign patronage and soon found that the threat of proliferation provided it with the ability to compel concessions from the United States.11 North Korea may have stumbled onto the blackmail potential of its nuclear program by accident, but it was well versed in identifying American and South Korean “pressure points” throughout the Cold War and then exploiting these vulnerabilities with coercive diplomatic campaigns.12
But when did nuclear latency give the North Koreans the strongest bargaining advantage over the United States? This chapter claims that there was an optimal range of nuclear technology for North Korea to possess for the purpose of successful compellence. The North Koreans were in the best position when the plutonium-production capability was just coming on line in the early 1990s. At this emerging stage of technical development, North Korea could issue a credible threat of proliferation backed by a relatively low-cost assurance to suspend and eventually disable nuclear activities at Yongbyon in exchange for concessions. Once North Korea’s nuclear program left this fissile material “sweet spot” by producing large quantities of plutonium and testing a nuclear weapon during the Six-Party Talks, it became prohibitively costly and unattractive for the regime to reverse course or even freeze these activities. The North Koreans may have liked to pretend that they were still in the sweet spot during subsequent discussions, but the mature nuclear enterprise no longer provided an easy means to practice coercive diplomacy.
The fissile material sweet spot explains in part why North Korea’s buildup of nuclear capabilities over the last decade did not translate into an enhanced edge to extract concessions from the United States. As Thomas Schelling noted long ago, coercive threats have to be “stopped or reversed when the enemy complies, or else there is no inducement.”13 While North Korea continued to issue demands and consider offers at the negotiation table, the proliferation blackmail strategy unraveled because the government was unwilling to freeze or cap its strategic capabilities. Once the nuclear enterprise matured into an operational capacity, the Kim regime would likely pay high domestic costs in terms of “delegitimization and destabilization” if it decided to barter away this valuable asset.14
The rest of the chapter reviews two episodes of North Korean diplomacy to illustrate the bargaining benefits the Kim regime was able to reap from its emerging proliferation threat, as well as the barriers to denuclearization that set in as the nuclear enterprise matured over time. The first case of proliferation blackmail from 1991 to 1994 shows how North Korea’s threat to produce plutonium applied enough pressure on the United States to comply with demands without requiring the regime to make a hard choice about proliferation. The second episode of nuclear diplomacy during the Six-Party Talks a decade later demonstrates how the menu of denuclearization options became more expensive, while the Kim regime grew increasingly unwilling to trade away its nuclear assets. The chapter concludes that North Korea is unlikely to freeze its modern nuclear activities in the absence of a major catalytic shock.
Proliferation Blackmail in the Sweet Spot
The first crisis over North Korea’s capacity to produce plutonium in the early 1990s is a paradigmatic case of how an adversary can leverage an emerging threat of proliferation to compel concessions from the United States. This section reviews the four main stages of coercive diplomacy that unfolded between 1991 and 1994 to assess how North Korea was able to strike a low-cost and high-reward deal by freezing operations at Yongbyon.
The first stage of the nuclear crisis began in 1991 as construction on a plutonium-reprocessing plant at the Yongbyon nuclear research complex neared completion. The United States worried that the huge plant could soon be used to produce large quantities of weapons-grade plutonium from spent reactor fuel. Washington coordinated a campaign to reward North Korea with expanded trade and security benefits if it froze and uncovered operations with this sensitive technology. North Korea subsequently allowed International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) teams to inspect the nuclear complex in the spring of 1992. The inspectors uncovered evidence that North Korea had lied about its past experiments with plutonium separation. Pyongyang refused to provide more information but implied that it did have full reprocessing capabilities. In an interesting move, North Korea also kept IAEA surveillance devices in place so the agency could track diversion of spent fuel to the reprocessing plant. By the end of 1992, North Korea had generated a credible proliferation threat along with the ability to ratchet up pressure on the United States by moving to produce fissile material.
During the second stage, North Korea issued a series of ultimatums, starting with an announcement on March 12, 1993, that it would withdraw from compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in ninety days.15 US officials believed that by starting a “ticking-clock” countdown to the production of fissile material and nuclear weapons, the North Koreans were “setting the stage to negotiate with the United States on a package that would secure the greatest benefits on the easiest terms possible.”16 In response, the Bill Clinton administration devised a diplomatic plan that focused on demanding nonproliferation assurances from Pyongyang, notably that North Korea return to the NPT, comply with the IAEA, verifiably declare all nuclear activities, and ship all plutonium and spent fuel out of the country.17
When formal negotiations began in June 1993, North Korean chief delegate Kang Sok-ju made the demands and assurances of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) more explicit in a meeting with American chief negotiator Robert Gallucci. Kang emphasized that “Pyongyang had the ‘capability’ to build such weapons, but going that route made little sense since the United States had a large nuclear arsenal. Kang proposed a deal. If the United States stopped threatening North Korea, his country would commit itself never to manufacture nuclear weapons.”18 The North Korean leadership understood that the threat of proliferation needed to be backed with a believable nonproliferation promise once compliance was forthcoming from the United States.
Gallucci indicated that the United States would be willing to fulfill demands for energy imports and perhaps even nuclear reactors if North Korea made a credible commitment not to produce fissile material and nuclear weapons. Kang bluntly told Gallucci that North Korea would “proceed to extract enough plutonium from its spent fuel rods to build one or two weapons” if the United States resisted.19 Although Kang recognized the need for a credible nonproliferation promise, the North Koreans would not offer up such an assurance without first extracting the greatest package of concessions possible from the United States. The negotiations deadlocked because Washington refused to capitulate without a nonproliferation promise from Pyongyang. This circular negotiation pattern continued to stymie a deal over the next year.
After the June 1993 meeting deadlocked, North Korea started to turn up the pressure with new activities at Yongbyon. North Korea allowed the IAEA to perform maintenance on the monitoring equipment at Yongbyon in May 1993 and to “install a new device at the reactor that would help monitor operations when the rods were unloaded.”20 Yet the United States continued to resist North Korean demands for significant concessions without a firm nonproliferation commitment on the bargaining table.21 By March 1994, however, Washington became aware of a relatively modest increase in breakout speed based on information gleaned from IAEA inspections. Inspectors discovered that North Korea had quietly doubled its capacity to recover plutonium at Yongbyon. Cooperation with the IAEA “smacked of a ploy to build up negotiating leverage,” as the inspections indicated that North Korea “might ramp up its nuclear weapons program rapidly if diplomacy failed.”22 If the United States continued to rebuff North Korea’s demands, Pyongyang signaled it was prepared to quickly breakout and produce nuclear weapons.23
The third stage of the blackmail process began in the spring of 1994, when North Korea prepared to explicitly cross the fissile material redline. By this point, Washington had resisted Pyongyang’s efforts to extort concessions for over a year and refused to buy out the North Korean nuclear program without a promise to freeze and dismantle the plutonium-reprocessing capabilities at Yongbyon. On April 19, North Korea informed the United States that it would begin preparations to separate plutonium because Washington had no intention of giving Pyongyang anything. North Korea created another ticking-clock ultimatum. This time, however, Pyongyang’s brinksmanship forced Washington to weigh the risks of capitulation against the costs of preventive military action on the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea’s reactor discharge campaign was a clear brinksmanship tactic designed to increase bargaining leverage over the United States. Similar to the NPT withdrawal crisis, Pyongyang sought to reassert “control of negotiations through the creation of perceived deadlines by which [Washington] should respond.”24 Since the plutonium-production process was set to begin on May 4, the United States had a few weeks to capitulate to “a package solution” and avert a major increase in North Korean nuclear latency. In this situation, the deadline to fissile material production was “combined with demands for unilateral concessions and threats of negative consequences in the event of failure to respond.”25 North Korea hoped its unsupervised defueling “would both force [the United States] to react and increase Pyongyang’s bargaining leverage by presenting a fait accompli that [Washington] would need to pay a higher diplomatic price to reverse.”26
North Korea began to unload fuel from the reactor on May 12 without IAEA inspectors present. Pyongyang claimed it was preserving the historical information of past irradiation history in the rods and noted that the defueling process would take about two months to complete, which left “ample time for the United States and North Korea to strike a deal.”27 But when the IAEA team arrived several days later on May 19, they “discovered that Pyongyang’s unloading of the spent fuel was proceeding at twice the expected rate since it had two, not just one, machines to discharge the fuel. . . . Now it looked as though the rods would be removed in a matter of weeks.”28 Pyongyang then “threatened to escalate the crisis dramatically by expelling IAEA inspectors and disabling the agency’s monitoring equipment.”29
In response, the United States considered a preventive strike against a range of North Korean nuclear and regime targets. Yet the potential costs of retaliation from the Korean People’s Army were deemed unacceptable. When President Clinton asked Gen. Gary Luck, the commander of United States Forces Korea, whether the United States could successfully perform such a mission, Luck replied, “Yes, but at the cost of a million [civilian causalities] and a trillion [dollars in economic damage to South Korea].”30 The United States backed away from the preventive strike option but boosted military capabilities in the region and prepared to levy harsh sanctions on the Kim regime.
With Washington’s bottom line revealed, Pyongyang likely wanted to find a way out before the situation escalated out of control. The unexpected visit of former US president Jimmy Carter with Kim Il-sung provided an off ramp for North Korea to offer a promise of nuclear restraint. The two sides returned to the bargaining table and reached a deal. North Korea agreed to freeze operations at Yongbyon, seal the reprocessing facility for eventual dismantlement, store and ship its spent fuel out of the country, halt construction of two large reactors, and remain party to the NPT. “In short, North Korea’s capacity to separate plutonium was ended,” and it was “obligated to fully disclose its past nuclear activities.”31 Cooperation with the IAEA at each step provided a credible system of verification of these sunk costs for the United States. In return, the United States agreed to the phased delivery of $50 million in heavy fuel oil each year, $4 billion in modern proliferation-resistant nuclear reactor technology, the relaxation of economic and political barriers, and a formal assurance against the threat or use of nuclear weapons against the DPRK. The final Agreed Framework between the United States of America and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, signed on October 21, 1994, formalized this bargain.32
North Korea was able to strike a low-cost and high-reward deal because it could reassure the United States by freezing operations at Yongbyon. This was a modest price to pay. North Korea avoided military attack and reaped badly needed energy assistance. Washington believed that Pyongyang was unlikely to cease operations and agree to the eventual disablement of the 5-megawatt reactor and reprocessing plant if it wanted nuclear weapons in the near term. The United States also insisted upon several hand-tying mechanisms to increase the costs of reneging on the Agreed Framework while boosting the benefits of sustained cooperation. Ambassador Galluccinoted in December 1994 that the technical options might not be enough to constrain North Korea’s nuclear ambitions over the long term: “We entered into discussions . . . without any uncertainty or delusions about past North Korean behavior.” The Agreed Framework was “not based upon trust” but rather a tit-for-tat structure “so that we can withhold cooperation at any point that we determine that North Korea is not meeting its obligations under the agreement.”33 The American negotiators deconstructed the terms of the deal into a series of smaller steps, with the burden of up-front performance falling on the North Koreans. To receive the first shipment of heavy oil, for example, North Korea had to verifiably halt all its declared nuclear operations. Larger benefits would only come several years later when the United States “had an opportunity to judge [North Korea’s] performance and its intentions.”34 To receive the full package of energy assistance, Pyongyang had to uphold its complete promise to disable the Yongbyon complex. The deal bound the Kim regime to its nonnuclear promise for as long as it valued the energy subsidies more than acquisition of nuclear weapons.
The Agreed Framework, however, suffered from three limitations. First, it focused on eliminating North Korea’s plutonium-production capacity and did not curtail weaponization or delivery system programs. Secretary of State William Christopher acknowledged that the deal placed “highest priority on the elements of the North Korean program that most acutely threaten the United States. This means, first and foremost, the accumulation of plutonium by North Korea.”35 Second, under the phased structure of the framework, North Korea was only required to come into full compliance with the IAEA and clear up the reprocessing discrepancies toward the end of the deal. The emphasis on declared facilities and materials left open the possibility of clandestine fuel-cycle operations. And by back-loading the dismantlement of the Yongbyon facilities, the Agreed Framework left open the possibility of future coercive diplomacy with nuclear technology.
Third, and most important, the value of energy subsidies to the Kim regime relative to the acquisition of nuclear weapons was likely to change over time. Given the Kim regime’s immediate need to fill gaps in the military economy with imported fuel oil, the deal seemed genuine at the time. But even if Pyongyang valued energy more than deploying a nuclear deterrent in 1994, it still seemed unlikely that long-standing nuclear ambitions would disappear forever. The deal therefore had a decaying half-life. Once the regime stabilized itself with energy assistance or diversified its supply chain, the deal would start to be worth less. Pyongyang might become very reluctant to give up its nuclear fuel cycle at that point. One critic noted at the time, “The North is presumably betting that the opening to economic and political normalization will allow it to survive and plans to hang on to its mothballed nuclear program for leverage.”36 The United States was relying on assurance mechanisms that could become devalued once Pyongyang had to weigh the costs and benefits of eliminating its latent nuclear capabilities.
Given these limitations, why did Washington not push the Kim regime for a stronger nonproliferation promise? The United States accepted the Agreed Framework because it believed the deal was imperfect but still credible. The Clinton administration understood the problems with the agreement and championed the commitment tactics as the best way to “attain all of our strategic objectives.”37 Washington believed that Pyongyang did not intend to proliferate with its plutonium program for the foreseeable future but was well aware that it might pursue other pathways to the bomb. The administration hoped the energy concessions would tie the Kim regime’s hands to a nonnuclear promise. If not, Washington concluded it had enough time to react. As a result, the United States was comfortable because the Agreed Framework would at least slow down and manage a nuclear proliferation on the peninsula.
The United States also faced constraints in reaching an optimal bargain with North Korea. A perfect nonproliferation promise from North Korea would have dealt with the possibility of clandestine nuclear efforts or undeclared facilities and devised much stronger hand-tying mechanisms to firmly bind the Kim regime to its nonnuclear commitment. Pyongyang refused to implement such comprehensive constraints. The United States could not force it to do so and lacked the leverage needed to devise the sort of hand-tying policies that would create very high costs to breaking the Agreed Framework. During the crisis, the Clinton administration revealed that it was unwilling to take military action on the Korean Peninsula. The United States could only hurt the Kim regime so much with economic sanctions if it decided to break out down the road. In an ideal world, Washington would have turned to Beijing to act as a third-party guarantor of the Agreed Framework since China kept the Kim regime afloat with critical lifelines. But Beijing was not interested in collusion over nonproliferation at the time. Washington had few options available to craft assurance policies for the Agreed Framework.
The limitations intrinsic to North Korea’s nonproliferation promise suggest that it is important to consider the actual set of commitment options available during the process of coercive diplomacy. As the first nuclear crisis makes clear, the United States may be forced to settle for an ephemeral commitment, especially when continued diplomatic resistance or a preventive strike pose high costs. Even vocal critics of the Agreed Framework conceded this point. As Paul Wolfowitz admitted in 1995, “No one should suggest that a perfect agreement would have been possible given the regime that we are dealing with and given the risks and limitations of military options.”38 The key is to assess whether the United States believed North Korea’s promise was a credible means to manage the proliferation problem, albeit for a short time. The Kim regime walked away with a package of concessions precisely because the deal temporarily prevented North Korea’s production of plutonium.
The Proliferation Blackmail Strategy Starts to Unravel
A second North Korean nuclear crisis illustrates how nuclear programs generate increasing returns over time as an operational capability but diminishing returns as a bargaining chip. In 2002, US officials claimed North Korea was cheating on the Agreed Framework with a covert uraniumenrichment program, so Washington stopped providing energy assistance. This revelation was problematic, as the North Koreans would have preferred to keep the Agreed Framework in place while they secretly acquired a stockpile of enriched uranium. North Korea withdrew from the NPT in January 2003, restarted the dormant plutonium program, and began to emulate the old concession-seeking diplomatic playbook from the 1990s. Yet this compellence campaign unraveled once it became clear that North Korea was no longer willing to seriously trade away its much more valuable nuclear weapon enterprise.
At the outset, North Korea faced new barriers to cutting a deal. The George W. Bush administration initially made rewards conditional on an agreement for the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear program and requested that China underwrite the diplomatic process as leader of the Six-Party Talks. Beijing had the motives and capacity to constrain Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Energy problems in the DPRK steadily worsened throughout the 1990s as the country suffered a severe “shortage of fuel oil, becoming increasingly dependent upon foreign oil supplies, with nearly total supply coming from China since 2003.”39 To maintain its military and economy, North Korea needed to increase its supply of energy beyond the fixed imports under the Agreed Framework. China filled this critical energy gap to enhance its influence over North Korean behavior. “By strategically increasing North Korea’s dependence on China, Beijing could increase its political influence to force North Korea to comply with Chinese demands. . . . Beijing would want Pyongyang to be more dependent on Chinese influence in order to be capable of inducing the North’s compliance by threatening Pyongyang with the bargaining card of ‘absence of assistance.’ ”40 Beijing was only willing to turn the fuel oil spigot on and off within limits, though, “since a large-scale intensive disruption of energy supply could result in catastrophe in North Korea.”41 China therefore acquired the capacity to act as a third-party mediator of nuclear negotiations between the United States and North Korea.
Although China was able to convene the Six-Party Talks as a multilateral forum for negotiating a nuclear deal, both the United States and North Korea adopted hard lines. President Bush admonished North Korea for playing “the old blackmail game,” while US officials remained adamant that they “would not ‘reward’ North Korea’s behavior.”42 Pyongyang attempted to break Washington’s tough stance by producing large quantities of plutonium from 2003 to 2005. Pyongyang threatened “a ‘physical demonstration’ of its nuclear capabilities” and followed through by dramatizing their possession of plutonium when a Track II delegation visited Yongbyon.43 A senior North Korean official admitted that the fissile material buildup was designed in part “to force Bush to negotiate on terms more favorable to North Korea.”44 Instead, the United States levied crippling sanctions against the regime’s financial assets.
In reaction to the economic sanctions, the North Koreans boycotted negotiations and tested a nuclear weapon on October 9, 2006. The nuclear test was a watershed moment for Pyongyang’s nuclear policy. The leadership had to consider three paths forward. The first was to abandon diplomacy altogether to focus on deploying a small but survivable nuclear arsenal. Second, North Korea could give up its entire nuclear enterprise in exchange for a package of concessions to be negotiated during future Six-Party talks. The obvious downside was that the Kim regime would have to rely exclusively on its deteriorating conventional military forces for deterrence. In the end, the diplomatic record indicates that North Korea went with a third option to “have its cake and eat it too.” North Korea would retain its nuclear enterprise, but negotiators tried to bargain over how much the force would grow from this point. This way, North Korea could retain the nuclear program as a bargaining chip without forgoing the security benefits of nuclear deterrence. Pyongyang shifted its blackmail threat from proliferation to further increases in its nuclear capabilities.
The key problem with this bargaining strategy was that the increase in fissile material and the weapon test made it difficult for North Korea to continue its rent-seeking stratagem for two reasons. First, by leaving the fissile material sweet spot, North Korea increased the requirements for issuing a nonnuclear promise. Any nuclear deal would be predicated on North Korea taking active steps to roll back three components of its nuclear program: nuclear fuel cycle assets and fissile material, ballistic missiles, and nuclear weapons. In contrast to the early 1990s, North Korea could no longer just freeze in place. The nuclear test revealed that the leadership in Pyongyang was willing to bear the consequences of overt proliferation. The prospect of further isolation, punishment, and possible alienation of Chinese patrons was not enough to constrain North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. As a result, the United States wanted North Korea to send a costly signal of its true nuclear intentions by giving up some of its valuable strategic assets.
Second, there were early indications that North Korea had already become unwilling to give up or seriously constrain its nuclear capabilities soon after the plutonium-reprocessing campaign in the winter of 2004. By February 2005, North Korea’s lead negotiator for the Six-Party Talks made a dramatic statement: “The time for discussing give and take type issues, such as freeze and reward, at the Six-Party Talks has passed. Now that we have become a dignified nuclear weapons possessing state, the Six-Party Talks must naturally become arms reduction talks.”45 By trying to shift the focus from nonproliferation to bilateral US-DPRK arms control negotiations, Pyongyang may have been signaling that the nuclear production complex was now too valuable to trade away.
Nonetheless, the United States returned to the bargaining table in 2007 to explore whether North Korea might be persuaded to denuclearize in exchange for concessions. The United States offered rewards in exchange for “tangible and verifiable steps in denuclearization that would limit North Korea’s plutonium production.”46 Pyongyang agreed to an accord in February 2007 that neutralized the plutonium program and hashed out a road map for further reductions. If Pyongyang shut down and disabled the Yongbyon reactor, reprocessing plant, and fuel-fabrication plant, Washington was prepared to lift the Banco Delta Asia (BDA) sanctions and deliver a onetime shipment of 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil. An additional 950,000 tons would be provided after the entire nuclear infrastructure had been declared and disabled.47 “The idea was to avoid ‘front-loading’ all of the North’s benefits before Pyongyang had taken concrete steps to disarm.”48 In many ways, the 2007 agreement was similar to the 1994 Agreed Framework, except Washington required Pyongyang take sequenced steps to roll back its nuclear capabilities before it would provide a onetime payout of energy assistance.
Over the next year, North Korea started to shut down and disable facilities at Yongbyon but eventually refused to verifiably dismantle key parts of the nuclear complex. In particular, North Korean diplomats argued that “disablement did not imply dismantlement” and refused to render the reprocessing plant inoperative at Yongbyon.49 These disagreements boiled over into a controversy regarding verification. During the final session of the Six-Party Talks in December 2008, the North Koreans balked “at any commitment to written, binding pledges on verification.”50 At this point, the process had a reached the point at which the United States required North Korea to stipulate how it was going to increase transparency and verify disablement before providing concessions. The North Koreans declined to move forward, and the agreement quickly fell apart. From the outside, the Kim regime appeared to decide that previously sufficient concessions were no longer good enough to trade away the nuclear program.
Conclusion
North Korea’s track record of initial blackmail success in 1994 and subsequent failure during the Six-Party Talks underscores that nuclear latency conferred Pyongyang with the most bargaining leverage when its plutonium program was just starting to emerge. North Korea readily issued a credible proliferation threat and nonproliferation promise during the first nuclear crisis but found it harder to bargain for aid with the prospect of nuclear breakout during the Six-Party Talks. The closer North Korea moved toward the deployment of a nuclear deterrent, the costlier and more unattractive it became to actually barter away the underlying strategic capabilities.
North Korea’s unwillingness to live up to the February 2007 agreement revealed a long-standing tension in its nuclear policy. Did North Korea really just want nuclear weapons? Or was the Kim regime ready to trade away its nuclear capability for a package of economic and political concession? In 1998, Joseph Nye claimed the US intelligence community remained “deeply divided on the question of whether the North wanted a bomb or was simply playing for aid.”51 The October 2006 nuclear test forced North Korea to resolve this quandary. Instead of giving up its nuclear infrastructure to reap a grand bargain with the United States, North Korea let its proliferation blackmail strategy unravel. North Korea’s subsequent pattern of coming to negotiations only to reject basic parameters or renege on interim agreements, such as the 2012 Leap Day Deal, led many in the United States to conclude that the Kim regime was focused on mastering “the technical capabilities that are vital to its nuclear deterrent.”52 The accelerated pace of nuclear tests in January and September 2016 further supported this conclusion. Given the centrality of coercive diplomacy to North Korean foreign policy in general, however, proliferation blackmail is unlikely to go away as the country continues to develop its nuclear arsenal. But future attempts to bargain with the underlying nuclear enterprise itself are likely to fail and will only increase tension and the risk of conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Unless a catalytic event shocks the leadership from its current path of warhead and missile development, the nuclear program is simply too valuable for the North Korean leadership to roll back or constrain.
Notes
1. Joel S. Wit, Daniel B. Poneman, and Robert L. Gallucci, Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005).
2. Mike Chinoy, Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009); Jonathan D. Pollack, No Exit: North Korea, Nuclear Weapons and International Security (Abingdon [UK]: Routledge, 2011).
3. US Department of State, “U.S.-DPRK Bilateral Discussions,” press statement, February 29, 2012.
4. Andrew Quinn, “Obama’s North Korean Leap of Faith Falls Short,” Reuters, March 30, 2012; Ankit Panda, “A Great Leap to Nowhere: Remembering the US-North Korea ‘Leap Day’ Deal,” Diplomat, February 29, 2016.
5. Alastair Gale and Carol E. Lee, “U.S. Agreed to North Korea Peace Talks before Latest Nuclear Test,” Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2016.
6. North Korea’s desire for nuclear weapons stems back more than half a century. During the 1950s and 1960s, Kim Il-sung reached out to the Soviet Union to train North Korean scientists and founded the nuclear research complex at Yongbyon. Beset by insecurity, Kim apparently saw nuclear weapons “as a strategic ‘equalizer’ and deterrent” against US-ROK combined forces in the South. But since Kim maintained personal and secretive control over the nuclear program at its genesis, North Korea’s “nuclear intentions were never written in any DPRK regulations or explicitly developed. . . . Instead, they were ‘hidden away’ in Kim Il-sung’s head, and he might have shared only reluctantly his thoughts and intentions with his close associates.” Alexandre Y. Mansourov, “The Origins, Evolution, and Current Politics of the North Korean Nuclear Program,” Non-proliferation Review (Spring–Summer 1995): 30.
7. Victor Cha, “North Korea’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: Badges, Shields, or Swords?,” Political Science Quarterly 117, no. 2 (2002): 209–30.
8. Etel Solingen, “The Political Economy of Nuclear Restraint,” International Security 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1994): 126–69; Mitchell Reiss, Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995); T. V. Paul, Power Versus Prudence: Why Nations Forgo Nuclear Weapons (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000).
9. Victor Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (New York: Ecco, 2012), 300.
10. Daniel Byman and Jennifer Lind, “Pyongyang’s Survival Strategy,” International Security 35 (Summer 2010): 64.
11. Nicholas Eberstadt, Mark Rubin, and Albina Tretyakova, “The Collapse of Soviet and Russian Trade with the DPRK, 1989–1993,” Korean Journal of National Unification 4 (1995): 87–104; Marcus Noland, “Why North Korea Will Muddle Through,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 4 (July 1, 1997): 106; Nicholas Eberstadt, The End of North Korea (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1999), 93–110.
12. Narushige Michishita, North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, 1966–2008 (Abingdon [UK]: Routledge, 2009).
13. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 76
14. Nicholas Eberstadt quoted in Gale and Lee, “U.S. Agreed to North Korea Peace Talks.”
15. David Sanger, “North Korea, Fighting Inspection, Renounces Nuclear Arms Treaty,” New York Times, March 12, 1993.
16. Wit, Poneman, and Gallucci, Going Critical, 32, 37.
17. David Sanger, “U.S. Revising North Korea Strategy,” New York Times, November 22, 1993.
18. Wit, Poneman, and Gallucci, Going Critical, 53.
19. Ibid., 55.
20. Ibid., 44.
21. After inspectors found several broken seals on sensitive equipment, North Korea also requested a $300,000 payment before allowing them to continue the inspections.
22. Wit, Poneman, and Gallucci, Going Critical, 144.
23. David Sanger, “North Koreans Agree to Survey of Atomic Sites,” New York Times, February 16, 1994; Thomas Lippman, “As N. Korea Balks, U.S. Predicts Nuclear Inspections Will Go On,” New York Times, February 24, 1994; Thomas Lippman and T. R. Reid, “N. Korea Nuclear Inspection Begins,” Washington Post, March 4, 1994; Michael Gordon, “U.S. Cancels Talks with North Korean over Atom Inspections,” New York Times, March 17, 1994.
24. Snyder, Negotiating on the Edge, 81.
25. Ibid.
26. Wit, Poneman, and Gallucci, Going Critical, 171.
27. Ibid., 175.
28. Ibid., 182.
29. Ibid., 185.
30. Ibid., 181.
31. Testimony of Secretary of State William Christopher, “North Korea Nuclear Agreement,” Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, January 24 and 25, 1995 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office [GPO], 1995), 6.
32. Alan Riding, “U.S. and North Korea Sign Pact to End Nuclear Dispute,” New York Times, October 21, 1994.
33. Testimony of Robert Gallucci, “Implications of the U.S.-North Korea Nuclear Agreement,” Hearing before the Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, United States Senate, December 1, 1994 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1994), 12.
34. Testimony of Secretary of State William Christopher, 7.
35. Ibid.
36. Gilinsky, “Nuclear Blackmail: The 1994 US-DPRK Agreed Framework on North Korea’s Nuclear Program,” 12.
37. Testimony of Secretary of State William Christopher, 5.
38. Testimony of Paul Wolfowitz, “North Korea Nuclear Agreement,” Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, January 24 and 25, 1995 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1995), 69.
39. Julia Joo-A Lee, “To Fuel or Not to Fuel: China’s Energy Assistance to North Korea,” Asian Security 5 (2009): 47–48.
40. Ibid., 50.
41. Ibid., 62.
42. David E. Sanger, “North Korea Says It Now Possesses Nuclear Arsenal,” New York Times, April 25, 2003.
43. “China and North Korea: Comrades Forever?,” Asia Report 112 (Washington, DC: International Crisis Group, February 1, 2006), 5.
44. Michishita, North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, 168.
45. Statements of the DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs, February 10 and March 31, 2005, emphasis added. Quoted in Pollack, No Exit, 148.
46. Pollack, No Exit, 151.
47. Some of the disablement steps were reversible but would create a longer lead time between initiation of a decision to break out and the operational readiness of the facility.
48. Chinoy, Meltdown, 325.
49. Pollack, No Exit, 153.
50. Ibid., 155. More specifically, there was disagreement over whether the North Koreans had already agreed to a plan for verification in February 2007.
51. Quoted in David E. Sanger, “North Korea Site an A-Bomb Plant,” New York Times, August 17, 1998.
52. Jennifer Lind, Keir A. Lieber, and Daryl G. Press, “Pyongyang’s Nuclear Logic,” Foreign Affairs, February 13, 2013.