CHINA
AND THE US PART 7: Clinton's belated path to
peace By Henry C K Liu
(To see the previous installments in
this series, please use the links at the bottom of
this article.)
Bill Clinton, a US
president who began to shed his hawkish foreign
policy of moral imperialism only late in his
second term, nearly went to war against North
Korea in the spring of 1994, just one year into
his first term, which began on January 20, 1993.
It was a time when opportunistic hostility toward
China dictated by US domestic political sentiments
that marked his 1992
presidential campaign had
followed him into a White House soon embroiled in
cronyism scandals and liberal domestic
social-program fiascoes.
During the 1992
campaign, Clinton had accused incumbent president
George H W Bush of "cuddling up to the butchers of
Beijing", in reference to the Tiananmen incident
of 1989. Cynics have since suspected many of
Clinton's military adventures of being "wag the
dog" moves, based on the eponymous black-comedy
film in which a beleaguered president staged a
phony war to distract attention from his sexual
indiscretions in the White House. The incoming
Clinton team had mistakenly regarded the US
position in the world as so secure that it openly
announced that its first term of office would be
focused primarily not on global geopolitics but on
domestic economic issues. The Clinton team
repeatedly told Chinese diplomats that the new
president would have no time for policy on China
until the second term.
Five years earlier,
during the first Bush presidency, the Central
Intelligence Agency had presented evidence that
North Korea was building a reprocessing facility
near its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon that, when
finished, would allow it to convert the fuel rods
into weapons-grade plutonium. Now, in the midst of
an inexperienced Clinton White House in disarray,
North Korea was preparing to remove the fuel rods
from their storage site, expel international
weapons inspectors, and withdraw from the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which North Korea
had signed in 1985.
In response, and in
the context of a feverish moralistic anti-China
climate, Clinton pushed the United Nations
Security Council to consider sanctions against
North Korea, China's blood ally. North Korea
warned that sanctions would be acts of war that
could trigger a renewed shooting war on the Korean
Peninsula.
Clinton's Defense Department
then drew up plans to send 50,000 additional
troops to South Korea, bolstering the 37,000 who
had been there since the Korean War armistice
agreement reached in 1953, as well as 400
additional combat jets, 50 ships, and additional
battalions of Apache attack helicopters, Bradley
fighting vehicles, multiple-launch rockets, and
new Patriot air-defense missiles, to be managed by
a new logistics systems command. These
mobilization moves were designed to send a clear
signal to North Korean that Clinton was willing to
go to war to keep the fuel rods in North Korea
under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
control. The signal was reinforced by several
former US officials publicly opining that Clinton
was prepared to launch an air strike on the
Yongbyon reactor even at the risk of provoking
war.
US preemptive strikes against nuclear
proliferation in countries deemed evil and
unfriendly have been a foreign-policy
consideration all through the nuclear age by all
US presidents, most notably against China, even at
the risk of global war.
Stepping back
from war As war clouds gathered over the
Korean Peninsula, Clinton sought a diplomatic
back-channel to try to defuse the crisis and
re-establish non-proliferation peacefully. The
vehicle for this channel was former US president
Jimmy Carter, who in June 1994 was sent to
Pyongyang to talk with Kim Il-sung, the founding
leader of North Korea.
Carter's trip was
publicly portrayed at the time as a private
citizen's venture, without approval from the
president. However, a 2004 book about the 1994
North Korean crisis, Going Critical by Joel
S Wit, Daniel B Poneman and Robert L Gallucci,
three former officials who played key roles in the
events, reveals that Clinton recruited Carter to
go. Carter himself wrote in the New York Times on
October 11 this year in a piece titled "Solving
the Korean stalemate, one step at a time":
Responding to an invitation from
president Kim Il-sung of North Korea, and with
the approval of president Bill Clinton, I went
to Pyongyang and negotiated an agreement under
which North Korea would cease its nuclear
program at Yongbyon and permit inspectors from
the atomic agency to return to the site to
assure that the spent fuel was not reprocessed.
It was also agreed that direct talks would be
held between the two Koreas.
Carter
was an ideal choice for defusing the Korean
crisis. As president, he had once announced that
he planned to withdraw all US troops from South
Korea, but was forced to retract the idea after it
met fierce and vocal domestic opposition,
ironically even from moralistic liberals and the
anti-communist left in the Democratic Party. The
stillborn proposal nevertheless made Carter a man
of peace in the eyes of Kim Il-sung, who, after
Carter left office, issued the former president a
standing invitation to visit North Korea.
When Iranian students holding US hostages
in a long siege inside the US Embassy in Tehran,
manipulated by the campaign team for presidential
candidate Ronald Reagan in ways that bordered on
treason, vindictively deprived Carter of a second
term by refusing to end the hostage crisis before
the 1978 presidential election to deny Carter any
advantage of an "October surprise", they
unwittingly acted against their own country's best
long-range national interest by letting loose a
lasting wave of conservative extremism in US
politics that eventually led to the current
quandary in several hot spots around the world. A
second term for Carter would have resulted in a
less belligerent US and a world less dangerously
threatened by terrorism.
The Clinton team
was divided over whether it would be wise to let
Carter go to North Korea. Ironically, those who
had served under Carter, such as Warren
Christopher, Clinton's secretary of state, and
Anthony Lake, national security adviser, opposed
the trip, warning that their former leader could
behave like a loose cannon that would ignore the
confines of specific orders and freelance a deal
that would create problems for the administration
both domestically and geopolitically. Vice
president Al Gore favored the trip, seeing no
other way out of the crisis.
Clinton sided
with Gore. As Clinton saw it, Kim Il-sung had
painted himself into a diplomatic and domestic
political corner and needed an escape hatch to
back away from the brink without appearing to
buckle under pressure from the United States.
Carter might offer that hatch. While it was
unspoken, Clinton felt that Carter might also open
an escape hatch for his administration, which,
should the Carter deal be opposed by intransigent
domestic politics, could be shut down by the White
House without political cost.
Both sides
in this internal debate in the White House turned
out to be right. Kim, who was to die unexpectedly
on July 8, 1994, less than a month after meeting
with Carter, from what was officially described as
"a heart shock following myocardial infarction
owing to heavy mental strains". agreed to back
down. And Carter went way beyond his official
instructions, negotiating the outlines of a treaty
and notifying Clinton after the fact only minutes
in advance of announcing the terms live on CNN on
June 15.
Four months later, on October 21,
1994, the United States and the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, commonly known
as North Korea) under the new leadership of Kim
Jong-il, signed a formal accord based on outlines
Carter negotiated, known as the Agreed Framework.
The accord specified that North Korea
would renew its commitment to the NPT, lock up the
fuel rods, and again let IAEA inspectors monitor
the facility. In exchange, the US, with financial
backing mostly from South Korea and Japan, would
provide two light-water nuclear reactors for
electricity generation, explicitly allowed by NPT
rules. Upon delivery of the first light-water
reactor targeted for 2003, intrusive IAEA
inspections of North Korean nuclear sites would
begin. After the second reactor arrived, North
Korea would ship its fuel rods to a third country
approved by the US. North Korea would in essence
give up nuclear-weapons capability step by step.
In the interim, the US would provide 500 tonnes of
fuel oil per year to North Korea to compensate for
the loss of energy from shutting down the nuclear
reactor at Yongbyon.
Other sections of the
accord, less publicized in the US press, pledged
both sides to "move toward full normalization of
political and economic relations". Within three
months of its signing, the two countries were to
lower trade barriers and exchange ambassadors.
Most critically, the US was also to "provide full
assurances" that it would never use, or threaten
to use, nuclear weapons against North Korea.
Clinton unable to deliver In
theory, the 1994 Agreed Framework called on North
Korea to freeze operation and construction of
nuclear reactors suspected of being part of a
covert nuclear-weapons program in exchange for two
proliferation-resistant nuclear power reactors to
be financed and construction by an international
consortium that included South Korea, Japan and
the European Union, to be known as the Korean
Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO).
The agreement also called on the US to supply
North Korea with fuel oil pending construction of
the reactors. On that basis, the Agreed Framework
ended an 18-month crisis during which North Korea
announced its intention to withdraw from the NPT
and attendant commitment not to develop nuclear
weapons.
The key item in the Agreed
Framework states: "Both sides will work together
for peace and security on a nuclear-free Korean
Peninsula. The US will provide formal assurances
to the DPRK, against the threat or use of nuclear
weapons by the US. The DPRK will consistently take
steps to implement the [1992] North-South Joint
Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean
Peninsula."
In practice, the construction
of the promised light-water reactors immediately
fell far behind schedule. The first reactor,
initially slated for completion in 2003, in
reality could not become operational until 2008 at
the earliest. Numerous other events, as part of
North Korean protests on the delays, strained
relations between Washington and Pyongyang,
resulting in vicious cycles of mutual
recrimination to justify further construction
delays.
In 1996, a Northern submarine
landed on South Korean shores, causing Seoul to
suspend its share of energy assistance stipulated
in the Agreed Framework. The North retaliated with
ballistic rhetoric and secretly started to export
missile technology to Pakistan in exchange for
Pakistani centrifuges. In 1998, North Korea
defiantly test-fired a Taepodong-1 missile to show
it was not bluffing.
On September 17,
1999, to salvage the deteriorating situation,
Clinton began easing some economic sanctions
against North Korea. That December, a US-led
consortium finally signed a US$4.6 billion
contract for two Western-developed light-water
nuclear reactors in North Korea. After that, North
Korea kept to its side of the bargain, but the US,
led by a politically weakened Clinton who had
narrowly escaped impeachment, could not deliver
its commitments.
Since the accord was not
a formal treaty, US congressional ratification was
not needed, but Congress held up the sizable
financial appropriation called for by the Agreed
Framework on the ground that the agreement
amounted to "appeasement" and rewarding North
Korea for bad behavior. That argument was
irrational, since North Korea considered it a
sovereign right to develop defensive weapons
against US threats and sanctions, and it was the
US that demanded North Korea give up its nuclear
program in exchange for non-weapon-grade
light-water reactors.
South Korea was not
supportive of the agreement, which had been
negotiated bilaterally between the US and North
Korea without Seoul's participation. The
light-water reactors were never funded, nor were
steps toward normalization between the US and
North Korea taken.
Not until June 2000 did
the US actually ease substantially long-standing
sanctions against North Korea under the Trading
with the Enemy Act, the Defense Production Act,
and the Export Administration Act, clearing the
way for increased trade, financial transactions,
and investment. Pyongyang was still prohibited,
however, from receiving US exports of military and
sensitive dual-use items and most related
assistance available to South Korea. Thus
non-proliferation in the Korean Peninsula remained
a selective regime, as it had been and still is
around the world.
In June 2000, South
Korean leader Kim Dae-jung traveled to Pyongyang
for a summit with Kim Jong-il. The meeting raised
hope for a further warming of relations between
the two fraternal governments. In August,
emotional family reunions were held in Seoul and
Pyongyang for families divided since the end of
the Korean War nearly five decades previously. The
following month, athletes from both North and
South Korea marched together in the opening
ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games in Sydney.
The prospect of Korean reunification was looking
encouraging.
By July 2000, North Korea
began to threaten restarting its nuclear program
if a lame-duck Clinton administration did not
compensate it financially for the loss of
electricity caused by delays in building
light-water nuclear power plants. It was a demand
that Clinton was in no position to meet. By then,
with time running out for Clinton, who desperately
wanted to resolve the North Korean and Middle East
crises before leaving office, relations were
allowed to warm between the US and North Korea.
In October, Kim Dae-jung received the
Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to open a
dialogue with North Korea, while US secretary of
state Madeleine Albright made an advance trip to
North Korea.
Clinton's last-minute
attempt Previously, North Korea had made
being removed from the US State Department's list
of states accused of sponsoring terrorism a
precondition for sending a high-level envoy to the
United States. However, according to Wendy
Sherman, Albright's North Korea policy
coordinator, North Korean delegates at a September
27-October 2, 2000, bilateral meeting in New York
proposed that North Korean special envoy Jo
Myong-rok visit the United States, in an apparent
concession.
Clinton had announced on
September 1 that he would not authorize deployment
of a national missile defense (NMD) system, citing
technical doubts and concerns about negative
international reaction. Russia and China, the only
two states with intercontinental ballistic
missiles capable of striking the continental
United States, staunchly opposed the system and
traditional North Atlantic Treaty Organization
allies, led by France and Germany, expressed
worries that the system would strain the
trans-Atlantic alliance and halt or reverse
progress toward enhancing general stability in
arms control.
Samuel Berger, Clinton's
national security adviser, explained the
president's statement as indicating that
development contracts for NMD would not be awarded
to defense contractors. Defense secretary William
Cohen, a Republican and the leading NMD advocate
in the Clinton administration, had reportedly
pressed the president to award the contracts just
days before Clinton's speech. Cohen released a
statement after the announcement, saying he
supported the president's approach of having the
"next president fully involved in decisions
regarding the future of the program".
Unfortunately for arms control, the next president
turned out not to be Al Gore but George W Bush,
who reversed Clinton's decision to delay
deployment of NMD.
Throughout periodic
negotiations since 1996, the United States had
tried to persuade North Korea to end its
ballistic-missile exports and terminate its
indigenous missile-development program. The last
round of missile talks ended in stalemate in July
2000 in Kuala Lumpur, when North Korea demanded
monetary compensation in the amount of $1 billion
per year to make up for lost revenue from arms
exports and reiterated its position that missile
development is a sovereign right. The US, North
Korea pointed out, has been the world's largest
exporter of missile technology and systems to
approved states all over the world.
Kim
Jong-il, who had been North Korea's leader since
his father Kim Il-sung's death in 1994, reissued a
public invitation to Clinton to come to Pyongyang,
promising to sign a treaty banning the production
of long-range missiles and the export of all
missiles.
Kim Jong-il impresses Clinton
aides Caricatured by a hostile Western
press as an unstable psychotic leader, Kim Jong-il
was described privately by those US officials who
saw him negotiate with Albright as a very rational
and pragmatic statesman. North Korea has been
portrayed by the Western press as an inhumane
government that allowed its population to starve
while pursuing costly nuclear armament,
notwithstanding the obvious fact that the
starvation has been largely caused by US sanctions
and embargo, and the nuclear defense has been made
necessary by repeated US threats of use of force
against it.
Robert Einhorn, who was
Clinton's chief North Korea negotiator, and now is
an analyst at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, a bipartisan think-tank in
Washington chaired by former Democratic senator
Sam Nunn and with a membership rooster that reads
like a who's who of former high US officials, took
part in the 12 hours of talks with Kim. "He struck
me as a very serious, rational guy who knew his
issues pretty well," Einhorn recalled later.
Ambassador Wendy Sherman came away with a similar
impression.
One month before the
presidential election, the Clinton administration
formally declared the US obligation not to
threaten North Korea militarily in the October 12,
2000, Joint Communique between Washington and
Pyongyang, in which "the two sides stated that
neither government would have hostile intent
toward the other and confirmed the commitment of
both governments to make every effort in the
future to build a new relationship free from past
enmity", according to a release by the State
Department.
The DPRK-US Joint
Communique of 2000 The full text reads:
As the special envoy of Chairman Kim
Jong-il of the DPRK National Defense Commission,
the First Vice Chairman, Vice Marshal Jo
Myong-rok, visited the United States of America
from October 9-12, 2000.
During his
visit, Special Envoy Jo Myong-rok delivered a
letter from National Defense Commission Chairman
Kim Jong-il, as well as his views on US-DPRK
relations, directly to US President William
Clinton. Special Envoy Jo Myong-rok and his
party also met with senior officials of the
Clinton Administration, including his host
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and
Secretary of Defense William Cohen, for an
extensive exchange of views on issues of common
concern. They reviewed in depth the new
opportunities that have opened up for improving
the full range of relations between the United
States of America and the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea. The meetings proceeded in a
serious, constructive, and businesslike
atmosphere, allowing each side to gain a better
understanding of the other's concerns.
Recognizing the changed circumstances on
the Korean Peninsula created by the historic
[June 2000] inter-Korean summit, the United
States and the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea have decided to take steps to
fundamentally improve their bilateral relations
in the interests of enhancing peace and security
in the Asia-Pacific region. In this regard, the
two sides agreed there are a variety of
available means, including Four Party talks, to
reduce tension on the Korean Peninsula and
formally end the Korean War by replacing the
1953 Armistice Agreement with permanent peace
arrangements.
Recognizing that improving
ties is a natural goal in relations among states
and that better relations would benefit both
nations in the 21st century while helping ensure
peace and security on the Korean Peninsula and
in the Asia-Pacific region, the US and the DPRK
sides stated that they are prepared to undertake
a new direction in their relations. As a crucial
first step, the two sides stated that neither
government would have hostile intent toward the
other and confirmed the commitment of both
governments to make every effort in the future
to build a new relationship free from past
enmity.
Building on the principles laid
out in the June 11, 1993, US-DPRK Joint
Statement and reaffirmed in the October 21,
1994, Agreed Framework, the two sides agreed to
work to remove mistrust, build mutual
confidence, and maintain an atmosphere in which
they can deal constructively with issues of
central concern. In this regard, the two sides
reaffirmed that their relations should be based
on the principles of respect for each other's
sovereignty and non-interference in each other's
internal affairs, and noted the value of regular
diplomatic contacts, bilaterally and in broader
fora.
The two sides agreed to work
together to develop mutually beneficial economic
cooperation and exchanges. To explore the
possibilities for trade and commerce that will
benefit the peoples of both countries and
contribute to an environment conducive to
greater economic cooperation throughout
Northeast Asia, the two sides discussed an
exchange of visits by economic and trade experts
at an early date.
The two sides agreed
that resolution of the missile issue would make
an essential contribution to a fundamentally
improved relationship between them and to peace
and security in the Asia-Pacific region. To
further the efforts to build new relations, the
DPRK informed the US that it will not launch
long-range missiles of any kind while talks on
the missile issue continue.
Pledging to
redouble their commitment and their efforts to
fulfill their respective obligations in their
entirety under the Agreed Framework, the US and
the DPRK strongly affirmed its importance to
achieving peace and security on a nuclear
weapons free Korean Peninsula. To this end, the
two sides agreed on the desirability of greater
transparency in carrying out their respective
obligations under the Agreed Framework. In this
regard, they noted the value of the access which
removed US concerns about the underground site
at Kumchang-ri.
The two sides noted that
in recent years they have begun to work
cooperatively in areas of common humanitarian
concern. The DPRK side expressed appreciation
for significant US contributions to its
humanitarian needs in areas of food and medical
assistance. The US side expressed appreciation
for DPRK cooperation in recovering the remains
of US servicemen still missing from the Korean
War, and both sides agreed to work for rapid
progress for the fullest possible accounting.
The two sides will continue to meet to discuss
these and other humanitarian issues.
As
set forth in their Joint Statement of October 6,
2000, the two sides agreed to support and
encourage international efforts against
terrorism.
Special Envoy Jo Myong-rok
explained to the US side developments in the
inter-Korean dialogue in recent months,
including the results of the historic
North-South summit. The US side expressed its
firm commitment to assist in all appropriate
ways the continued progress and success of
ongoing North-South dialogue and initiatives for
reconciliation and greater cooperation,
including increased security dialogue.
Special Envoy Jo Myong-rok expressed his
appreciation to President Clinton and the
American people for their warm hospitality
during the visit.
It was agreed that
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will visit
the DPRK in the near future to convey the views
of US President William Clinton directly to
Chairman Kim Jong-il of the DPRK National
Defense Commission and to prepare for a possible
visit by the President of the United States.
When asked at an October 12, 2000,
press briefing whether Jo Myong-rok had discussed
Kim's reported offer to Russian President Vladimir
Russian to stop missile launches in exchange for
foreign satellite-launch assistance, ambassador
Wendy Sherman, policy coordinator for North Korea,
said, "We believe, based on the discussions that
we had, that there is validity to this idea."
At the end of an unprecedented visit to
Pyongyang on October 24, 2000, Albright, less than
two weeks from the presidential election,
announced that Kim Jong-il had apparently signaled
a willingness to end testing of the Taepodong-1
ballistic missile. Albright and Kim met for two
days of discussions covering the North Korean
missile program, nuclear transparency,
normalization of relations, and a possible trip to
Pyongyang by Clinton. Albright was the
highest-level US official ever to travel to North
Korea and the first US government representative
to meet with Kim, then in his sixth year as leader
of North Korea.
Albright announced to a
new conference that she and Kim "discussed the
full range of concerns on missiles", including
North Korea's indigenous program, its exports to
such states as Pakistan and Iran, and Kim's
reported proposal to Putin to cease missile
testing in exchange for foreign launch of North
Korean satellites.
Since September 1999,
North Korea had voluntarily forgone missile
testing during talks with the US, a moratorium
that Pyongyang reaffirmed after the US eased
economic sanctions in July 2000. North Korea had
conducted its only test of the Taepodong-1
medium-range ballistic missile in August 1998 in
an attempt to put a satellite into orbit. US
government officials maintain that the satellite
launch was a failure and that the launch was
intended to test missile guidance and booster
capability. The US had cited North Korea's
advances in missile technology as the primary
rationale for a national missile defense and
Pyongyang as the principal exporter of missiles to
so-called states of concern.
According to
Albright, while attending a celebration of the
55th anniversary of North Korea's communist party,
Kim told her there would be no more tests of the
Taepodong-1 missile. Albright added: "I take what
he said on these issues as serious in terms of his
desire and ours to move forward to resolve the
various questions that continue to exist on the
whole range of missile issues."
No
Clinton-Kim summit Bill Clinton did not
visit North Korea when he made his final
presidential visit to Asia in November 2000 but
did not rule out making a trip to the country
before he left office on January 20, 2001.
The decision not to include North Korea on
the president's itinerary came after talks between
the two sides on Pyongyang's missile program
wrapped up in Kuala Lumpur with an apparently
inconclusive ending, despite US delegation leader
Robert Einhorn's characterization of the talks as
"detailed constructive and very substantive". A
summit between Clinton and Kim would have crowned
North Korea's diplomatic emergence after decades
as a Cold War pariah adversary of Washington. But
Clinton had come under increasing pressure in the
last weeks of his term in office not to go to
North Korea from domestic critics who warned that
any visit would be portrayed in Pyongyang as a
stamp of approval for Kim Jong-Il, whom US
propaganda had portrayed as an eccentric tyrant.
As the election approached, Albright urged
the next president to follow the path set by the
outgoing administration. "The next president will
have to choose whether to continue down the path
we have begun. Respectfully, I hope he will and
believe he should, because I am convinced it is
the right path for America, our allies and the
people of Korea," she said in an address to the
National Press Club.
Of course, Albright's
hope was misplaced. George W Bush and his
neo-conservative team rejected the conciliatory
path of the Clinton administration toward North
Korea.
Time runs out for
Clinton But time had run out for the
Clinton team. After the Albright-Kim talks,
Einhorn and his staff worked at a frantic pace
with North Korean diplomats but could not close a
deal. Clinton was distracted in the final weeks of
his second term by a futile last attempt to forge
a peace treaty in the Middle East.
The
disputed outcome of the 2000 presidential
election, which took weeks to be settled by the US
Supreme Court. suspended all diplomatic activity,
as the US drifted diplomatically in mid-ocean. Yet
as Clinton left the White House, the fuel rods
remained under lock and key in North Korea. The
1994 Agreed Framework signed by his administration
was not without problems, but it did prevent North
Korea from moving in the direction of
nuclearization for a good part of a decade.
Bush reverses Clinton
approach By June 2001, North Korea warned a
newly installed Bush administration dominated by
neo-conservatives that it would reconsider its
moratorium on missile tests if the White House did
not resume contacts aimed at normalizing
relations, a warning ignored by Bush.
In
July, the US State Department reported that North
Korea was going ahead with development of its
long-range missile. A Bush administration official
said North Korea had conducted an engine test of
the Taepodong-1 missile. In December, three months
after the terrorist attacks on New York and the
Pentagon, President Bush warned Iraq, Iran and
North Korea that they would be "held accountable"
if they developed weapons of mass destruction
"that will be used to terrorize nations".
In his State of the Union message in
January 2002, the first after the September 11
attacks, Bush labeled North Korea as part of an
"axis of evil" along with Iraq and Iran. Pyongyang
accused Washington of targeting it for "preemptive
nuclear attack". In September 2002, the Bush
administration released a report that emphasized
the right of "preemptive defense" in attacking
hostile countries developing weapons of mass
destruction, explicitly mentioning North Korea. In
addition, a leaked version of the Bush
administration's January 2002 classified Nuclear
Posture Review listed North Korea as a country
against which the United States should be prepared
to use nuclear weapons, although it did not
mention preemptive nuclear strikes. The impact of
these developments was fundamental on North
Korea's renewed nuclear strategy, which was then
condemned by the US as provocative.
With
the Iraq war turning into an endless occupation
quagmire, the Bush administration began to reverse
itself, and its officials began to say that the US
now had no intention of attacking North Korea. A
January 7, 2003, joint statement from the United
States, Japan and South Korea reaffirmed this
commitment in writing, stating that the US "has no
intention of invading" North Korea. Still, voices
advocating preemptive attacks on North Korea have
not been totally silenced in US policy circles.
From Pyongyang's perspective, the US
pledge to provide formal assurances not to
threaten or use nuclear weapons against North
Korea was the sine qua non of the entire
Agreed Framework. With its new "transformation
policy" of regime change for the "axis of evil" of
Iraq, Iran and North Korea, the Bush
administration has failed to keep this critical
pledge by the US. Thus the "provocation" behind
the alleged "provocative actions" taken recently
by North Korea in the form of missile and
nuclear-weapon tests originated from the Bush
White House.
The Bush administration
alleged that Pyongyang admitted during an October
4, 2002, bilateral meeting to possessing a
uranium-enrichment program, which could be used to
build nuclear weapons and would violate North
Korea's commitment to forgo the acquisition of
such weapons. Pyongyang denied the allegation, but
KEDO nonetheless suspended fuel-oil shipments -
for which the US had provided the largest
financial contribution - to North Korea the
following month as winter began. North Korea
reacted on December 12, 2002, by announcing that
it would restart the nuclear facilities mothballed
by the Agreed Framework. Pyongyang expelled IAEA
inspectors on December 31 and announced on January
10, 2003, that it was withdrawing from the NPT,
effective the next day. Pyongyang's official
status with the treaty remains ambiguous.
On November 21, 2003, KEDO announced that
it would suspend construction of the two
light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea for
one year beginning that December 1. The Bush
Department of State declared that there was "no
future for the project". With that, the future of
non-proliferation in the Korea Peninsula was
foreclosed.
