Surprise! No candor from North
Korea By Donald Kirk
LONDON - The failure of North
Korea to meet the "deadline" for "fessing up" to
everything in its nuclear inventory should have
come as no shock to anyone.
The only
surprise is that US diplomats and spokespeople
persisted in saying North Korean disablement of
its nuclear program was "on track" and all that
was needed to complete this "phase" of the deal
was for the North to produce that list.
Now the all-patient US State Department is
saying all is fine, "They should not sacrifice
completeness and accuracy for speed," said nuclear
envoy Christopher Hill as he prepared for
another round of talks about
getting North Korea to live up to its word.
Giving Hill the benefit of the doubt, some
analysts ask if he believes all those optimistic
statements and carefully phrased "warnings" that
he drops while commuting between Washington and
Beijing with stops in Seoul and Tokyo. Or might
secret diplomatic communications, when revealed a
few years or decades hence, prove he knew the
whole show was a charade but had to make a
pretense of doing his best to cool down a crisis
on the Korean Peninsula while US forces were
pinned down in a real shooting war in Iraq and
Afghanistan?
In any event, as the New
Year's witching hour predictably slipped by, a
familiar pattern of wait-and-see, talking about
talks, demands and counter-demands quickly fell
into place. There was China saying delay was
expected, the State Department cautiously
optimistic, North Korea accusing the US of going
back on its promises and South Korea yearning for
more six-party talks even before North Korea came
up with the list.
The most discordant
note, however, may have been an expression of
skepticism by a White House talking head about
whether North Korea would ever provide all the
details promised in the six-party nuclear
agreement last February 13 and reaffirmed on
October 3 even as North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il
was hosting South Korea's President Roh Moo-hyun
in Pyongyang. The admission, "We are skeptical,"
by spokeswoman Dana Perino evoked memories of her
boss, President George W Bush, at the outset of
his presidency in March 2001 expressing
"skepticism" about verifying any deal with North
Korea.
It was that remark, made by Bush as
he sat in the White House beside South Korea's
president Kim Dae-jung, author of the Sunshine
policy, after their first meeting that touched off
a long period of strain in US-South Korean
relations relieved only by the US eventually going
along with reconciliation.
The debate over
North Korea reached crisis proportions with the
breakdown of the 1994 Geneva framework agreement
after North Korea in October 2002 supposedly
acknowledged the existence of a program for
developing nuclear warheads with highly enriched
uranium (HEU). Incredibly, after all the
negotiations, deals, high hopes and misleading
news reporting, HEU remains the same issue as it
was then.
"I thought Chris Hill had
persuaded himself of a face-saving way out," said
Mark Fitzpatrick, senior research fellow at the
International Institute for Strategic Studies in
London, but North Korea is showing no signs of
yielding to such a simple formula for compromise.
The understanding, as spread by Hill, was
that North Korea would acknowledge having acquired
19 or so centrifuges, and the plans to go with
them, from Pakistan's rogue physicist Abdul Qadeer
Khan and then turn them over in a display of good
faith.
As negotiators on all sides should
have known, however, North Korea is no closer now
to acknowledging anything to do with HEU than it
was more than five years ago. North Korean
negotiators in the past few weeks have said they
have no HEU program.
Beside the HEU issue,
the disablement of the nuclear complex at
Yongbyon, where North Korean technicians are
believed to have reprocessed enough plutonium for
anywhere from six to a dozen warheads, is a
secondary issue. The US does not appear concerned
by North Korea's delaying disablement until
February for reasons that American technicians on
the scene say are unavoidable.
Fitzpatrick, former deputy assistant
secretary of state for non-proliferation, notes
that North Korea has yet to agree to give up the
plutonium it has already produced. "They've agreed
to do one phase and then talk about the next
phase," he said. "Longer term, there are so many
things that are waiting to be done."
The
Yongbyon facilities, modeled on outdated Soviet
plans, with Soviet technology, were ready for
disablement - and had already served their primary
purpose of frightening the US into considering
serious concessions after the explosion by the
North of a small nuclear warhead on October 9,
2006.
Even if North Korea were to reach
the stage of admitting, "OK, we've got a uranium
program," said Fitzpatrick, "they haven't agreed
to disable it." North Korean recalcitrance on HEU
means the US and others may well have to accept
the fact that North Korea will go on playing the
nuclear card, challenging the US while making few
if any serious concessions. If the US wants to
avoid another nuclear crisis, the only option may
be to go on with talks that go nowhere, hoping to
avoid a breakdown of the process while holding on
to the rewards that North Korea demands as "action
for action", including removal from the State
Department's list of terrorist states and a
bonanza of ever-more aid.
The wild card in
the whole process, however, may be North Korea's
assessment of the likely attitude of South Korea's
president-elect Lee Myung-bak.
An
incredible irony is that, while the Bush
administration reversed course on North Korea and
turned toward moderation, South Korean voters have
become ever more dubious about what all the
talking is accomplishing. Lee, a conservative
whose primary focus is on the economy, has been
using much the same language as American
conservatives in wanting to know all North Korea's
been up to, including its HEU program, and
demanding "verification" of compliance with the
six-party agreements.
North Korea so far
has refrained from comment on his election, but
the North Korean outlook may become clear in the
response to a suggestion by one of Lee's senior
advisors that Pyongyang send a senior leader to
Lee's inauguration on February 25.
The
idea, as proposed by Nam Sung-wook at Korea
University, is that South Korea should send an
envoy to Pyongyang to invite Kim Young-nam, North
Korea's second highest-ranking leader in his
capacity as president of the presidium of the
Supreme People's Assembly, to attend Lee
Myung-bak's swearing-in.
No one, however,
is seriously expecting North Korea to go along
with the idea, especially while a special
prosecutor is still investigating Lee's alleged
connection with an investment fund whose top
executive, his former business partner, faces
trial for stock manipulation and embezzlement.
Assuming Lee survives that embarrassment,
Kim Jong-il may want to see what Lee really means
when he talks about "verification" and "human
rights" with the same determination shown by
conservative American think-tankers.
"Verification is a very broad term," said
Fitzpatrick. "The devil will be in the details.
Maybe he'd be expected to go ahead with a little
less speed, and he would be more inclined to
listen to the US." All of which pretty well rules
out North Korea detailing its nuclear inventory,
much less abandoning the program, while waiting to
see how much Lee will be willing to yield.
Journalist Donald Kirk has been
covering Korea - and the confrontation of forces
in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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