North Korea To Suspend Plutonium Production

By Leon V. Sigal, MIT Center for International Studies. Posted March 1, 2007.

In a laudable about-face, President Bush has decided at last to accept North Korea's longstanding offer to suspend production of plutonium by shutting down and sealing its reactor and reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, halting construction of a larger reactor and not restarting a newly refurbished fuel fabrication plant. In so doing, he is rejecting the counsel of American hardliners who have kept the United States from making and living up to earlier agreements while managing to convince much of America that it is North Korea that has been the one at fault. By negotiating in earnest, Bush has achieved an important goal for U.S. and Asian security.

To do so the president had to take his first steps toward ending enmity with Pyongyang -- authorize negotiator Christopher Hill to meet directly with his North Korean counterpart in Beijing and Berlin, free up suspect North Korean hard currency accounts in a Macao bank, resume shipments of heavy fuel oil he suspended in 2002, authorize Secretary of State Rice to meet with her North Korean counterpart and other six-party foreign ministers, and promise to relax sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act and anti-terrorism statutes.

Bush put the brakes on a nuclear program that threatened to set off an arms race in Northeast Asia, erode U.S. alliances in the region, and jeopardize his most significant foreign policy achievement -- sustaining cooperation with China.

The president can coax Pyongyang farther down the road to disarmament if he continues to engage in direct diplomatic give-and-take to end enmity. By legitimating deal-making with North Korea as a bipartisan approach, he makes it easier for his successor to follow in his footsteps.

Deal Making and Deal Breaking

Hardliners like former U.N. envoy John Bolton and former Under Secretary of State Robert Joseph immediately pounced on the deal, saying it did nothing to stop the North's uranium enrichment program, dismantle its plutonium facilities, or capture the seven to nine bombs worth of plutonium that the North is believed to have. Yet they themselves had long fought to deny negotiator Hill the bargaining chips he needed to negotiate even this first-stage deal, never mind achieving further disarming. Delaying a freeze to seek a more far-reaching deal would give the North time to generate more plutonium, fabricate bombs, and increase its bargaining leverage.

The hardliners insist Pyongyang will never live up to its pledge, made in the September 2005 round of six-party talks, to abandon "all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs." How can they be so sure? In fact, nobody knows (with the possible exception of Kim Jong-il), and the only way for Washington to find out is to proceed, reciprocal step by reciprocal step, in sustained negotiations.

If it were up to the hardliners, Washington would never know how far it can get with Pyongyang. They identified diplomatic give-and-take as rewarding bad behavior. This stance rests on a fiction they propagated that North Korea duped President Clinton in halting its plutonium program while starting a covert uranium enrichment effort. As President Bush put it on March 6, 2003, "My predecessor, in a good-faith effort, entered into a framework agreement. The United States honored its side of the agreement; North Korea didn't. While we felt the agreement was in force, North Korea was enriching uranium."

In fact, it was the United States that first reneged on the 1994 Agreed Framework by failing to reward North Korea's good behavior. Washington got what it most wanted up front -- a freeze of Pyongyang's plutonium program, a program that by now could have generated enough plutonium for at least fifty bombs. Washington did not live up to its end of the bargain, however. When Republicans won control of Congress in elections just days after the October 1994 accord was signed, many of them denounced the deal as appeasement. Unwilling to take on Congress, President Clinton backpedaled on implementation. He did little easing of sanctions until 2000. Washington pledged to provide two nuclear power plants "by a target date of 2003," but concrete for the first foundation was not poured until August 2002. It did deliver heavy fuel oil as promised but seldom on schedule. Above all, it did not live up to its promise in Article II of the Agreed Framework to "move toward full normalization of political and economic relations" -- end enmity and lift sanctions.

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Leon V. Sigal is director of the Northeast Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council and author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton University Press, 1998).

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