What to do about North Korea? The Authors of this article offer one solution.
November 6, 2002, 11:35 a.m.
A Time for Demanding
Rollback Pyongyang’s uranium bomb.
By Victor Gilinsky & Henry Sokolski
In the next few days, the president and his Cabinet are slated to decide whether to continue shipping U.S. nuclear-power-reactor technology and fuel oil to North Korea in the wake of Pyongyang's admission that it has been secretly working to make a uranium bomb. President Clinton promised Pyongyang this energy aid in l994 as part of an "agreed framework" to keep it from making nuclear weapons. After North Korea's flagrant violation, it makes no sense to continue this deal, as even its most-ardent defenders acknowledge.
That still leaves the question of what to do about Pyongyang's uranium-enrichment program — the most-egregious violation in the history of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). The U.S. and its Asian allies have demanded that North Korea dismantle its enrichment program. But with 12,000 North Korean caves to hide different parts of its program, how will we verify any promise by Pyongyang? The small team of United Nations inspectors assembled under Mr. Blix — most with little experience — are hopelessly outmatched by the North, and not remotely up to this open-ended task.
A simpler, sounder approach would be to follow North Korea's enrichment imports and demand that it surrender what it has gained. News reports indicate that Pakistani air transports brought North Korean missiles to Pakistan and returned to North Korea with thousands of Pakistani centrifuge machines. This commerce, which by U.S. law triggers a number of nonproliferation actions (including, possibly sanctions), apparently has been underway since the late l990s. It has been conducted under the auspices of A. Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's uranium-enrichment program and director of a major Pakistani missile program.
The first thing to do — if we have not done so already — is to lean hard on Pakistan to specify exactly what got transferred to North Korea. That means every piece of enrichment hardware, every drawing, every diagram — in short, everything. This list would become the inventory of everything that Pyongyang — an NPT member forbidden to build nuclear weapons — must return. The stuff should be returned not to Pakistan, not to the United States, but to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The agency would hold it and examine and assess what, if anything else, Pyongyang should cough up with the assistance of responsible countries with suitable expertise. This activity should serve as the seed for developing an executive enforcement mechanism attached to the NPT, a mechanism that the treaty now lacks and desperately needs to deal with major violators like North Korea.
We should understand that the same request for intelligence sharing will need to be made of Russia and China, possibly Japan, and others that may have allowed entities in their country to ship enrichment technology or hardware to North Korea. As members of the NPT, all these nations agreed not to assist other countries in getting nuclear weapons. As in the case of current cooperation in combating terrorism, where mistakes were made in the past, they need to be corrected to protect against future harm. The key NPT members have to cooperate in getting a fix on what technology the North Koreans were able to import.
Of course, no one should think the return of hardware and documents would guarantee elimination of North Korea's uranium-enrichment facilities. They could, of course, make and hide copies. But the approach would slow them down significantly.
It would also have two important ancillary advantages. First, it would help put teeth into the NPT, a legal obligation we will want to enforce against Iraq and Iran and other would-be nuclear countries. Second, Pyongyang's surrender of even part of its uranium-enrichment program would likely follow a politically wrenching high-level debate, one with adverse consequences for those senior officials who misjudged the weakness of the West. Inducing such stress at the top would not be an altogether bad thing.
Let us be clear, though, there will be no entirely satisfactory solution to this issue so long as the current regime is in power. At this point, North Korea has no intention of giving up its nuclear-weapons options and is using them and the threat of renewed missile testing to extort Japan. North Korean officials current equate disarmament with national death. So they will certainly refuse to consider returning the imported nuclear technology, at least initially. Still, the demand to reverse the NPT violation will remain on the table, leaving us in a better position to gain allied and international support for tougher actions.
It is possible that, if faced with enough international pressure, Pyongyang might go along with the demand. After all, even if it totally dismantled its enrichment program, it would still have the plutonium option for a bomb, and likely have one or a small number of assembled bombs in hand.
We are talking, therefore, about achieving a partial nuclear disarmament to eliminate the NPT violation related to the DPRK's uranium-enrichment program. In making our demand, we have to make it clear that no engagement is possible for the current North Korean regime, nor any economic contact, if Pyongyang continues with uranium enrichment or resumes its plutonium production. If Pyonygang ignores this and proceeds with either nuclear program, all bets are off. We are then in a deep Cold War and putting their regime out of business should become an even-higher priority not just for the U.S., but for all parties involved.
— Victor Gilinsky is an energy consultant and served as an U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. and is author of Best of Intentions: America's Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation.
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