The Six Party Talks
January 19, 2007
Probably one of the sharpest reversals in President Bush's foreign policy has been his shift in the past 14 months from confrontation with North Korea to diplomacy.
The shift occurred for many reasons, not least of which was the nuclear explosion that Pyongyang set off in October 2006. It was the final indicator that perhaps Bush's hard-line "axis of evil" policies had accomplished the opposite of their intent.
Since Bush took office in 2001, North Korea has withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, kicked out U.N. nuclear inspectors, made an unknown number of nuclear explosive devices, and publicly threatened to test one before finally doing so. The change in U.S. policy was helped along by the resignation of neoconservative John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and by the ascendance of Christopher Hill as the assistant secretary of State for East Asia. Finally, Bush and outgoing South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun had brass-tacks discussions at two summits, in Hanoi in November 2006 and in Sydney, Australia, in September 2007, after which Bush agreed to try something new in the long-running six-party talks. Those talks between China, Japan, Russia, the two Koreas, and the United States began in 2003 after Pyongyang withdrew from the treaty but made no progress until after the nuclear explosion. In February 2007, within four months of the blast, the parties reached agreement on a new deal.
Under the agreement, the United States agreed to talk directly with Pyongyang, something the North Koreans had been seeking for years, although the talks take place under the six-party rubric; cease the calls for regime change and give Pyongyang security guarantees that U.S. forces won't attack or invade; and remove Pyongyang from two blacklists that make it hard for the North to trade -- the State Department's state-sponsor of terrorism declaration and restrictions applied under the Trading With the Enemy Act. In addition, the U.S. and the other parties will jointly provide 1 million tons of heavy fuel oil, or its equivalent, for the energy-starved North. Toward the end of the process, if all goes as planned, the United States would normalize relations with North Korea; help negotiate a peace treaty to end the Korean War, which halted in 1953 with only a cease-fire; and discuss the construction of light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea, which would provide a long-term energy source without producing weapons-grade plutonium.
For the North Koreans, the obligation is a three-phase process to denuclearize: "disablement" of its main nuclear reactor and plutonium-reprocessing facilities at Yongbyon; "declaration" of all of its nuclear weapons, research programs, and past activities; and "dismantlement" of all of its nuclear weapons and programs. Here are where the three phases stand and where the obstacles, which are many, lie.
Disablement. By most accounts, this first phase has gone relatively smoothly. As promised, the North Koreans shut down their main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon in July. This is the plant that produced enough plutonium to make several nuclear devices, one of which was detonated in 2006. With the reactor shut down, North Korea can no longer add to its stores of weapons-grade plutonium. American engineers have been in North Korea since October helping the North Koreans disable the reactor, the accompanying plutonium-reprocessing plant, and the nuclear fuel rod factory, so that the nuclear fuel cycle can't be restarted quickly. U.N. inspectors have also monitored the progress.
In recent weeks, however, disablement has slowed, and the December 31 deadline for its completion came and went. Technical and safety issues have partly caused the delay, but indications are strong that the North Koreans are dragging their feet. Pyongyang says that the United States has not acted quickly enough to remove North Korea from the blacklists and hasn't delivered fuel assistance on time. It could also be that Pyongyang is delaying for reasons of politics -- it wants to see if South Korea President-elect Lee Myung-bak, a conservative, will continue deepening economic ties between the two Koreas and how the U.S. presidential elections are shaping up.
Still, officials in South Korea and Washington have said that the plant is sufficiently disabled and would take a year to restart, although complete disablement isn't likely until March.
Declaration. This phase, also with a missed December 31, 2007, deadline, is more problematic than disablement and may be the most crucial to the deal's completion. From the U.S. point of view, North Korea agreed to fully declare all of its nuclear programs and activities. These include precisely how much weapons-grade plutonium it has produced over the years and still possesses; how many nuclear explosive devices it has; what kind of nuclear technology it has acquired from, or sold, or proliferated to other countries; and, perhaps most important, the state of its suspected second nuclear effort -- a program to highly enrich uranium to provide a second source of weapons-grade fissile material.
The enrichment program is mysterious, and the North Koreans have alternately acknowledged and denied that they have such a program. It is also more long-range and would take years to bring to fruition, because enriching uranium is time-consuming and technologically challenging. But this is now the key sticking point in the talks.
Washington wants the declaration to be "correct and complete," particularly on the highly enriched uranium. Pyongyang's definition of what the document should include is proving to be very different, and it wants some of the declarations to remain secret. Bush sent a personal letter to Kim Jong Il in December evidently restating his expectations of the declaration phase.
When the deadline was missed, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice played down the delay, as did Hill. "They were prepared to give a declaration which wasn't going to be complete and correct, and we felt that it was better for them to give us a complete one even if it's going to be a late one," Hill told journalists in Tokyo on January 7. "We understand that this is always a difficult process, one that is rarely completed on time. So I think we have to have a little sense of patience and perseverance." Meeting with his counterparts in Beijing on January 10, Hill said he wanted the declaration to be complete by the end of February. "I want to emphasize that throughout the six-party process, we had these bumps in the road, we had these missed deadlines, but ultimately we have been able to make progress."
Dismantlement. This final phase, with a target deadline of the end of 2008, obviously can't go too far until North Korea discloses all of its nuclear programs. But assuming it does so to the satisfaction of the five other parties, international teams would then help North Korea dismantle and remove all of the nuclear programs, materials, and facilities; the planet would have one less nuclear state; and North Korea would be welcomed into the family of nations, much as Libya was after giving up its weapons of mass destruction programs. The U.S. would then normalize relations with North Korea, and talks would proceed on a final peace treaty to end the Korean War. A sticking point here could be North Korea's insistence on the five other parties' help in building the light-water nuclear reactors for civilian energy needs.
Considerable skepticism in the U.S. government remains about whether North Korea will truly disarm. The nuclear card in many ways is the only one that Kim Jong Il has available to play, and skeptics question why he would ever give it up. One senior U.S. diplomat in South Korea said, "It remains to be seen if they are willing to go all the way to abandon everything."But South Korean officials, and Korea experts in this country, think that the deal is as likely to go through as not. Said University of Chicago history professor Bruce Cumings, the author of many books on the two Koreas: "The North Koreans have a deal not only with Bush but with the other four parties. There's a lot in it for North Korea. If one presumes that cooler heads prevail in Pyongyang, they may go through with it and get it done in this administration."