As the Clinton Administration settled into office, the issue escalated sharply.
Frustrated by North Korean intransigence, IAEA Director General Hans Blix requested a special inspection of the waste sites, under procedures specified in the DPRK’s Safeguards Agreement. Pyongyang refused. In response, and in the face of clear evidence of North Korean cheating and concealment, the IAEA Board of Governors found the North in violation of its Safeguards obligations, and under the IAEA Statute, on April 1, 1993, referred the matter to the United Nations Security Council. Two weeks earlier, seeing the likely chain of events, Pyongyang announced a decision to withdraw from the NPT, effective June 12, 1993.12) North Korean Ambassador Kim Yong Nam’s letter to the Security Council said that the request for special inspections was an
“undisguised strong arm act designed to disarm the DPRK and strangle our socialist system, which jeopardizes its supreme interests.”13)
Not for the last time, the crisis appeared to peak. If North Korea successfully withdrew from the NPT, it would be free to produce—and to sell to the highest bidder—as much fissile material as it could. The Security Council could attempt to sanction the North, but Pyongyang threatened that any such move would be treated as an act of war—bluster not easily
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dismissed given Pyongyang’s well-deserved reputation for violence and erratic behavior. Finally, using sanctions to coerce an autarkic society, with at least one friendly neighbor, was not obviously a winning strategy.
Moreover, the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council were key to any effective international action against North Korea. Russia, Britain, and France favored negotiations, believing that the United States “had all the cards—all the carrots—and would induce the North Koreans to cooperate with the NPT.”14) China supported the North’s longstanding objective of gaining direct access to U.S. negotiators. So, despite the dangers inherent in rewarding North Korea’s brinksmanship, the Clinton Administration ultimately concluded that “Tactically you had to try negotiations to make it possible to get further Security Council action.”15)
The first round of talks in early June produced a joint statement of principles including “assurances against the threat and use of force . . . peace and security in a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula . . . [and] support for the peaceful reunification of Korea.”16) In that context, the North “suspended” its withdrawal from the NPT. Significantly, for the first time, the United States also pledged to respect North Korean sovereignty.
Special inspections at the two sites holding waste material to improve the IAEA’s understanding of how much plutonium the North might have produced remained the primary U.S. objective. Meanwhile, the North continued to reject such inspections and even resisted full implementation of its “suspended”
Safeguards Agreement. The United States, Japan, and South Korea actually tried to rein in the IAEA during this period, for fear of being painted into a corner by the combined actions of a recalcitrant DPRK and a zealous IAEA.
They did not want an impasse, which might return the issue to the Security Council and perhaps ultimately lead to war.17)
Eventually, though, Hans Blix was pushed too far. On December 2, 1993, he reported to the IAEA Board of Governors that the inspections program
“cannot be said at present to provide any meaningful assurance of peaceful use of the DPRK’s declared nuclear installations and materials.”18) In its
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139 ponderous way, the IAEA cried out that it could no longer verify North Korean compliance with the NPT. In a recent summary of events in North Korea, the IAEA Secretariat noted dryly that, “Between May 1993 and March 1994, the Agency performed limited Safeguards activities related to technical work and maintenance of containment and surveillance systems.”19)
Although talks continued with indifferent results, relations between the DPRK and the IAEA deteriorated. In March, the North halted an inspection of the reprocessing plant and Blix recalled the inspectors. In response, on March 21, the IAEA Board of Governors declared the North to be in further noncompliance with its Safeguards obligations and again referred the matter to the UN Security Council.
On May 14, the North began to remove the fuel rods from the Yongbyon reactor, while refusing to allow the Agency to monitor the process. With the operation complete, on June 2, Blix sent a letter to the United Nations Secretary General saying that the IAEA’s ability to verify that nuclear material had not been diverted from the Yongbyon reactor had “been lost.”20) Meanwhile, the North threatened to reprocess the spent fuel rods, separating more plutonium that could be used to make nuclear weapons.21) As the Security Council considered further economic sanctions, Pyongyang threatened to turn Seoul into “a sea of flames.”22)
By June 15, the Administration was facing calls for military action. Former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and his former deputy Arnold Kanter argued that, “Pyongyang must be made to understand that if war is unavoidable, we would rather fight it sooner than later, when North Korea might have a sizable nuclear arsenal. Likewise, it must understand that if war comes, it will result in the total defeat of North Korea and the demise of the Kim Il Sung regime. The stakes could hardly be higher. The time for temporizing is over.”23)
The next day, Defense Secretary William Perry found himself in the Cabinet Room brooding about the terrible options he was about to present to President Clinton.
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Like Perry, two of his top aides, Undersecretary John Deutch and Assistant Secretary Ashton Carter, were both trained as scientists. They looked at the problem differently than the diplomats at the IAEA. They had for months argued that the U.S. position “demanded both too little and too much of North Korea.”24) In their view, the IAEA’s obsession with verifying the nature of past actions was too much for Pyongyang to accept, while too little attention was being paid to shutting down the reactor at Yongbyon and preventing the future operation of two larger reactors then under construction. They argued for deferring the special inspections in return for a freeze on new activity, including reactor operations.25)
Dramatically, the National Security Council meeting that was to contemplate military options was interrupted by a telephone call from former President Jimmy Carter, who had gone to Pyongyang to try to work out a deal. Carter conveyed a proposal from the North to negotiate directly with the United States. President Clinton instructed his National Security Advisor to respond that the United States:
“Would be willing to begin negotiations, provided that the North would freeze all activities at Yongbyon wile negotiations were under way, and that negotiations would point the way to a permanent end of the nuclear dimension of the North Korean military threat.”26)
Four months later, on October 21, 1994, the United States and the DPRK signed the Agreed Framework, which essentially froze North Korean nuclear reactor activities, in return for political and economic benefits, including heavy fuel oil shipments and construction of two light water power reactors. The North was to comply with the NPT and the North-South Denuclearization Agreement, but resolution of the past plutonium discrepancies was deferred.
In the United States, the deal faced a barrage of criticism, specifically that it: undercut the IAEA, damaging nonproliferation efforts not only in North Korea, but elsewhere;27) failed to include effective verification measures, especially for facilities beyond Yongbyon; propped up and prolonged a brutal and dangerous North Korean regime with substantial economic support; and,
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141 submitted to blackmail, providing all the wrong incentives for nuclear brinksmanship to both Pyongyang and to other states.
To these criticisms, supporters of the Agreed Framework responded that the most important fact was that North Korea was no longer running the Yongbyon reactor and thereby producing plutonium. They argued that while it was in force, the Agreed Framework prevented the production of more than 100 North Korean nuclear weapons.28) The other issues, while perhaps important, were less urgent than the imminent threat of more fissile material for nuclear weapons.
Unstated, but important to this argument was a broad assumption about the general course of world events in 1994. The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989, and so too had the Soviet Empire. Democracy was taking root in former communist countries in Eastern Europe. There was a strong sense that time was not on the side of totalitarian dictatorships. Kim Il Sung himself was said to be deeply affected by the object lesson of the death of his friend and fellow dictator, Romania’s Nicolai Ceausescu.29) Moreover, even in the nuclear realm, there had been astounding progress. South Africa ended its nuclear weapons program in 1989 and joined the NPT in 1991 as a non-nuclear weapons state. Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine would give up the nuclear weapons they inherited from the Soviet Union under the December 1994 Budapest Memorandum, and the negotiations were well underway as the Agreed Framework was signed.
Thus, there was a sense that if the immediate crisis—in which North Korea had time on its side because it controlled the pace of reprocessing, and thereby confronted the United States with terrible options—could be averted, then longer term historical trends would place time on the side of America and its allies. While this bet did not pay off, it was not necessarily unrealistic.
Of course, the Agreed Framework did not end the Clinton Administration’s responsibility to deal with North Korean nuclear issues. Significantly, the Administration could not certify to Congress in 1999 and 2000 that North Korea was not pursuing a uranium enrichment capability.30) Clearly, the
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Clinton Administration had picked up some indications that the North might be cheating on the Agreed Framework, but time apparently ran out before it could pursue either those suspicions or the “more for more” approach that it contemplated in its final days.