LET’S MAKE A DEAL

If the prospect of a nuclear summit involving someone as unusual as Donald Trump — let alone North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — seems dismaying, be assured that it gets worse. Even if Trump were the genius he claims to be, his meeting with Kim might still be doomed. During 1985-2005, no less than four separate nuclear agreements failed in Korea. They failed because the North Koreans were committed to lies and subterfuge, and because those who negotiated with them — Russians, South Koreans, Americans — wavered between naivety, cynicism, determination and disarray.

The story begins with a place in North Korea called Yongbyon. According to Jeffrey T. Richelson, an authority on nuclear intelligence, the CIA concluded in 1986 that a just-completed nuclear reactor there, which it had monitored since 1980, likely had a military capacity. Other sources later backed the CIA’s fears. Don Oberdorfer, a prominent journalist in Korean matters, cited a Russian intelligence official who stated that North Korea’s Kim dynasty ordered a nuclear weapons program in the late 1970s. Writer Bradley K. Martin has highlighted the case of Kang Myong-do, the son-in-law of a North Korean prime minister, who defected in 1995 and claimed that the Kim regime became very anxious about the need for nuclear arms after a confrontation with the U.S. in 1976.

All of this put Russia — a provider of civilian nuclear assistance to North Korea since the 1950s — in an awkward position. Reportedly urged on by the U.S., it nudged North Korea into joining a global accord, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) on Dec. 12, 1985. The hope that the North Koreans would then co-operate was misplaced. Instead, inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors compliance with the NPT, waited in vain for years to be summoned by the North.

As North Korea moved toward nukes, the U.S. reduced its own arsenal. According to Oberdorfer, the U.S. stockpiled tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea beginning in 1957, but the growing sophistication of U.S. nuclear capabilities made them obsolete. The last ones were removed by the end of 1991, inspiring unwarranted optimism in South Korea. Discussions between North and South led to the Joint Declaration for a Non-Nuclear Korean Peninsula on the last day of 1991.

The 1991 agreement, in which the signatories vowed to keep the peninsula free of nuclear weapons, was a mirage. In 1992, North Korea finally allowed the IAEA to inspect Yongbyon, but what followed was pathetic. The North Koreans falsely reported the amount of plutonium processed there and prevented inspectors from examining two suspicious waste-disposal areas. Finally, in March, 1993, North Korea could endure no more inspections and announced it would abandon the NPT the following June. With that one move, both the NPT and the 1991 agreement fizzled.

The U.S. president at the time, Bill Clinton, has stated in his memoir: “I was determined to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, even at the risk of war.” In fact, what unfolded was an exercise in mutual slipperiness. After U.S.-North Korean talks lurched past the June 1993, deadline and into 1994, North Korea pulled off a publicity stunt. In June 1994, it invited former U.S. president Jimmy Carter for a visit. Despite some qualms at the White House, Carter agreed to go. That, coupled with the death a month later of North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, somehow created an environment in which progress was possible. (Kim was succeeded by his son, Jong-Il, father of Jong Un.) On Oct. 21, 1994, a nuclear treaty was signed, but former CNN correspondent Mike Chinoy says something was missing — the word “treaty,” which Clinton avoided. A proper treaty with a foreign power would have required ratification by the U.S. Congress, which was then balking. Instead, the treaty became known as the “Agreed Framework,” and more oddity was to come.

As detailed by Oberdorfer, the Agreed Framework involved, on the North Korean side, a pledge to cease nuclear activity and then dismantle nuclear facilities over the course of a decade. In exchange, the U.S. promised to provide the North with Light Water Reactors (LWRs), which were incapable of being used for weapons development. As well, until the LWRs were in place, the U.S. was to provide the North with heavy fuel oil. Thus, the supposed end of an arms program became an energy bonanza for North Korea. Moreover, to handle the implementation of the U.S. commitments, according to Chinoy, there came into being a U.S.-South KoreanJapanese-European Union consortium. So Washington was getting other countries to pay for its non-treaty.

The Agreed Framework was unpopular. A veteran reporter on Korean affairs, Jasper Becker, has slammed it as “one of the most peculiar international agreements ever devised.” A distinguished authority on international relations, Graham Allison, reviewing a book by three U.S. participants in the talks, held his nose over the “imperfect” (his word) arrangement and concluded it really did impede North Korean nuclear activity, but he added: “In truth, neither side intended to comply fully, and neither did.” Those LWRs never appeared, and North Korea was, well, still North Korea.

The end of the Agreed Framework was soon visible. Journalist Seymour Hersh has described how contacts between North Korea and a Pakistani nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, came to light in the late 1990s. Washington began to worry that Khan had huckstered a different sort of weapons expertise, involving not plutonium but rather highly enriched uranium (HEU). The HEU debate went on for years, punctuated by conflicting statements from North Korea that added to the uncertainty. In addition, after 9/11 in 2001, the world became a tenser place, and a pugnacious new president, George W. Bush, started denouncing North Korea as part of an “Axis of Evil.” The U.S. cut off fuel shipments in late 2002, and North Korea quickly resumed work at Yongbyon. The Agreed Framework was finished.

New diplomacy produced yet another forum, the so-called Six Party Talks, which brought together all stakeholders in the Korean nuclear crisis, including the U.S., North and South Korea, Japan, China and Russia. Negotiations during 2003-2005 seemed promising, but they were undermined at the last moment when a U.S. Treasury Department crackdown on North Korean money laundering caused the collapse of a bank in Macau that may have been used (says Chinoy) by Kim JongIl himself. Victor Cha, a U.S. participant in the Six Party Talks, insists that the Macau affair was not a ploy to ruin the talks but instead an instance of parallel policies entangling. Days later, on Sept. 19, 2005, the Six Party Talks yielded a joint declaration in which North Korea pledged to end its nuclear program, but the atmosphere was soured, and Washington criticized the declaration. The fourth nuclear agreement was almost dead on arrival.

North Korea then showed the world what it had secretly been up to from 1985 to 2005. On Oct. 9, 2006, it tested its first nuclear bomb. Nuclear historian Stephanie Cooke says this test was “widely dismissed as a failure” (although plenty of successes would follow). In fact, the real failure here was 20 years of nuclear agreements — negotiations to nowhere.