N. Korea conundrum: Decades of failure

Road to denuclearization littered with crises, stalemates, broken promises

SEOUL, South Korea — Bill Clinton offered oil and reactors. George W. Bush mixed threats and aid. Barack Obama stopped trying after a rocket launch.

While Seoul and Washington welcomed Pyongyang’s declaration on Saturday to suspend further intercontinental ballistic missile tests and shut down its nuclear test site, the past is littered with failure.

A decadeslong cycle of crises, stalemates and broken promises gave North Korea the room to build up a legitimate arsenal that now includes purported thermonuclear warheads and develop-

mental ICBMs. The North’s latest announcement stopped well short of suggesting it has any intention of giving that up.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Friday to kick off a new round of highstakes nuclear diplomacy with Pyongyang. The inter-Korean summit could set up more substantial discussions between Kim and President Donald Trump, who said he plans to meet the dictator he previously called “Little Rocket Man” in May or June.

A look at previous negotiations with North Korea and how the currently planned summits took shape:

1994

The Clinton administration in October 1994 reached a major nuclear agreement with Pyongyang, ending months of war fears triggered by North Korea’s threat to withdraw from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and convert its stockpile of nuclear fuel into bombs.

Under the “Agreed Framework,” North Korea halted construction of two reactors the U.S. believed were for nuclear weapons production in return for two alternative nuclear power reactors that could be used to provide electricity, and 500,000 metric tons of fuel oil annually.

The deal was tested quickly. North Korea complained about delayed oil shipments and construction of the reactors, which were never delivered. The United States criticized the North’s pursuit of ballistic missile capability, and its launch of a two-stage rocket over Japan in 1998.

The deal lost political support with the inauguration of Bush, who in January 2002 grouped North Korea with Iran and Iraq as parts of an “axis of evil.”

The deal collapsed for good months later. Washington stopped the oil shipments and Pyongyang restarted its nuclear weapons program.

2005

Responding to Washington’s toughened stance, North Korea announced in 2003 that it obtained a nuclear device and would withdraw from the Nonproliferation Treaty.

This brought the United States back to the negotiating table with the North, and six-party talks also involving South Korea, China, Japan and Russia began in Beijing in August 2003.

After months of fiery negotiations, North Korea accepted a deal in September 2005 to end its nuclear weapons program in exchange for security, economic and energy benefits.

But the agreement was shaky from the start as it came just days after the U.S. Treasury Department ordered American banks to sever relations with a Macau bank accused of helping North Korea launder money from drug trafficking and other illicit activities, which hampered Pyongyang’s international financial transactions.

In October 2006, the North went on to conduct its first nuclear test.

2007

North Korea agreed to resume the six-nation disarmament talks a few weeks after the nuclear test. In February 2007, the United States and the four other countries reached an agreement to provide North Korea with an aid package worth about $400 million in return for the North disabling its nuclear facilities and allowing international inspectors back into the country.

North Korea demolished the cooling tower at its Nyongbyon reactor site in June 2008. But in September, the North declared that it would resume reprocessing plutonium, complaining that Washington wasn’t fulfilling its promise to remove the country from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

The North conducted its second nuclear test in May 2009, months after Obama took office.

2012

Months after taking power following the death of his father, current North Korean leader Kim reached a deal with the Obama administration in February 2012 to suspend nuclear weapons and missile tests and uranium enrichment and to also allow international inspectors to monitor its nuclear activities in exchange for U.S. food aid.

The United States killed the deal in April 2012 when the North launched a long-range rocket that it claimed was built for delivering satellites. The failed launch was seen by the outside world as a prohibited test of ballistic missile technology.

Some experts say Kim’s nuclear program is now too advanced to realistically expect a rollback to near zero.

“Kim will not offer CVID at the door,” said Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Dongguk University, who is advising Moon on his summit with Kim. He was referring to an abbreviation for the “complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement” of the North’s nuclear weapons program.

“Everything depends on whether Trump can accept a deal that puts out the ‘early fire’ — taking away the North’s ICBMs and freezing and closing its known nuclear and missile production facilities — and leave the rest for future negotiations,” Koh said.