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Selig S. Harrison, director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy and a longtime expert on North Korea, says Pyongyang is "eager" to start step-by-step negotiations with Washington to freeze and end its nuclear program. But the United States, Harrison says, refuses to take up the offer. Harrison recently returned from North Korea—his eighth visit since 1972—where he met with Kim Yong Nam, the second in command to leader Kim Jong Il, as well as with the foreign minister, the vice foreign minister, and the spokesman for the North Korean Army.
A pair of six-nation talks has been held to try to resolve the sharp dispute between the United States and North Korea over Pyongyang's nuclear program. A working group of officials from the six nations—the United States, North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia—is to start another round of talks May 12, but Harrison holds out little hope for progress. "I think it is a charade," he says.
Harrison, the author of "Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement", was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on May 10, 2004.
You recently returned from your eighth trip to North Korea. What was the mood there on making progress on the nuclear issue, which has bedeviled relations ever since 2002?
I found the North Korean leadership extremely eager to find a way to conclude a nuclear deal with the United States. They need such a deal urgently because North Korea embarked on significant economic reforms in the middle of 2002, and these [reforms] have intensified the economic pressures that confront its leadership. These pressures make large-scale aid to modernize the country's infrastructure extremely important, particularly in the energy, water, and transportation fields.
So they want improved relations with the United States. As part of that, the nuclear issue would be settled. In North Korea's plan, as its fear of the United States diminishes and as the denuclearization process proceeds, the North Koreans will be getting installments of aid in payment for, or tied to, the concessions they make in the denuclearization process. I found them very eager for settlement, but the problem is, while they're eager and they need [a deal], but they are not prepared to do it in the way the Bush administration is asking them to do it. The North Koreans say that Washington wants them to, in effect, simply roll over and disarm unilaterally.
What is the Bush administration's position at this moment?
Its position is that North Korea should agree to what [administration officials] call the complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantling [CVID] of its nuclear program at the outset of the negotiating process. That is to say, before administration officials tell the North Koreans what they are going to give them [in return for CVID], or before they start on any process of step-by-step concessions—which is what North Korea wants in return for step-by-step denuclearization—the administration wants North Korea to disarm completely in the nuclear field. The Bush administration feels that North Korea can't be trusted, that its honor has been found wanting in the past. The Bush administration has what I would call a very rigid position, in that it is not prepared to trade anything to get a process of denuclearization started.
Has the United States hinted, unofficially or in side talks, what benefits would be in store for North Korea if it agreed to CVID?
No, I don't think so. The most officials have done is suggest that when the process gets started, they will tell South Korea, which has been thinking of providing energy aid to North Korea, that the United States would no longer object to such aid, which it now does. But they haven't been willing to talk about any significant changes in the U.S. posture toward North Korea.
The problem is—and I think it's important to understand this—the Bush administration is very much divided between people who want to negotiate and people who really think North Korea shouldn't be there, that there should be a change in regime brought about through sustained economic and military pressure. It's not a position that looks for a war, but I think it's a position that risks a war. The point is, the administration's objective is really regime change in Pyongyang. The president in his interview in 2002 with [Washington Post correspondent] Bob Woodward in the book "Bush at War", said he loathed Kim Jong Il, and that he would like to topple his regime.
I think there's a feeling [among some in the administration who ask], "What's the matter with North Korea? All these places in Eastern Europe have collapsed, why doesn't North Korea collapse? We shouldn't do anything to prop the North Koreans up," which, in this view, would prevent an inevitable collapse. And they criticize [former U.S. President Bill] Clinton's policy, which they think was, essentially, giving North Korea assistance that enabled an obnoxious regime to continue longer than would otherwise be the case. [This refers to the 1994 "Agreed Framework" aid-for-disarmament deal between the United States, Japan, South Korea, and North Korea.]
The problem, of course, is that most people who know anything about North Korea, who've been there and have a feel for the place, who've watched it over the years, who know the history and culture, believe that this regime is not going to collapse. Therefore, they believe the Bush administration's hope for regime change is totally unrealistic. And because the administration does not want to give North Korea anything that would help it survive, it's not prepared to trade things in a negotiation.
There's a very interesting new book called "Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategy" co-authored by a hawkish scholar named Victor Cha of Georgetown University, who's kind of the ideologue of the Bush administration. His book lays it all out: the purpose of negotiating with North Korea, he says, is not to settle anything because you can't settle anything with this regime, which is unchanging, is up to no good, and is essentially a threat to South Korean and American interests. You have these multilateral negotiations in Beijing simply to show to the other parties in the region—China, South Korea, Russia, and Japan—that it is not possible to make any deals with North Korea. He says the purpose of the negotiations is to mobilize a "coalition for punishment." And the outcome of the negotiating process would be a greater readiness, Mr. Cha believes, on the part of China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea to put pressure on North Korea.
The problem is that this has already been shown to be a totally unrealistic assessment of the situation. I was just in China for 10 days, prior to my visit to North Korea, and I had many talks with many very plugged-in Chinese. China is absolutely not prepared to follow that course. China thinks the Bush administration's policy is unrealistic and is not going to accomplish anything. The Chinese want to keep the Bush administration tied up in diplomatic knots so that it won't start a war in Korea, but they are not prepared to go along with the pressure tactics that the Bush people, including [Vice President Richard] Cheney on his recent visit, would like China to pursue. The same viewpoint is found in South Korea.
What is the North Koreans' negotiating position? What are they willing to offer?
The North Koreans want a step-by-step process of simultaneous trade-offs in which the two sides agree on step one—you do this, we do this—and when that happens, which moves the two countries closer to being friends, then you go to step two. For example, right now they are offering to freeze their plutonium program, which is the one program we know they have. We suspect they have other things, but we know they have a plutonium program; we know they've been able to reprocess plutonium [into weapons-grade materials]. We don't know how much.
And this business of freezing their plutonium program would, first, determine how much has been reprocessed—this is what they're offering. They're saying, "We're willing to let you come in with inspectors and find out how much plutonium we have reprocessed and put it under international controls again," as it was prior to December 2002 when the present crisis began. "We're willing to commit ourselves not to reprocess plutonium in the future. We would allow inspectors at the reprocessing plant to make sure." In return for that, [the United States] would have to do certain things. They want the United States to [provide] large-scale energy assistance because that's the big bottleneck in their economy now. They were receiving heavy fuel oil from us, under the 1994 nuclear freeze agreement. We cut it off after the current crisis began in December of 2002, and they retaliated by kicking out the [nuclear] inspectors and starting to reprocess. Now, they want energy aid.
They also want us to take them off the [State Department's] list of terror states. They say, "Look, since you don't accuse us of having done anything in the way of terrorism for the last 20 years, it's time for you to take us off that list because as long as we're on it, we can't get into the World Bank and we can't get Asian Development Bank assistance. We are a pariah in the international economic community." They want also us to end the economic sanctions that have been in place since the Korean War. So, [those things] would be the trade-off for a freeze of their plutonium program, and that would be the first stage of what they say would be a continuing process. The problem is that they don't specify, at this stage, what stage two would be, what they would give up next.
Probably, we would insist that they account for the plutonium they had before the 1994 nuclear freeze agreement was concluded, because that accord did not establish what they had. And when you read a story in the paper saying the United States "thinks" North Korea has two nuclear weapons, or that the estimate is now eight because they processed a lot of plutonium in the last year, what you're reading are stories based on the fact that, prior to the 1994 freeze, they had done some reprocessing, and we haven't yet found out how much they had.
So stage two would probably be revealing how much they had before 1994. But the problem is, they haven't specified yet that they're willing to do that, and the administration wants them to admit something that they don't admit to, which is that they have an enriched uranium program [another way to make weapons-grade nuclear weapons] going on also. That's a very complicated question, because we get stories out of Pakistan saying that scientist A.Q. Khan [the so-called father of Pakistan's nuclear program, who confessed to providing atomic expertise to other countries] has said this and said that, but we don't have any hard evidence.
The United States has never talked to A.Q. Khan, and we don't have any specific evidence of a uranium program in North Korea, except evidence of things it was buying that could be used for such a program. That whole uranium thing is a big barrier; it's one of the reasons the Bush administration says it is not prepared to go down this road of step-by-step negotiations unless North Korea tells us what its uranium program is, where it is, and includes all of that in the agreement right from the beginning.
Isn't that what caused the breakdown in 2002, when [U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific] James A. Kelly asked the North Koreans about their uranium program, and they said, yes they had it?
According to Kelly, he reached a conclusion that they acknowledged they had it after he had accused them of having it. However, their version is very different. They say—I'm just telling you what they say, I'm prepared to believe there is such a program—but what they say they said is the following:
This was the first time the Bush administration was talking to them. They were ready to make a lot of concessions, they were hoping for big things. Instead, Kelly confronts them with these accusations in what they considered a very high-handed, arrogant, insulting manner. And therefore, their first deputy foreign minister, Kang Suk Ju, got angry and said to them, "We are entitled to have even more than that." And then he said, "Besides, the United States and North Korea are still enemies; we are still belligerents. There's never been a peace treaty ending the Korean War, so we're not obliged to clarify that for you."
In other words, according to them, Kang Suk Ju did what the United States calls "NCND" [neither confirm nor deny] about its nuclear weapons. The United States said for years that it refused to answer questions as to whether it had nuclear weapons in South Korea, for example, until [former U.S. President George H.W.] Bush removed them in 1991.
So, in a sense, they say their position at the time of the Kelly visit was NCND. Now when you ask them more specific questions, they actually deny any kind of enriched uranium program. I think we have to include the pursuit of a possible enriched uranium program as part of any denuclearization agreement; it's very important. You would have to have the kind of inspection that would enable us to find out, to the best of our abilities, whether they do have such a program.
However, I don't think we're going to get that at the outset, the way the Bush administration is seeking to do. I think it's, in a sense, the North Koreans' last card. They're going to keep that card, if they have it, inside their pocket until a fairly late stage when they think that things have really improved with the United States, when there are American diplomats resident in Pyongyang, we've recognized them, we have economic relations with them, they're getting money from Europe, Japan, and everyone else with our encouragement.
When things have really improved, their economy is looking up, and we no longer have an administration, whether it's the second Bush administration or another one, that says we want to topple their regime and we might stage a pre-emptive strike against them. When you have all that—in other words, a whole new atmosphere—that's when the nuclear problem will definitively be settled.
But we have a chance now, with this freeze of the plutonium program, to get the most important priority resolved. It's not good for North Koreans to have reprocessed plutonium available to sell to a potential third party offering them a billion dollars. Now, I was told, when I was there, that they would never do that. They pledged that they would never sell fissile material to anyone else; the nuclear program over there is just for their own self-defense. It's a deterrent to us.
They denied, specifically, Cheney's warning that they might sell to al Qaeda?
Exactly. When Cheney was in Shanghai, he warned that they might sell to al Qaeda, and they said, "No, we will not do that. We are going to sell missiles for foreign exchange; we think that's our right; there's no international convention accepted by everybody that prevents that. But nuclear material is another matter." They said, "We recognize that if nuclear material is sold to a third party, it could be used for purposes that would lead to innocent victims, like those on 9/11." They specifically deplored 9/11 and criticized al Qaeda for it. So, at the verbal level, they've now made a pledge to me, for the first time, never to do that. However, the fact is that it is in our interest to find out how much they have reprocessed. They've said they have reprocessed all 8,000 fuel rods that were in [the reactor at] Yongbyon. That is enough for them to have enough plutonium for six to eight nuclear devices, if they knew how to make the nuclear devices—and we don't know that yet.
Has the Kerry camp come up with a position on North Korea?
Yes. It's not very specific yet, but first of all, they say they will not insist on limiting negotiations to multilateral [talks]. They'll talk to the North Koreans bilaterally, as the Clinton administration did. Secondly, they are ready for a step-by-step deal.
So, it's probably in the North Koreans interest to hold out to see what happens in November?
Yes. But they want to move the United States toward a settlement because they need the aid urgently. They simply cannot accept it on the terms of Bush's offer, which they think would be a kind of surrender that would internally destabilize the Kim Jong Il regime. His military will simply not accept that.
What's going to happen in the working group talks this week in Beijing?
Very little, if anything. I think it's really a charade. The North Koreans want the working group to discuss the plutonium freeze that they have offered ever since August 27, [2003]. We have told them, "No, we won't discuss it. We will only discuss CVID." The North Koreans are being urged by China to keep up this process, and they're going to do it. It's in their interests, also, to look like they are willing to negotiate. So, they are going ahead with the meeting, but they told me, they really don't understand what's going to happen at this working group meeting. What they expect is that both sides will make opening statements that are the same as what they made last meeting. And then the hope is, somehow, a process will begin. But there's no agreed agenda; so far, it's just a series of statements by the two sides, so I don't expect much.
