But after a breakdown in talks with the Bush administration a year ago, inspectors were kicked out and the Yongbyon facility was put back on line. Some experts believe that the reactor itself has produced enough nuclear material over the last year to make another bomb. Nobody outside of North Korea knows if the spent fuel rods have been processed into weapons-grade plutonium.
Meanwhile, four months have passed since the United States sat down for negotiations with Pyongyang. The most recent round of talks, scheduled for this month, was pushed back until at least February. Stung by North Korea’s admission in October 2002 that it was developing yet another nuclear program, the Bush administration wants it completely, verifiably and irreversibly dismantled. The United States will provide security assurances to Pyongyang only after this demand–as well as a go-anywhere-at-any-time inspection regime–is met. For its part, North Korea insists on written, iron-clad security guarantees and desperately needed economic aid before it makes a move. “This is going to be huge hard slogging no matter what,” says one State Department official.
So far, though, it has been more like no slogging at all. Washington refuses to deal with Pyongyang one on one, and State Department officials admit that the six-party format for the talks–South Korea, Japan, China and Russia are also involved in negotiations–has been unwieldy. Beyond that, the United States and its partner countries have not been able to agree even to the terms of a starting point to make a deal with the North Koreans. Critics contend that Washington is simply not negotiating with enough vigor and suggest that the first step toward any deal must involve getting the program at Yongbyon back under a freeze. “It must be a real and serious and substantive negotiation,” says Wendy Sherman, the chief negotiator with North Korea during the Clinton administration. “The longer this takes, the fewer options we have and the more opportunities it gives the North Koreans.”
Administration officials counter that the Clinton administration originally botched North Korea policy by agreeing in 1994 to sign a deal with Pyongyang which promised fuel aid and the eventual normalization of relations in exchange for an immediate freeze on North Korea’s nuclear operations. That agreement was broken, they argue, when North Korea announced it had started up a uranium-enrichment program in October 2002. Anything less than a comprehensive deal now, they say, would be giving in to blackmail. “The Clinton administration gave the North Koreans a free pass,” says a State Department official. “That is not an option now.”
But United Nations diplomats who have a detailed understanding of North Korea’s nuclear program argue that a long negotiation process will also make it more difficult to verify whatever agreement is reached. One diplomat with extensive experience in North Korea estimated that it would take, at minimum, three to four years under the best of circumstances to verify that Pyongyang had dismantled its weapons program. Even verifying a refreeze of the nuclear program at Yongbyon would take time. “You think that this can be handled in months?” said the diplomat. “No way.”
Still others say that bickering within the Bush administration has hampered the process. They point to the fact that the chief American negotiator, James A. Kelly, has been so hamstrung by his superiors at the National Security Council that he has been forced to read from a script that has been highly scrutinized in advance by his superiors. “He has no wiggle room to actually negotiate,” says a former Bush administration official. “The North Koreans are absolutely bemused by his performance.” Meanwhile there is no sign that the North Koreans plan to stop making plutonium anytime soon.
