The North Koreans were uncooperative, at one point discharging so much fuel that the IAEA lost the continuity of this history. Once again, this confrontation generated a report to the IAEA Board; once again, the Board debate led to a report to the Security Council. This time the Board’s resolution was harsher: in particular, it ordered cutbacks to the technical cooperation the Agency had traditionally given North Korea, such as assistance with medical, agricultural, and other humanitarian applications of nuclear technology.
North Korea shot back by relinquishing its membership in the IAEA and declaring that it would withdraw from the NPT. This withdrawal was then “suspended,” at the urging of the United States, just one day before it was to go into effect. Nonetheless, cooperation with the Agency was deteriorating rapidly.
In the summer of 1994, the United States began negotiating directly with North Korea, in Geneva, on a bilateral arrangement intended to improve the situation. Former president Jimmy Carter was heavily involved, as a private citizen; his meetings with an aging Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang helped move the negotiations along. The result was the so-called Agreed Framework: an ad hoc, one-of-a-kind agreement that would remain in place for years to come.
The Agreed Framework was based on “action for action,” according to a preset timeline. The primary provisions were that North Korea would freeze the operations of its existing nuclear program, including the existing five-megawatt research reactor and nuclear fuel reprocessing facility at Yongbyon and two new facilities under construction, a fifty-megawatt reactor and a two-hundred-megawatt reactor. In compensation, Pyongyang would be given two one-thousand-megawatt proliferation-resistant power reactors, at no charge, with crude oil supplied to meet energy needs in the meantime. The “action for action” would culminate in North Korea resuming its full participation in the NPT, in return for a commitment to normalize their relationship with the United States.
Put simply, the Agreed Framework was designed to buy off the North Koreans. According to Robert Gallucci, the U.S. official who negotiated the agreement, it was the best deal he could get. The hope was that the North Korean regime would implode from within before full implementation of the agreement.
My initial reaction to the Agreed Framework was rather critical. The IAEA had not been part of the negotiation regarding how nuclear verification would take place. Legally, since North Korea had “suspended” its decision to withdraw from the NPT, the IAEA was supposed to resume comprehensive safeguards inspections. However, under the terms agreed between North Korea and the United States, the Agency could not do so during the initial stages of the Agreed Framework.
This put North Korea in an automatic state of noncompliance. The IAEA would be able to reestablish its verification of the North Korean nuclear program only at a much later stage, after the United States and North Korea had followed through with their commitments and the North Koreans had returned fully to the NPT. For the IAEA, accepting this arrangement was politically and legally awkward. Moreover, it did not resolve the plutonium discrepancies in North Korea’s declaration or answer IAEA questions about undeclared facilities. From a technical standpoint, the limitations imposed on our inspections under the Agreed Framework could make it impossible for IAEA inspectors later to retrace the development of North Korea’s nuclear program.
The Agency’s role consisted of monitoring the freeze—the shutdown state—of the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon: most important, the reprocessing facility and the five-megawatt reactor. But we could not inspect, for example, the other two reactors under construction. The most important aspect of our monitoring role was to make sure that the spent fuel at Yongbyon was not reprocessed to extract the plutonium that could be used for weapons purposes. To monitor the freeze, the IAEA inspectors installed tamper-sensitive seals, used video surveillance, and conducted inspections on short notice.
Technically, there was no need for our people to stay in the country all the time; that would have been like watching grass grow. However, some Member States, including the United States, believed that our presence was important politically, so we maintained two or three inspectors in residence. Decent meals were available at the guesthouse for hard currency; but the inspectors were unable to get away from their immediate surroundings, so it was like being in a detention camp. We rotated inspectors every three to six weeks, to keep them from going stir crazy.
The discovery of discrepancies and plutonium concealment in North Korea was a success for the IAEA’s verification program. What is less clear, in hindsight, is whether the Agency’s request for a special inspection in 1993 was the right approach. We were fairly certain that North Korea would reject the request, and that a confrontation would be the most likely result. From past experience, we could have anticipated that the Security Council, charged under the IAEA statute with ensuring compliance, would not take strong action. Thus, the IAEA and the international community might have done better to continue negotiations with North Korea and push for incremental progress.
The only trump card at the North Koreans’ disposal was their nuclear capability; clearly, they would play it to the greatest possible effect. The regime’s belief that the United States was bent on its overthrow was a recurrent factor influencing the nuclear negotiations. Pyongyang did not place a high priority on the welfare of its people nor on the humanitarian impact of any potential repercussions from its nuclear activities; its sole priority was the survival of the regime. Accordingly, there was little to be accomplished by using penalties to apply pressure to North Korea, let alone the threat of force as an option: Seoul, just thirty kilometers from the border, could well be pulverized. In any case, it is the last time the Agency ever tried to resort to special inspections as a verification tool. We would remain limited in our ability to verify undeclared activities until the arrival of the Model Additional Protocol in 1997.
After the special inspections approach failed, the only sensible path available to the international community was gradually to rebuild trust with North Korea, and then try to buy out its nuclear option, keeping tensions to a minimum while waiting for the regime to change. This was what the Agreed Framework tried to achieve. However, that framework was ultimately undermined when the United States failed to live up to its commitments with North Korea, most notably by not delivering the promised power reactors. The North Koreans clearly read this as evidence of a lack of good faith on the part of the Americans.
The Korean experience can be seen as a textbook case of the shortcomings of treating only the symptoms of insecurity, instead of developing a comprehensive, long-term approach designed to defuse the causes of tension. Security guarantees and development assistance are always more effective than punitive measures that inevitably escalate the tension.
3
IRAQ, 2002 and After
A Needless War
By 2002, the security landscape had markedly altered. The September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States had changed many assumptions about the capacity of terrorists to stage complex, suicidal operations. Extremist groups had expressed specific interest in acquiring and using weapons of mass destruction. In response, the IAEA had overhauled and greatly expanded its programs for helping countries secure their nuclear materials to prevent illicit use. As an agency, we, too, had changed. A decade of dealing with challenges such as Iraq and North Korea had made us more resourceful and more confident. We had considerably more legal and technological verification tools at our disposal.