As for the charge of naà ¯vete' when it comes to a proposal to begin the partial demilitarization of the peninsula, that's part and parcel of prevailing Washington orthodoxy, a deep conviction that North Korea will never surrender its nuclear weapons as part of a grand bargain. In fact, progress toward just such a denuclearization was made during Bill Clinton's presidency, when the sticks were briefly put aside and the carrots brought out. In October 1994, negotiations led to what was called the Agreed Framework.
Its details are complicated, so brace yourself for a barebones summary: North Korea agreed to shut down its reactor at Yongbyon, place the plant's spent fuel in sealed containers for shipment out of the country, stop construction on two larger reactors (at Yongbyon and Taechon), remain a party to the NPT, and permit the IAEA to inspect its nuclear sites to verify the agreement's implementation. In exchange, the United States, Japan, and South Korea undertook, through a consortium, to build two light-water reactors (LWRs) suitable for generating electricity but not for producing weapons-grade plutonium and to provide Pyongyang with 500,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil pending the completion of the reactors.
Eventually the Agreed Framework fell apart, a development for which all the parties share blame. North Korea's ongoing missile tests, while not banned by the deal, bolstered the accord's critics in Washington. It also faced resistance in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, which in 1994 were, for the first time in four decades, in Republican hands, while the Clinton administration proved inept in defending the agreement. Having stopped producing plutonium at Yongbyon, North Korea complained about the delay in building the LWRs. (Work on the first reactor didn't start until August 2002.) The South Korean government, stuck with partially funding those plants, was unenthusiastic, too.
The Bush administration arrived in office in 2001 ready to shred the Agreed Framework. Soon enough, however, it sought to resurrect a version of that deal during the "Six-Party Talks," which began in 2003 and included both Koreas, the United States, Russia, China, and Japan.
Here again the details are labyrinthine, but the basic formula that emerged did indeed resemble the Agreed Framework: North Korea was to receive both those LWRs and economic aid in exchange for freezing and then dismantling its nuclear program. The North Koreans even allowed American and other technical experts to observe it shutting down the Yongbyon reactor. It also provided reams -- 18,000 pages to be exact -- of documentation on its nuclear program. Most importantly, having frozen plutonium production in 1994, it continued to do so until 2003.
For its part, the Bush administration removed North Korea from the State Department's list of countries accused of sponsoring terrorism and exempted it from the Trading with the Enemy Act.
There were also threats, theatrics, and setbacks aplenty. In the end, the Six-Party Talks failed for reasons similar to those that killed the Agreed Framework: quarrels over the nature and scope of verification procedures, North Korea's missile tests and confirmation of reports that it had embarked on efforts to build uranium-based nuclear weapons, and U.N. sanctions. President George W. Bush, of course, included that country, along with Iran and Iraq, in what he infamously termed the "axis of evil," which he called a "grave and growing danger" in his January 2002 State of the Union address. His administration also listed North Korea in the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review as one of the states that might become the target of a preventive strike.
The lessons to be drawn from this grim record are not that North Korea will not negotiate, let alone that it won't ever agree to freeze, or even terminate, its nuclear program. Instead, the history of these failed deals should be looked to for ideas on better ways to reach a consensus-based solution.
This much remains clear: the more Pyongyang suspects that Washington's real goal is regime change, the less likely it will be to relinquish its nuclear weapons for fear of suffering the fate of Muammar Gaddafi, who shut down his nuclear program only to be toppled in what began as a U.S. and NATO humanitarian intervention to protect civilians but morphed quickly into a campaign to take him out.
North Korea and the Legacy of War
The notion that North Korea couldn't possibly fear an American attack and that its claims to the contrary amount to paranoia reflects a stunning ignorance of history. Between 1950 and 1953, North Korea experienced firsthand the devastation the American military machine was capable of inflicting. As Charles Armstrong, a historian of Korea, has written, in those years "American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea -- that is, essentially North Korea -- including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific theater of World War II." Armstrong estimates that 12%-15% of the North Korean population might have died, "a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II."
As happened during the Anglo-American terror bombing of Germany and Japan, the distinction between civilians and soldiers, so central to International Humanitarian Law and Just War Theory, was defenestrated. Many Americans know about the bombing of Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki and the deliberate targeting of civilians in an attempt to break their morale. But few know what happened to North Korea in the early 1950s. In his haunting book, On the Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald writes that Germans did not discuss the wartime bombings because Nazi crimes made them hesitant to cast moral judgments on other states, no matter what they had done to Germany. There has been no such repression of memory or reticence by the state or the citizenry of North Korea.
As a result, the usual dismissals of Pyongyang's apprehension about what the United States might do to a denuclearized country are both callous and foolish. Successful negotiations would mean taking its security concerns seriously, not rejecting them as paranoid demands, especially given that American military power remains so close, that Washington has threatened to attack the North more than once, and that the American president only recently boasted to the president of the Philippines (in a conversation leaked online) of the two U.S. nuclear submarines that were evidently somewhere off the North Korean coast at that moment.
Cutting the Umbilical Cord
A grand bargain that combines aid and political normalization in return for denuclearization and the pullback and reduction of troops on the Korean peninsula could be made even more attractive to Pyongyang if it included a phased withdrawal of the 28,500 American troops in South Korea. The standard claim -- that this would leave South Korea defenseless -- is ludicrous.
South Korea has twice the population of the North: 50.6 million to 25.2 million, and they are better educated, far better fed, and much healthier. Just look at the data on life expectancy, infant mortality, and the amount and quality of calories consumed. The South, then, has far more and better human capital.
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