North Korea Has Agreed To Shut Down Its Nuclear Program. Is He Really Ready to Disarm?

For all its pomp and circumstance–the police-escorted limousines, the grand conference rooms, the hordes of assistants and aides–international diplomacy can be a grind. For three years, Christopher Hill had sought a deal to disarm North Korea, only to be frustrated at every turn. But in the early hours of Feb. 13, that changed. Shortly before 3 a.m., the U.S. negotiator returned to his hotel room in Beijing with a deal in hand, thanks to arm twisting of North Korea by the Chinese. “They kept us up late,” Hill said later. He wasn’t the only one losing sleep. His boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, phoned him at 4:15 in the morning Washington time to go over final details, checking in with Hill for the 12th time in three days. “He thought he had a tentative agreement,” she told reporters Tuesday, “but I called him … to make sure.”

When dealing with North Korea, “making sure” is always the hardest part. Since 1994, when the Clinton Administration cajoled Pyongyang into promising to abandon its nuclear-weapons program, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il has repeatedly made and then reneged on such accords. For the Bush Administration, whose officials had once speculated openly about regime change, the agreement signed on Feb. 13 represented a marked shift to diplomacy. But have the U.S. and its four negotiating partners–South Korea, China, Russia and Japan–laid a solid foundation for eliminating Kim Jong Il’s nuclear arsenal? Or is this agreement, as one former U.S. negotiator puts it, “just another false start, destined to end badly”?

The Administration can’t be accused of overhyping what it got in Beijing. This was not a comprehensive solution that could bring about a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. Under the pact, North Korea agreed to shut down within 60 days its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, where it’s believed to have produced the fissile material needed to make the six to 10 nuclear weapons Kim is estimated to possess. Pyongyang has also promised to allow international inspectors into the country to verify compliance. In return, the North is to receive an emergency shipment of fuel oil from the U.S., China, Russia and South Korea. If all that goes well, Pyongyang would receive more humanitarian aid, and the U.S. and North Korea would begin discussing an end to the standoff between the two countries that has lasted for more than a half-century.

Don’t get your hopes up just yet. The Beijing agreement calls for Pyongyang “to discuss all of its nuclear programs.” To the U.S. and its partners, that means the North must eventually dismantle both its plutonium-based weapons program and a suspected uranium-enrichment program. But Pyongyang, after first admitting to the uranium program when confronted about it by the U.S. in 2002, has since denied its existence–and may well have hidden it away deep inside a mountain somewhere in the countryside, beyond the reach of international inspectors. If Kim refuses to come clean about the uranium-enrichment program, the deal could come undone.

The agreement is also silent on the subject of the nuclear weapons the North already has. The existence of that arsenal was confirmed last October, when the North said it had tested a nuclear weapon (albeit with mixed success). The fact that Kim’s stockpile is not mentioned in the latest agreement “is probably not an oversight,” says Gary Samore, who was head of the counterproliferation program at the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) under Clinton. “That’s an indication that the North Koreans are not going to be willing to give up their existing capabilities.”

It’s hard to see why they would do so. Ever since Bush’s speech in 2002 labeling North Korea a member of the “axis of evil,” Kim Jong Il has believed “he has a big, fat target painted on his back,” says a former U.S. diplomat. “Kim believes that having a few nukes in his pocket is the ultimate guarantee that no one will try to topple his regime militarily. He’s probably right about that, and no matter how much fuel oil or diplomatic goodies we send his way, he’s not going to negotiate that away.”

As Bush’s critics see it, that’s where the latest deal falls short. Former Clinton Administration officials say the agreement is a close facsimile of the Agreed Framework signed by Washington and Pyongyang in 1994. That deal called for the North to halt nuclear-weapons development in return for two light-water nuclear power plants, from which it is difficult to generate the fissile material for bombs. Clinton’s presidency ended before the power plants could be completed, and the projects today are derelict–evidence, in Pyongyang’s eyes, of Washington’s bad faith. But those who defend the Agreed Framework say that if Bush had followed through, six years of dangerous saber rattling–not to mention Kim’s successful testing of a nuclear device–may have been avoided.

In addition to criticism from the Clintonites, the deal faces carping on the right. John Bolton, Bush’s former ambassador to the U.N. and his lead negotiator in the early rounds of six-party talks, said the deal sends a signal to proliferators that they can be rewarded for bad behavior. “He’s just wrong,” Rice sniffed, in response to Bolton’s criticisms. The Administration argues that the latest deal is much stronger than the one negotiated in ’94 because it effectively isolates Kim. The Clinton deal was bilateral, whereas this time all North Korea’s neighbors, including its closest ally, China, are co-signers, which should force Pyongyang to keep its promises and continue to bargain in good faith. The Chinese were infuriated by Kim’s October nuclear blast–President Hu Jintao had publicly warned against such a test–and have ratcheted up the pressure accordingly. This “deal has muscle,” argues Michael Green, a former Bush adviser on East Asian affairs, “because the Chinese have been very unhappy with the North’s provocations.”

So what impact will the agreement have? At the very least, it provides the prospect of real improvement on the status quo, which is a North Korea bent on producing more weapons. If the Yongbyon reactor is shut down, the North’s ability to make more nukes–or worse, peddle nuclear material to third parties–will be crippled. Although Pyongyang is a long way from giving up its nuclear weapons entirely, the diplomatic path toward that goal is more visible than it has been in years. This is likely the best deal the U.S. could get right now, and the fact that Bush’s team took it means “they have come to face reality,” says former NSC adviser Samore, rather than hold out for greater concessions that aren’t feasible.

Rice and other foreign ministers plan to meet in Beijing in two months to assess whether both sides have lived up to their initial promises. If they have, Rice says she will meet face to face with her North Korean counterpart for the first time during Bush’s presidency. Those meetings could set the stage for historic discussions about normalizing relations between two implacable enemies. The Administration’s rhetoric about seeking a sweeping solution to the North Korean threat–such as regime change in Pyongyang–has faded. Instead, the U.S. seems willing to pursue a more modest strategy: bargaining away North Korea’s nuclear program, one deal at a time.