Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula: Divergent Perspectives
By Ankit Panda
Prepared for the 2019 World Korea Forum Summit in New York City
What does “denuclearization” mean? Does it mean the same thing as “disarmament”? Or something else entirely? These questions are central to understanding years of diplomatic agreements between North Korea and South Korea, and North Korea and the United States. Indeed, during the bout of diplomacy with Kim Jong Un that began in 2017 with the Seoul Winter Olympic Games, the term “denuclearization” has been deployed in misleading ways by U.S. government officials and commentators alike. Without a common understanding of this word, productive diplomacy between Pyongyang and Seoul will never be possible. What is most important to understand about denuclearization that it is emphatically not disarmament. In effect, the term itself is bespoke to the situation on the Korean Peninsula. While disarmament might accurately describe the experiences of other countries, including Libya, South Africa, Ukraine, and others, it does not describe what the United States has officially sought from Pyongyang since the early 2000s, when the “comprehensive, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement” of North Korea’s nuclear complex became a priority.
What differentiates denuclearization from its counterpart disarmament is its bilateral nature. The word has never referred to a set of actions to be taken by North Korea. To understand this, it is most useful to trace the term back to its origins. Beginning in the early 1990s, both South Korea and the United States took an interest in what was quickly becoming apparent: North Korea had aspirations to produce nuclear weapons. The term that’s now used in international discourse around North Korea almost without a second thought—denuclearization—was first introduced to the world in 1992.
That year, the North and the South produced a joint declaration on the “Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” The agreement was signed on January 20, 1992. North and South Korea, in that agreement, agreed not to “test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons” or to “possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment facilities.” The agreement also sees both sides agree to reciprocal inspections to allow for a degree of verification. At the time, North Korea did not have in place infrastructure for uranium enrichment, but it had been operating the gas-graphite 5MWe reactor at Yongbyon for some years. In 1991, the United States, under the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNI) that followed the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, withdrew its tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea. Those weapons had been on the Peninsula since 1958 and had left Kim Il Sung well aware of the fundamental asymmetry in capabilities that divided North and South Korea. While the Korean People’s Army outnumbered South Korea’s armed forces at the time—and still do—the quantitative advantage had been offset for decades by the presence of U.S. nuclear weapons. That ended in December 1991. On December 18 that year, South Korean President Roh Tae Woo made a public declaration that “there do not exist any nuclear weapons whatsoever anywhere in the Republic of South Korea.”
For South Korea, it was the departure of U.S. nuclear weapons from its territory that created the conditions that allowed that inter-Korean declaration of 1992 to come into existence. “Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula”—a phrase that first appeared in the inter-Korean agreement of January 1992—came to mean something very particular: no nuclear weapons would be present on the entirety of the Korean Peninsula, from the southern tip of South Korea all the way up to the Yalu and Tumen rivers that separated North Korea from China. Even as the two Koreas arrived at this agreement, North Korea carefully avoided acknowledging that South Korea, in fact, had “denuclearized.” More than two decades later, in the present day, North Korea has yet to make any public acknowledgement of the fact that the United States no longer bases its nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula. Instead, the reality of U.S. nuclear weapons in South Korea between 1958 and 1991 all but ensured that the decision to pursue a North Korean bomb would be irreversible under Kim Il Sung—especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union shocked Pyongyang with the disappearance of an important benefactor in Moscow. In any case, just ten days after the declaration with South Korea to pursue the “denuclearization” of the entire Peninsula—on January 30—North Korea acceded to a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), following through on one of its obligations as a member of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which it had joined seven years earlier, in 1985.
The 1992 comprehensive safeguards agreement between North Korea and the IAEA would be significant and hint at the kinds of the verification issues that would linger around the country’s nuclear programs for years and years. North Korea should have concluded in the agreement by mid-1987 to comply with the eighteen-month-long window provided for by Article III for the Treaty for concluding a safeguards agreement. Even with the delay, Pyongyang’s acquiescence was seen as better late than never—until the agreement began to mean something. In February 1993—almost exactly one year on from the entry-into-force of the 1992 inter-Korean declaration—the director-general of the IAEA invoked the “special inspection procedure” provided for by the safeguards agreement at two sites that it believed were involved in the storage of nuclear waste. The North Korean reaction was swift indignation.
The IAEA’s push for a special inspection followed North Korea’s voluntary declaration of its nuclear materials and sites. In May 1994, one month after the ratification of the safeguards agreement by the pro forma North Korean Supreme People’s Assembly, North Korea told the IAEA that it had reprocessed fuel rods at Yongbyon in 1989 and had approximately 90 grams of plutonium. Shortly after the declaration, the IAEA worked to verify North Korea’s declarations. It was partly this process that left the Agency unsatisfied with what North Korea had declared. By September 1992, the Agency already had questions about the completeness of the declaration, leading to the invocation of the special inspection power in 1993.
Perhaps North Korea had anticipated that the conclusion of the safeguards agreement would have borne no consequences when it finally moved ahead with its longstanding obligation as a party to the NPT. But by early 1993, it was abundantly clear that this wasn’t the case. As the IAEA pressed on for inspections at sites of interest that North Korea was unwilling to grant it access to, Pyongyang decided to take the dramatic step of announcing its decision to withdraw from the NPT altogether. It had hardly been 11 months since the safeguards agreement had been ratified at the time of Pyongyang’s notice; the North Korean justification cited Article X of the NPT, which carved out withdrawal rights under “extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country.” For North Korea, the IAEA’s demands were precisely a threat to its “supreme interests” and pulling out of the NPT would be the simplest and most effective way to neuter the powers granted to the Agency by the safeguards agreement, which would cease to apply.
Even as North Korea made its intention to leave the NPT known in 1993, it would be another decade before it would actually make good on its threat to leave the Treaty altogether. The inter-Korean “denuclearization” agreement of 1992 would be followed up a little more than a year later by what would become the first-ever written agreement between the United States and North Korea on the issue of denuclearization. Signed in New York on June 11, 1993—almost exactly 25 years before the fateful encounter between U.S. President Donald J. Trump and Kim Jong Un in Singapore—the two countries signed a brief joint statement. Among its provisions, the 1993 bilateral agreement had one important effect. It paused North Korea’s withdrawal from the NPT. In light of U.S.-North Korea “dialogue” would continue, the agreement noted, “the Government of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has decided unilaterally to suspend as long as it considers necessary the effectuation of its withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”
In subsequent official diplomatic agreements—including the 1994 U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework, the June 2000 inter-Korean joint declaration, the October 2000 U.S.-DPRK joint communiqué, the September 2005 joint statement of the Six-Party Talks, the October 2007 inter-Korean joint statement—all the way up to the current era’s April 2018 inter-Korean Panmunjom declaration, June 2018 U.S.-DPRK Singapore declaration, and the September 2018 inter-Korean Pyongyang declaration, denuclearization has carried the same connotations in bore in the early 1990s. North Korea has expressed public frustrations with attempts by the U.S. side to misrepresent the meaning of that word, particularly in the aftermath of the Singapore summit. Senior U.S. officials, including U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, used Kim Jong Un’s signature on the June 12, 2018, Singapore declaration as evidence that North Korea had agreed to unilaterally relinquish its nuclear arsenal. Pompeo—and other representatives of the U.S. State Department—regularly made reference to the fact that the “final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea” had been “agreed to by Chairman Kim in Singapore.” Of course, a simple glance at the English and Korean texts of that agreement would show this was not the case. Kim’s signature appeared alongside Trump’s on a document that committed North Korea to “work towards the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula”—the very same commitment that had first been made by Pyongyang in the early 1990s.
An honest reckoning with the meaning of denuclearization has to take place at the highest levels of government in the United States. For the Trump administration, such a reckoning would be a coming to terms with an unsavory fact: Kim Jong Un has not agreed to unilaterally relinquish his nuclear arsenal. The other side of the ledger—what North Korea expects from the United States and South Korea in the pursuit of denuclearization—has yet to be clarified publicly by Pyongyang. However, to this end, in December 2018, North Korean state media carried a remarkable editorial attributed to the pen-name Jong Hyon that offered the clearest description of what exactly, in 2018, the word denuclearization meant to the regime. At the core of the Jong Hyon commentary was the following, which was a corrective following what was at the time of publishing months of U.S. officials behaving as if Kim Jong Un had come to Singapore to agree to unilaterally “denuclearize”:
When we refer to the Korean peninsula, they include both the area of the DPRK and the area of south Korea where aggression troops including the nuclear weapons of the U.S. are deployed.
When we refer to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, it, therefore, means removing all elements of nuclear threats from the areas of both the north and the south of Korea and also from surrounding areas from where the Korean peninsula is targeted. This should be clearly understood.
Even without reading between the lines, it is clear enough that Kim’s pledge in Singapore to work “toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” would concern itself with the postures and capabilities of the United States and its allies, including South Korea and Japan. The commentary’s focus on “nuclear threats” that may be capable of targeting the Korean Peninsula opens up the prospect of the entire U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal—including strategic bombers, ballistic missile submarines, and silo-based intercontinental-range ballistic missiles in the continental United States—needing dismantlement to satisfy North Korean denuclearization requirements. Absent a transformation of the nature of the U.S.-North Korea relationship away from decades of hostility and the presence of security guarantees, this might indeed be what it would take for North Korea to broach the subject of disarmament.
But what is clear after all is that denuclearization is a dance for two: not a unilateral commitment by the Kim regime.
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