ABSTRACT
I served as an ‘on-site monitor’ under the 1994 United States-North Korean nuclear agreement known as the Agreed Framework . . . In 1994 the situation with North Korea had become so fraught that the Clinton administration was considering military strikes to prevent North Korea from extracting plutonium from spent fuel at Yongbyon. At the time North Korea might have had enough plutonium, produced in 1989, to build one or two nuclear devices. The fuel being discharged contained enough plutonium for five or six additional weapons. Last-ditch talks between former President Jimmy Carter and President Kim Il Sung of North Korea defused the crisis and led to the framework. The deal, which helped us avoid a military conflict, froze Pyongyang’s plutonium programme; eventually it could have led to North Korea abandoning its nuclear efforts in exchange for diplomatic recognition by the United States and economic incentives. In 2002, however, American intelligence agencies confirmed that North Korea was trying to acquire a uranium enrichment programme in violation of the deal. But instead of working within the framework to get the North to abandon its nuclear
efforts, the Bush administration terminated the agreement altogether. It also began arguing for regime change. In jettisoning the framework the administration jettisoned something of great diplomatic value. A key part of the agreement was the willingness of North Korea to let Americans into their nuclear centre to secure plutonium-bearing fuel rods for internationally monitored storage . . . Now that North Korea claims to have tested a nuclear device [on 9 October 2006], Bush administration supporters and commentators are seeking to blame the framework for all our problems. They should look elsewhere. Without the framework’s freeze North Korea would have immediately acquired enough plutonium to produce more nuclear weapons and would have completed construction of two much larger weapon production reactors. By now North Korea would have been capable of producing twenty nuclear weapons per year. The prolonged freeze on North Korea’s production and nuclear construction delayed the acquisition of nuclear materials – and it appears to have prevented North Korea from completing the larger reactors. The testing of a nuclear device by Pyongyang was pushed back by at least a decade.
