Managing the Atom Promotes North Korea Dialogue

[At press time, the Managing the Atom Project was completing plans for a U.S.-North Korean meeting entitled "The Nuclear Issue on the Korean Peninsula: A Congressional Dialogue." A DPRK Foreign Ministry delegation will conduct off-the-record discussions with a group of U.S. Senate staffers.]

Aclose examination of North Korea's key statistics reveals two intriguing insights into the current situation. First, the Kim Jong Il regime has emerged stronger from the devastating famine and natural disasters of the mid-1990s. At the time, these events convinced many North Korea watchers of the country's imminent collapse. North Korean resiliency, however, was not internally generated, but fostered externally. Indeed, the massive influx of Chinese food and fuel oil since the late 1990s has breathed subsistence-level life into the country. Concerned about instability on its border which could disrupt its vital plans for rapid internal economic development, Beijing sought to prevent a failed state scenario coming to pass. A recurrence of the vulnerability that threatened North Korea's survival following the demise of the Soviet Union is now unlikely.

The second insight that the numbers highlight is that the nuclear genie is indeed out of the bottle. Following the expulsion of IAEA inspectors and the dismantlement of Agency monitoring cameras in December 2002, North Korea removed the 8,017 spent fuel rods from a temporary storage pond in Yongbyon. In September 2003, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman stated that North Korea had completed the reprocessing of this spent fuel. North Korea could now have sufficient quantities of weapons-grade plutonium for approximately four to six new nuclear warheads.

As the crisis lingers on and North Korea qualitatively and quantitatively enhances its nuclear stockpile, multilateral and bilateral talks remain on hold indefinitely. While the future of any talks is unclear, the North Korean statistics underscore a deepening imbroglio.

John Park is a joint MTA/ISP fellow at BCSIA. His research focuses on how each member of the Six-Party Talks structures its approach to resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis.