The world feels slightly safer this week – but the feeling may be short-lived. The leaders of North and South Korea last week agreed to make peace and to “”.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had already pledged to suspend all his nuclear and missile tests. Now he has invited “foreign experts” to witness the closure of his test site in May ahead of a summit with US President Donald Trump.
But Korea watchers are warning that “denuclearisation” means different things to Kim and Trump, as the US seems to have no plans to give up its nuclear capabilities on the peninsula. As that becomes clear, the collapse of diplomacy risks sparking a war, says of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, as hawks in the US argue for military solutions after talks fail.
Advertisement
“When Kim says denuclearisation, he means exactly what Barack Obama meant when he said he would seek a world without nuclear weapons,” says of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. That means a process in which everyone disarms – not where just one country does so.
US pledge
The US has pledged to defend South Korea and has nuclear weapons stationed in nearby Guam. Yesterday, US National Security Adviser John Bolton denuclearisation didn’t imply the US would commit to keep all its nukes out of Korea.
Kim’s offer to denuclearise is aimed at getting international economic sanctions lifted. On 21 April he that North Korea could concentrate on economic development, now it had successfully developed its nuclear weapons and missiles.
If he plans to trade one for the other, it could take time. At a meeting of the signatories of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in Geneva last week, Japanese foreign minister Taro Kono insisted heavy sanctions must remain until North Korea had dismantled “all weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles” in a “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearisation”.
Bolton agrees that denuclearisation means “full, complete, total disclosure of everything related to their nuclear weapons program with full international verification”. He told Fox News the model is Libya, which gave up its nuclear programme in 2004, verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Verify disarmament
This may not encourage Kim: Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was later deposed and killed. But , who was a lead IAEA inspector in Libya – as well as in South Africa and Iraq, which also gave up nuclear programmes – says it should be possible to verify nuclear disarmament in North Korea.
“First, you’d have to make sure they have declared all their nuclear materials, and aren’t producing more,” he says. That means looking at North Korea’s declared stocks of plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU), and comparing them with records from reactors and enrichment plants, checking old satellite images and otherwise seeing whether they correspond to what the country could plausibly produce.
Then the and plants at Yongbyon could be rendered unusable. The problem, says Kelley, is we don’t know if there are further, secret facilities, as there were in Iran.
Inspectors can detect illicit plutonium production by sampling the environment for tell-tale radioactive by-products, he says. Finding HEU is harder, as it requires detecting unnatural environmental ratios of different uranium isotopes, and may require more access within the country than North Korea will allow.
As no gases have escaped from any of North Korea’s recent underground nuclear tests, we don’t know what it uses in its bombs. That might be a good place to start being transparent: Kelley suggests that North Korea might allow the experts invited to watch the test site closure in May to take samples of radionuclides emitted by test explosions, which can establish warhead size and design. “A cotton swab in an access pipe should be enough,” he says.
