Scot Peterson :
Just over 20 years ago, North Korean technicians extracted 8,000 spent fuel rods from the Yongbyon nuclear reactor – enough for five or six atomic bombs if reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium.
Designed to be a provocation, North Korea’s move focused minds in Washington: The Pentagon devised a military strike plan that would destroy the reactor and entomb the plutonium, while – it was hoped – avoiding a Chernobyl-type radioactive cloud.
That’s also when the diplomacy began that led to the 1994 US-North Korea Agreed Framework.
North Korea was the Iran nuclear crisis of its day, with the risk of failure and chance of war just as high as it is today, as Iran and six world powers aim to meet a June 30 deadline for a deal ensuring Iran cannot produce a bomb.
The North Korea deal failed to prevent Pyongyang from secretly going nuclear and detonating its first atomic bomb in 2006. But while critics of the Iran talks today point to North Korea as proof that diplomacy is pointless – Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu charges that the Iran deal “repeats these mistakes” – some analysts say the Iran and North Korea cases differ so significantly that there is a far greater chance of success this time.
“First it was the Soviet Union, they were the original ‘rogue state,’ and everyone was saying you can’t do a deal with those guys,” says Joel Wit, a senior fellow at the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, who was coordinator for the Agreed Framework from 1995 to 2000.
“We did deals, and Reagan did a deal, and some of the people criticizing this deal criticized Reagan for dealing with Gorbachev, and on and on,” says Wit. “The fact is you can do deals with rogue states … if the deal is in the rogue state’s interests.… But of course you need insurance, and that is where the verification comes in.”
What Iran must do
· Halt all enrichment (above 5% and dismantle the technical connections required to enrich above 5 per cent
Iran has committed to neutralise its stockpile of near-20 per cent uranium:
· Dilute below 5 per cent or convert to a form not suitable for further enrichment its entire stockpile of near-20% enriched uranium before the end of the initial phase.
Iran has committed to halt progress on its enrichment capacity:
· Not install additional centrifuges of any type.
· Not install or use any next-generation centrifuges to enrich uranium.
· Leave inoperable roughly half of installed centrifuges at Natanz and three-quarters of installed centrifuges at Fordow, so they cannot be used to enrich uranium.
· Limit its centrifuge production to those needed to replace damaged machines, so Iran cannot use the six months to stockpile centrifuges.
· Not construct additional enrichment facilities.
In 1994, North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear weapons program and allow inspections in exchange for two new electricity-generating light-water nuclear reactors, “heavy oil” to provide energy until those came on line, the lifting of US sanctions, and political benefits.
Yet the bilateral Agreed Framework ran to just four pages, with many of its provisions vague. The document stated that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea would “allow implementation” of safeguards obligations and permit “inspections required” by the UN nuclear watchdog agency. But there was no enforcement mechanism for failure to comply.
The Iran deal and annexes, by contrast, could run to more than 150 pages and will be far more detailed, from stricter verification measures to technical steps to curb Iran’s nuclear work, and the step-by-step sanctions relief Iran gets in return.
So what are the real lessons from the US-North Korea deal? And why is Iran not North Korea?
North Korea today is believed to have a dozen nuclear weapons, and over the weekend tested submarine-launched ballistic missiles in a show of military prowess. But the number of nuclear devices likely would have been far higher without the deal, negotiators say, if intelligence estimates decades ago proved true that North Korea could build 30 Nagasaki-size bombs a year by the end of the 1990s.
“Although our policy ultimately failed, the agreement did not,” Robert Gallucci, the US chief negotiator of the Agreed Framework, and Wit, wrote recently in The New York Times, noting that “more than 20 years later [the predicted expansion] still hasn’t happened.”
In a critique of that view, conservative writer Max Boot and Sue Mi Terry wrote in Foreign Affairs: “If Iran is anything like North Korea, it will seek to gain the benefits of a deal – notably, the lifting of sanctions – without truly ending its nuclear program.” If North Korea today has fewer nuclear weapons than once expected, Boot and Terry argue, that was because of regime “dysfunction rather than any lack of desire to acquire more weapons.” In their response, Messrs. Gallucci and Wit say that version of “history ignores history,” and note that “as a direct result of the agreement, the North gutted a decades-old multi-billion-dollar plutonium production program.”
The Agreed Framework included full normalization between the US and North Korea. For Pyongyang, it was a high-priority request, but seemed an impossible task for Washington to achieve quickly with a regime so vilified and on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism.
One result was US political foot-dragging that angered North Korea and led to provocations such as North Korea’s 1998 test of a ballistic missile that flew over the Japanese island of Honshu.
The Iran deal seeks to sidestep this problem by limiting the talks to the nuclear issue only, recognizing that 36 years of mutual US-Iran hostility – which is still an article of faith for hard-liners on both sides – won’t disappear anytime soon.
“I would say that’s a strength, because you are not pushing either system farther than it’s prepared to go now,” says George Perkovich, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
“The Iranians understand that you’re still going to be talking about human rights, the sanctions on terrorism are still going to be there,” says Mr. Perkovich. “We understand that somebody’s going to stand up [in Iran] at Friday prayers and say, ‘Death to America.’ They are still going to support Hezbollah. There is an agreement that there is still going to be competition, so it’s less pretend.” A critical lesson from the North Korea experience is the need for top-level, continued attention to avoid failure.
When the 1994 deal was signed, President Bill Clinton vowed in a letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to “use the full powers of my office” to uphold US obligations.
But a host of world issues pushed North Korea out of the headlines, from the aftermath of Somalia and the Rwandan genocide to the Bosnian war and military campaigns in Iraq and Kosovo in the late 1990s.
(The Christian Science Monitor)
