The history of Western and South Korean efforts to stop and eventually dismantle the North Korean programs aimed at creating a nuclear weapons arsenal demonstrates the triumph of unwarranted hope over experience.
Indeed, the history of many diplomatic efforts aimed at reaching a binding agreement with North Korea whereby its government would give up its nuclear ambitions shows that at its very best diplomacy managed to slow down, freeze, or temporarily constrain North Korea’s nuclear program. However, a very long list of diplomatic initiatives never persuaded Pyongyang to surrender its nuclear program. The long record extends over more than three decades. (See below).
True, it would be inaccurate to say that every diplomatic initiative was a total failure. For example, the 1994 Agreed Framework actually froze North Korea’s plutonium program for roughly eight years. In turn, the Six-Party process temporarily shut down and disabled important facilities at Yongbyon. But none of these initiatives achieved the ultimate objective: the complete, verifiable, and lasting denuclearization of North Korea.
It is useful here to provide a brief summary of the many efforts through which the West and South Korea tried to induce North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions, as these efforts are evidence of a Western fixation on the usefulness of diplomacy, even when the counterpart, North Korea, time and again demonstrates that it treats negotiations as a tool to buy time, while obfuscating its real policy objectives.
Let’s be clear, this long list of total or partial failures is not aimed at discrediting any and all diplomatic efforts. it is, however, a reminder that diplomacy cannot rest on the assumption that all parties come to the negotiating table animated by a sincere goal of reaching a good faith agreement that they are fully prepared to enforce.
Diplomatic Efforts Chronology
- 1991–1992: The first denuclearization agreements
In 1991, North and South Korea adopted the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. North Korea also concluded an IAEA safeguards agreement in 1992, but disputes over inspections soon emerged. Pyongyang’s 1993 announcement of its intention to withdraw from the NPT effectively ended the framework. - 1993–1994: First nuclear crisis and former US President Jimmy Carter’s intervention
The crisis intensified in 1994 as North Korea removed spent fuel from Yongbyon and Washington considered sanctions. Jimmy Carter’s June visit to Pyongyang produced an indication that North Korea would freeze its nuclear program in return for negotiations, opening the way for U.S.-North Korean talks. - October 1994: The Agreed Framework
Under the Agreed Framework, North Korea agreed to freeze its Yongbyon reactors and associated facilities under IAEA monitoring, while the United States and its partners offered light-water reactors, fuel supplies and steps toward normalization. The freeze constrained plutonium production for years, but disputes over implementation and a suspected uranium-enrichment program eventually led to the agreement’s collapse. - 2003–2009: The Six-Party Talks
After the Agreed Framework collapsed, China organized the Six-Party Talks involving North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States. Pyongyang sought security guarantees, economic assistance and normalization, while Washington initially demanded Complete, Verifiable and Irreversible Dismantlement (CVID). - September 2005: The Six-Party Joint Statement
North Korea agreed to abandon “all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs” and return to the NPT and IAEA safeguards, while the other parties offered security, economic and normalization measures. Yet disputes soon re-emerged, and North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in October 2006. - 2007–2008: A second Six-Party breakthrough
Negotiations resumed in 2007. North Korea shut down and sealed Yongbyon, allowed IAEA inspectors to return and later disabled major facilities, while receiving energy assistance and other concessions. The process eventually stalled over disagreements concerning verification of North Korea’s nuclear declarations. - 2009: Collapse of the Six-Party process
After a long-range rocket launch in April 2009, North Korea withdrew from the Six-Party Talks, expelled inspectors and restarted its nuclear facilities. It conducted its second nuclear test the following month, reversing much of the progress achieved between 2005 and 2008. - 2011–2012: The Obama administration and the “Leap Day” agreement
Under the 2012 Leap Day Agreement, North Korea agreed to moratoria on nuclear tests, long-range missile launches and uranium enrichment at Yongbyon in exchange for U.S. nutritional assistance. The agreement collapsed within weeks after North Korea launched a satellite using a long-range rocket. - 2013–2017: Diplomacy gives way to sanctions and pressure
North Korea conducted additional nuclear tests in 2013, 2016 and 2017, while the Obama administration pursued “strategic patience” and UN sanctions intensified. Meanwhile, Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile capabilities advanced substantially, including missiles apparently capable of reaching the continental United States. - 2018: Moon Jae-in and inter-Korean diplomacy
The 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics opened a new diplomatic phase. Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un met at Panmunjom in April, where they affirmed the goal of complete denuclearization and a peace regime. Kim also maintained a moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile testing and closed the Punggye-ri test site. - June 12, 2018: Trump-Kim Singapore Summit
Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to meet a North Korean leader. Kim committed to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, while Trump provided security assurances. However, the agreement lacked a definition of denuclearization, an inventory, a timetable and a detailed verification mechanism. - September 2018: Pyongyang Summit
At the Pyongyang Summit, Kim offered to dismantle Yongbyon if the United States took “corresponding measures.” North Korea favored a phased process linking its concessions to U.S. measures and sanctions relief, while Washington sought more extensive denuclearization before major sanctions relief. - February 2019: Hanoi was the decisive failure
At the Hanoi Summit, North Korea offered restrictions or dismantlement at Yongbyon in return for substantial sanctions relief. Washington considered the offer insufficient because significant nuclear and missile capabilities would remain outside Yongbyon. The summit ended without an agreement, effectively ending the momentum created in Singapore. - June–October 2019: Panmunjom and the final attempt
Trump and Kim met again at the DMZ in June 2019 and agreed to restart working-level talks. The Stockholm negotiations in October quickly collapsed, effectively ending the Trump-Kim diplomatic process. - 2021 onward: offers of dialogue, but no serious denuclearization negotiations
The Biden administration offered talks “anywhere, anytime, without preconditions,” but Pyongyang showed little interest. Instead, North Korea continued expanding its nuclear and missile capabilities and increasingly presented its nuclear arsenal as an essential and effectively permanent component of national defense.
What Does the Long 30-year Chronology Tell Us?
Each diplomatic cycle began with a crisis. It produced negotiations. It generated some form of North Korean commitment to denuclearization or restraint, sometimes produced real temporary constraints, and eventually broke down, because North Korea never seriously meant to end its nuclear weapons programs, because it sees it as its only deterrent against any possible effort to attack the regime. Indeed, while negotiations came and went, overtime North Korea incrementally moved from possessing a nuclear program to possessing nuclear weapons, and from primitive delivery systems to increasingly sophisticated ballistic missiles. Sadly, the failures-dotted diplomatic record demonstrates that negotiations cannot persuade the North Korean leadership to surrender a nuclear arsenal it increasingly regards as essential to regime survival. Diplomacy having failed, the only remaining tool is deterrence.
The Difficult Road Ahead
As diplomacy failed, how can peace and stability in the Peninsula be strengthened? North Korea’s emergence as a nuclear-armed state represents one of the most difficult security challenges confronting South Korea and the international community. As the historic account summarized above indicates, for decades, governments and international organizations have attempted to prevent Pyongyang from developing nuclear weapons and increasingly sophisticated ballistic missiles. Negotiations, United Nations Security Council resolutions, sanctions, diplomatic initiatives, economic pressure and international condemnation have all been employed. They all failed.
North Korea possesses nuclear weapons and continues to improve the missiles capable of delivering them. Pyongyang increasingly regards its nuclear arsenal not as a temporary bargaining instrument but as an essential and permanent component of its national security. This reality requires a distinction between what is desirable and what is presently achievable.
The ultimate objective should remain the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Acceptance of North Korea as a legitimate nuclear-weapon state would damage the international nonproliferation regime and could encourage additional proliferation in Northeast Asia and elsewhere. Nevertheless, as indicated above, there is zero evidence that North Korea can presently be persuaded or compelled to relinquish its nuclear arsenal.
Under these circumstances, the immediate objective must be different: North Korea must never conclude that its nuclear weapons can be successfully employed as instruments of coercion, blackmail or war.
Deterrence as the Foundation of Security
As North Korea cannot be disarmed via diplomatic agreements, the central task becomes deterrence. The message to Pyongyang must be unmistakable: nuclear aggression will not achieve its objectives. On the contrary, the consequences of nuclear use would threaten the survival of the North Korean regime itself.
Effective deterrence rests on three elements: capability, credibility and communication.
First, North Korea must understand that South Korea and the United States possess overwhelming military capabilities and could respond decisively to any level of aggression.
Second, the threat of retaliation must be credible. This is particularly important because North Korea’s development of intercontinental ballistic missiles creates a classic problem regarding the credibility of a U.S. extended deterrence guarantee. As Pyongyang now has the ability to threaten American territory, North Korean leaders may ask whether an American president would truly risk Chicago or Los Angeles in order to defend Seoul.
For this reason, maintaining the credibility of the US political commitment to South Korea’s security and territorial integrity is perhaps the most important element of deterrence. Military capabilities alone are insufficient if an adversary has any reasons to doubt the political will to employ them.
Third, deterrence requires clear communications. North Korean leaders must understand that nuclear use, and potentially other forms of catastrophic aggression, would cross a threshold that would provoke an immediate, truly devastating response. Deterrence is truly effective only when an adversary has no reason to miscalculate either the capabilities or the determination of those confronting it.
This makes the US-South Korean alliance far more important to South Korean security than declarations issued by international organizations. Strong conventional forces, missile defenses, intelligence and surveillance capabilities, military interoperability, regular exercises and credible American extended nuclear deterrence collectively reduce the possibility that Pyongyang might believe aggression could succeed.
South Korea: Strength and Restraint
South Korea should not be portrayed simply as a country protected by the United States. Seoul has an essential role in shaping its own robust and credible security environment.
It should continue strengthening its conventional military capabilities, missile defenses, intelligence and surveillance, civil defense and interoperability with US forces. Security cooperation with Japan should also be strengthened wherever politically possible. The nuclear and missile threat posed by North Korea affects all three countries, making improved coordination increasingly important.
At the same time, military preparedness should not preclude diplomacy as a matter of principle. Arguably, deterrence and diplomacy are not alternatives. Effective deterrence creates the conditions in which diplomacy can be pursued without desperation.
A South Korea confident in the strength of its defenses and in the reliability of its alliance with the United States can afford to keep diplomatic channels open. Who knows, maybe negotiations may eventually produce arms-control arrangements, risk-reduction measures or, under very different political circumstances, progress toward denuclearization.
That said, for any of these options to be even remotely plausible, diplomacy must be backed by a credible military deterrence. A credible threat of massive retaliation should diplomacy fail must always be in the background of any future negotiations. Diplomacy backed by deterrence is fundamentally different from diplomacy undertaken because the alternative appears to be military defeat or nuclear coercion.
What Does It Mean to “Stop” North Korea?
This leads to a necessary reconsideration of what it means to stop North Korea’s nuclear program. There are three distinct objectives: denuclearization, containment and deterrence.
Complete denuclearization should remain the ultimate objective. Containment, meanwhile, should seek to restrict North Korea’s access to financing and advanced technologies, prevent the transfer of nuclear or missile technology to other states or non-state actors, enforce sanctions where possible and maintain international diplomatic pressure.
Deterrence addresses the immediate danger. Its purpose is to ensure that whatever weapons North Korea possesses now or in the near future, they cannot be transformed into successful instruments of political coercion or military aggression.
Deny nuclear coercionAt present, we do not have the means to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons. We can, however, work to ensure that Pyongyang derives no political or military advantage from possessing them.
This strategy also bears directly on the increasingly debated question of whether South Korea should acquire its own nuclear weapons. An independent South Korean nuclear arsenal might appear to provide an ultimate national deterrent. However, it could also stimulate additional nuclear proliferation in Northeast Asia and further weaken the international nonproliferation regime. A credible American extended nuclear deterrent therefore remains preferable — but only so long as that deterrent is unquestionably credible. And this is something that Washington must demonstrate via the deployment of a credible array of forces that unmistakenly show that America can adequately meet any threat level, accompanied by equally clear communications that it has the will to use its overwhelming force, should the circumstances require action.
There is no easy solution to the North Korean nuclear challenge. Decades of experience should have cured us of the belief that another resolution, another round of sanctions or another diplomatic initiative by itself will cause Pyongyang to surrender weapons that its leadership regards as essential to regime survival.
A realistic Assessment
International institutions remain useful. Sanctions and nonproliferation measures remain necessary. But until circumstances fundamentally change, peace on the Korean Peninsula must rest primarily on credible deterrence: convincing North Korea’s leaders that nuclear aggression would fail, that it would bring a devastating retaliation that could threaten the survival of the regime they sought to protect by acquiring nuclear weapons in the first place.
In the end, diplomacy still has a role, but a modest one: crisis communications, arms-control-type restraints, test moratoria, confidence-building measures, preventing accidental escalation, and perhaps eventually placing ceilings or other constraints on the nuclear arsenal. That is very different from assuming diplomacy can deliver complete denuclearization. If we realistically conclude, as we should, that diplomacy cannot work in the present circumstances, then deterrence and defense are the only tools to maintain peace in the Peninsula and Northeast Asia.
Paolo von Schirach
President
Global Policy Institute (GPI)