North Korea Redux

The headlines covering North Korea this week have left me with a feeling of deja vu.

North Korea has removed the seals on equipment at its Yongbyon nuclear site, expelled IAEA inspectors and their access to the country's activities, and plans to resume work at its plutonium reprocessing facility. See the IAEA press release here.

This is the same sort of chain reaction (no pun intended) that touched off a crisis in 2002, when, after being confronted with the Bush administration's suspicions of a uranium enrichment plant under construction in North Korea and the cancellation of energy shipments, Pyongyang expelled IAEA inspectors, removed fuel rods stored under lock and key, and restarted the Yongbyon reactor. Two helpful timelines can be found here and here.

Some useful background to the latest developments is in order. In October 2007, the Six-Party Talks agreed that an initial step in implementing the latest disarmament accord would be to disable North Korea's nuclear infrastructure - meaning that key facilities would be stripped of essential components and rendered unable to operate, but not to the point where they could not eventually be restarted. Most of the disablement tasks have so far been completed. One of the remaining tasks, however, was the unloading and containment of spent fuel rods stored in the 5MW(e) reactor. Fuel rods, after being irradiated during the reactor's operations, contain plutonium created as a byproduct of the fission process. Reprocessing is used to separate and extract plutonium from other elements in the spent fuel rods. Separating the last bit of available plutonium is precisely what Pyongyang is threatening to do now. There is roughly 10-20kg of plutonium - which is enough for approximately one-three weapons - that has yet to be recovered from spent fuel following the reactor's shut down in early 2007.

The current impasse has resulted from the inability to negotiate a set of monitoring measures to verify North Korea's earlier declaration of the depth of its nuclear activities. Pyongyang is alleging that the US is asking for too stringent of a verification regime and the US is saying that North Korea is offering far too little. Furthermore, North Korea has complained that the US has not removed the country from the list of state sponsors of terror, while Washington has said it would not do so until the two sides agreed to a verification protocol and verification was actually underway.

The significance is that if North Korea proceeds unabated and gains access to additional separated plutonium, it's bargaining position is strengthened at the very time the US is consumed by more urgent and perhaps consequentional matters. This doesn't bode well for the vitality of the denuclearization agreement through the end of this year and ditto for the leverage of the next administration (if/when it comes to that). I take it that North Korea's recent actions are designed to force the US to accept something less than it desires on the verification protocol and to speed up the country's de-listing; I doubt they are seriously intent on reconstructing their entire nuclear program, which would require the reactor to be fully restored.

Still, this is not an attractive position to be in at the end of an administration beset by problems on multiple fronts. The North Koreans are shrewd bargainers. Don't expect them to walk this back absent any meaningful intervention by the US.