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[Page: E777]

• Mr. STARK. Mr. Speaker, disturbing news continues to come out about North Korea's nuclear weapons program. This week, there are reports that Pyongyang is cooperating with Iran on developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. U.S. News & World Report cites reports from Western intelligence sources that Iran is contributing $500 million to North Korea to develop ballistic missiles. In exchange, the DPRK will sell nuclear weapons and designs for a plutonium reprocessing facility to Tehran.

• Whether or not the reports are true, there is frightening logic to such an arrangement.

• After acceding to the Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT] in 1985, North Korea stalled for 7 years before accepting International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] inspections in 1992. We know from these inspections that North Korea has partially constructed a plutonium reprocessing facility and has successfully produced some plutonium--a key material in building the bomb. We also know that there are indications North Korea has produced more plutonium than it has officially declared. The DPRK has refused to let the IAEA examine facilities which may harbor waste from additional plutonium produced. Instead, North Korea has become the only country ever to announce its intention to withdraw from the NPT, effective after the required 3 months notice. North Korea is an extremely poor country, desperately short of fuel or hard currency.

• While Iran doesn't have much hard currency to spare, it has substantially increased its oil production over the past 5 years to support its military buildup. Over the last several years Tehran has been on a vigorous shopping spree to acquire sensitive dual-use technology with nuclear weapons applications. Despite having the world's second-largest proven reserve of natural gas--enough for a 200-year supply of energy--Iran is purchasing nuclear power reactors from China and Russia. Once these reactors are operating, Iran would need only a plutonium reprocessing plant--which North Korea knows how to build--to produce bomb-grade material. While the nuclear plants from Russia and China would be under IAEA safeguards, nothing would prevent Iran from withdrawing from the NPT after producing a stockpile of spent nuclear fuel and then reprocessing it into plutonium in a North Korean-designed facility. In this scenario, Tehran would still be a few years away from a nuclear weapons capability. The time would be drastically shortened, though, if Pyongyang supplied Iran with bomb-grade material directly.

• The possibility of such an oil/nukes barter arrangement further highlights the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Both of these countries are on the State Department's list of countries sponsoring terrorism. Both are located in regions of high tension in close proximity to important U.S. allies.

• The United States must take decisive action to halt North Korea's program and to ensure that Iran's program doesn't get any farther off the ground. In the short term, this means strong U.N. pressure on North Korea to reconsider its withdrawal decision and to provide full access to IAEA inspectors. We must get a full accounting of all the plutonium North Korea has produced.

• Following my remarks, I am inserting for the Record a column by David Kay which appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week. Mr. Kay calls for `strong international action to face down North Korea. Vigorous U.S. leadership must be forthcoming in the international effort to create the policies and multinational structures that can support tough inspections and, where they fail, to provide the capabilities to respond to nuclear crises.' Mr. Kay should know something about vigorous leadership and responding to crises, since he faced down Iraqi troops while leading the U.N. inspection effort which uncovered much of what we know about the Iraqi bomb program. We should heed his words.

• In the longer term, the United States must ensure that strong multilateral export controls are in place to prevent additional countries from acquiring the means to build the bomb. The United States must also pursue a global ban on the production or use of bomb-grade material. This would prevent countries from acquiring a stockpile of bomb-grade material, and then withdrawing from the treaty, as North Korea has done and Iran could do in the future.

• Finally, the United States should continue to strengthen the IAEA. The agency, to its credit, was much more aggressive in North Korea than it was in Iraq, where it failed to detect Saddam's secret bomb program. The United States must ensure that the IAEA is just as aggressive in future confrontations with suspect nuclear states.

• In general, nonproliferation must become a higher priority in U.S. foreign policy. Bosnia and Somalia shouldn't be ignored, but we should devote at

• least as much attention to North Korea and Iran's nuclear weapons programs. The spread of nuclear weapons is the leading long-term threat to our national security. Our Government policies and personnel must reflect this fact.

[Page: E778]

North Korea's announcement on Friday that it was withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which it signed in 1985, is but its latest and most overt effort to avoid complying with the demands of the International Atomic Energy Agency for inspections of suspect nuclear sites. Iraq was also a signatory of the treaty and a member of the IAEA at the outbreak of the Gulf War. As members in good standing of the IAEA, both Iraq and North Korea received technical assistance, including equipment and training, from the IAEA while developing their clandestine nuclear programs. These developments rise serious doubts as to whether real confidence can be placed in the world's nonproliferation system.

But it is not just the IAEA that appears to be unprepared to face the realities of nuclear weapons in the hands of the North Koreans. March 10, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger testified before Congress that in his personal view North Korea had nuclear weapons. The next day, the State Department official in charge of U.S. policy in the IAEA reportedly told a briefing session of congressional staffers that the Clinton administration did not consider a North Korean withdrawal from the treaty a serious possibility, since it would not be in North Korea's interest to do so. Less than 24 hours later, North Korea withdrew.

More than 40 years of concentrating on the Soviet nuclear threat has left Western nonproliferation effort dominated by the assumption that other nations would acquire, plan for and deploy nuclear weapons the way the U.S. and Soviet Union did. This tunnel vision contributed greatly to the nonproliferation establishment's overlooking the Iraqi nuclear program and failing to anticipate or counter the North Korean threat.

For the U.S. and the Soviets it became clear by the mid-1960s that the purpose of continuing to build nuclear weapons was to ensure that they were never used. There are strong reasons, however, to doubt that the system of deterrence by which the U.S. and the former Soviet Union held one another's societies hostage will be effective against a nuclear nation or terrorist driven by extreme ideology, ethnic hatred or self-destructive behavior in the pursuit of power.

• Saddam Hussein, far from seeking deterrence, followed a path that begged attack; North Korea appears to be on the same path. Intelligence efforts and nonproliferation control activities must urgently address the problem that states may be seeking to acquire and use nuclear weapons in ways that we have up until now dismissed as irrational and not credible.

• But what is to be done now about North Korea? The international community cannot sit back and, as President Clinton said on Monday, hope that North Korea will have a `change of heart.' This is the failed logic that held off the IAEA inspections of North Korea for eight years after it signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and now has seen Kim II Sung dump even the fiction of honoring the legal obligations of the treaty. And it is his failed logic that has left the world on the brink of nuclear blackmail.

• The decision of how to respond should be moved immediately from the IAEA to the United Nations Security Council, which has shown in Iraq that it is capable of marshalling the full power of its members to demand compliance and impose sanctions in the face of unacceptable behavior by outlaw states. In January 1992, the Security Council unanimously adopted a declaration that the spread of weapons of mass destruction would constitute a `threat to international peace and security.' North Korea's actions have directly challenged this declaration.

• The Security Council should condemn North Korea's repeated actions in frustrating international inspections and demand that the long-delayed IAEA inspections be allowed to take place without hindrance. Moreover, it should tell North Korea that withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty does not mean it will be able to cloak its pursuit of nuclear terrorism.

• The Security Council should also make clear that if the IAEA inspections under the treaty do not take place, it will implement--under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which it used to institute effective inspections in Iraq--an inspection regime with far greater powers than the normal IAEA safeguard visits. The North Koreans should have no difficulty understanding that such inspections are far tougher than the treaty inspections they are trying to escape. Economic sanctions should also be readied to show the North Koreans that defiance is not cost free.

• In addition, the Security Council should provide unequivocal security guarantees to South Korea and Japan that any aggression by North Korea will be met by overwhelming force. These guarantees should be given reality by augmenting the U.S. troops already in South Korea with a more than symbolic additional contingent of troops from the Security Council's permanent members. Unless such support is quickly extended, one can count in months the time remaining before an Asian nuclear arms race begins.

• Finally, China should be challenged to live up to its frequent statements that it is a responsible member of the family of nations. Friday, China blocked an immediate Security Council condemnation of Pyongyang's actions. The Chinese must be made to understand that even implicit support for North Korea's threats will harm Beijing's own interests. China is the only state with any significant influence on North Korea and has become the economic lifeline that supports its destitute, derelict regime. Every effort should be made to see that this `China card' is played in the interest of regional peace.

• Unless there is quick and effective international action to stand up to North Korea, we will witness the collapse of the nonproliferation regime and the opening of a period of unpredictable nuclear threats from rogue states, terrorists or regional ethnic conflicts. A rush to nuclear arms, particularly in Asia, by those who see themselves as threatened by such developments will be very hard to block.

• If there is to be any hope of turning the tide, it must begin with strong international action to face down North Korea. Vigorous U.S. leadership must be forthcoming in the international effort to create the policies and multinational structures that can support tough inspections and, where they fail, to provide the capabilities to respond to nuclear crises.

END