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Mr. McCAIN. Madam President, before the 103d Congress adjourns I want to return to an issue that has troubled me greatly for many months; an issue which surely represents the gravest threat to our national security interests that the United States has encountered in the post cold war world. While it may appear to some that this threat currently emanates from a small nation in the Caribbean, I have another larger problem on my mind: the nuclear ambitions of North Korea.
For a moment last Spring, North Korea's repeated and gross violations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty appeared to have brought a reluctant Clinton administration to the belated recognition that its concession-heavy diplomacy had failed to dissuade Pyongyang from the further pursuit of nuclear weapons. That moment, however, was brief.
Following former President Carter's discussions with Kim Il Song in June, and his public expressions of admiration for the previously under-appreciated personal charm of the late dictator, the administration abandoned its efforts in the United Nations Security Council to impose economic sanctions against North Korea. The administration had gone to the Security Council after North Korea rejected United States warnings that the further discharge of fuel rods from its Yongbyon reactor would constitute an unpardonable breach of its obligations under the NPT. But President Carter's subsequent proclamation of a breakthrough agreement, in which Kim Il Song agreed to freeze his nuclear program, refrain from further violating the NPT by expelling IAEA inspectors, and hold a summit meeting with South Korean President Kim Young Sam convinced the administration to reverse field yet again, cease its pursuit of sanctions and resume high level negotiations with North Korea.
While this breakthrough with North Korea was being celebrated in the media and in the offices of very relieved administration officials, I made the following observation on the Senate floor:
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`What North Korea has done is withdraw a threatened stick regarding the expulsion of their inspectors and offered to refrain the expulsion of their inspectors and offered to refrain from utilizing a capacity that it presently does not have. For this, they received a celebration in the White House press office, and President Clinton's enthusiastic embrace of President Carter's diplomacy. While the talks drag on, the North Koreans will be granted sufficient time to reach a point when they can convert the fuel into weapons grade plutonium. During this time, they will not be constrained by economic sanctions or the build-up of U.S. military forces on the Korean peninsula. The most critical reinforcements necessary to diminish North Korea's ability to destroy Seoul with artillery fire will now be held in
abeyance while the U.S. finds itself trapped in negotiations with the North, leaving Seoul a hostage to Pyongyang's future belligerence.
I say we will be trapped because the Carter initiative is now the Clinton initiative. . . . This political reality, I suspect, will cause President Clinton to become a coconspirator with Kim il Sung in dragging the talks out even if it becomes apparent that North Korea is only stalling until it can develop four to six additional weapons.
Madam President, it is edifying to recall what were the dimensions of the North Korean problem on the eve of former President Carter's visit. The North Koreans had discharged remaining fuel rods from their Yongbyon reactor without international supervision. This clear violation of the NPT seriously undermined the IAEA's ability to determine the amount of nuclear fuel diverted for weapons production in 1989. Although permissible under the terms of the NPT, special inspections of undisclosed nuclear sites in Korea, especially two nuclear waste sites, which offer the only other means of partially determining their past diversion of fuel, were denied by the North Koreans.
The discharged fuel rods were stored in a cooling pond because they were at that time too radioactive to be used for any other purpose. When they were sufficiently cooled near the end of summer, the fuel they contained could be converted into weapons grade plutonium in a nearby reprocessing plant and diverted for use in manufacturing four to six additional nuclear weapons.
Three miles west of their 5 megawatt reactor at Yongbyon, the North Koreans were constructing a new 50 megawatt reactor, intended to be operational in 1995. A 200 megawatt reactor was under construction at Sinpo, scheduled to come on line in 1996. A new reprocessing plant would also be operational next year.
North Korea had test launched a new ballistic missile, the NoDong 1, capable of carrying nuclear, biological and chemical warheads in 1993. The NoDong 2, with a range of 2000 kilometers, was in development. United States intelligence, as well as allied intelligence agencies, believed that North Korea intended to export these missiles to Iran, Syria and possibly, Libya. From Pyongyang, the NoDong 1 could strike Osaka; the NoDong 2, Tokyo. From Teheran, the former could reach Tel Aviv; the latter, Europe.
On the diplomatic front, North Korea had achieved an objective which it had pursued for 40 years--high level negotiations with the United States from which South Korea was, in effect, excluded.
After President Carter's intervention, the Clinton administration decided to include in its negotiations with North Korea, which began in August, offers to arrange for the supply of new light water reactors to replace North Korea's graphite reactors. Although the Yongbyon reactor is not, nor was it ever, connected to electrical power grids in North Korea, the administration accepted the North Koreans' argument that they could not shut down their plutonium producing graphite reactors unless they were supplied with alternative energy sources.
Additionally, the United States was prepared to offer North Korea substantial economic assistance as well as diplomatic relations. No sticks were to accompany the basket of carrots the administration's lead negotiator, Assistant Secretary Robert Gallucci, would carry to Geneva.
After the new negotiations were scheduled, I urged administration officials, publicly and privately, to compliment their offer of generous rewards for North Korea's compliance with the NPT with some indication of the seriousness with which we would respond to any further bad faith on their part. Specifically, I suggested that we open the negotiations by informing the North Koreans that while we welcome Kim I1 Song's commitment to former President Carter, their past record of reneging on international commitments obliges us to take the purely precautionary action of denying Pyongyang the capital of South Korea as a hostage. Accordingly, we have deployed additional counter battery artillery--as requested by the American commander in Korea, General Luck--to our defenses north of Seoul. This development will be sufficient to greatly diminish North Korea's present ability to destroy Seoul in the event that their further violations of the NPT result in armed confrontation with the United States and South Korea.
Without evidence of our determination to resolve this crisis on our terms, I greatly feared that the North Koreans would not negotiate in good faith; make and break promises as frequently as they had in the past; and drag out the negotiations with the intention of delaying a favorable resolution of the crisis until such time as it became virtually impossible to resolve. While administration officials politely listened to my suggestions, they ultimately decided to dismiss them.
Despite the death of Kim I1 Song, and the resulting uncertainties about the succession of Kim Jong I1, the North Koreans appeared in Geneva to be seriously considering the late leader's intimation that they would exchange their current nuclear program for light water reactors and economic assistance. On August 12, the United States and North Korea issued a joint statement that was interpreted by some as evidence that the Carter initiative had born fruit.
In the August 12 joint statement, North Korea agreed not to reprocess the discharged fuel rods; seal its reprocessing plant and allow the IAEA to monitor it; and freeze construction of its 50 megawatt and 200 megawatt reactors. Additionally, North Korea promised to remain a party to the NPT, which prohibits the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states.
On the United States part, the administration promised to find funding and suppliers of our choosing for the light water reactors, to open diplomatic liaison offices in Pyongyang and Washington, and to provide various forms of economic assistance to North Korea.
One discordant note in the administration's upbeat assessment of the negotiations' progress was the disclosure that Pyongyang still refused to permit special inspections of the nuclear waste sites. But Assistant Secretary Gallucci made it abundantly clear that no deal would be finally concluded without an accounting for the 1989 diversion. At the press conference to announce the joint statement, he said:
I wish to leave no uncertainty on the point that there will be no overall settlement, there will be no ultimate settlement, there will be no provision of light water reactors, until the question of special inspections is settled, until the question of the past, as it is sometimes known, is settled.
Not dismayed by this remaining obstacle to a settlement, the administration pressed ahead with negotiations over economic and diplomatic carrots, even agreeing to discuss in Pyongyang the details of opening diplomatic liaison offices. Formal negotiations on the nuclear question resumed in September.
During this latest round of negotiations, to which Mr. Gallucci returned yesterday, North Korea's irritating habit of breaking its word manifested itself yet again. North Korean negotiators began making demands that Mr. Gallucci characterized as bizarre, including their insistence that Pyongyang select the countries which would provide them with the light water reactors and also outrageous demands for economic compensation that amounted to a $7 billion bribe. North Korea now insists that the construction and operation of the two new reactors should continue until the light water reactors are operational--some 8 to 10 years from now. Indeed, construction of the reactors, which our negotiators intimated was to be suspended last August, has continued to this day.
Last week, in the middle of these bizarre negotiations, what I believe was an unprecedented event occurred: The North Korean military issued a press release which stated emphatically that they would never allow special inspections of suspected
nuclear sites--thereby rejecting Mr. Gallucci's apparent ultimatum that there would be no deal without access to the nuclear waste sites. Due to North Korea's intransigence, the negotiations were, in effect, suspended last week, and Mr. Gallucci returned to Washington for new instructions from his superiors.
Mr. Gallucci returned to Geneva yesterday and negotiations resumed earlier today. According to the Washington Post, the administration instructed Mr. Gallucci to remain firm in his negotiating position. Reportedly, the administration believes North Korea's recent hard line is only a temporary negotiating tactic which they will abandon if United States negotiators refuse to yield. Perhaps.
However, I cannot shake the suspicion that the administration's commitment to `staying the course' might be less steadfast than advertised. For over a year, North Korea's many broken promises have been mirrored by the administration's many abandoned negotiating principles. And I fear past trends are reasserting themselves in this instance. Adding to my concern, is the administration's apparent lack of any strategy to coerce the North Koreans' cooperation should they persist in making a mockery of these negotiations.
In the same Washington Post article, an anonymous administration official admitted that the administration's return to the bargaining table was intended to `avoid having this thing come to head' while the United States was busy running Haiti and the administration was busy trying to salvage the coming congressional elections. The source went on to observe that `Nobody is enthusiastic about Plan B,' in other words, a return to the Security Council for sanctions.
What that sounds like to me, is that we may soon see previously nonnegotiable United States demands tossed out the window in Geneva, irrespective of the administration's publicly expressed determination to stand firm. Or we may see the administration acquiesce in prolonging these negotiations long past the point when they could have led to any acceptable resolution of this crisis. I assume they would participate in this increasingly obvious charade in the expectation that the dire economic circumstances in North Korea will force the regime's collapse before the United States has to face the very grave consequences of North Korea's arrival as a nuclear power.
However, there is a problem looming in the very near term which I believe will soon squarely confront the United States with the folly of its carrots-only approach to North Korea and prevent the administration from kicking this can much further down the road.
Let us take a look at the dimensions of the problem now that nearly four months have passed since President Carter declared that his visit with Kim Il Song had defused the crisis. The crisis has not improved. Indeed, for the most part, it has worsened.
The discharged fuel rods remain in their cooling pond still available for reprocessing. North Korea still denies IAEA inspectors access to suspected nuclear sites. Construction of the two new, much larger reactors and a new reprocessing facility continues. Ballistic missile development is further advanced. Our allies, the South Koreans, are still excluded from the negotiations. No one has even seen Kim Jong Il, much less observed him speaking to Kim Young Sam.
The military balance of power on the Korean peninsula has not changed significantly. North Korea's artillery advantage along the DMZ remains daunting. The Clinton administration fears that the deployment of desperately needed counter artillery batteries to South Korea would threaten the future of negotiations or even provoke the North Korean military to attack, thereby acquiescing in leaving Seoul a hostage to the North's future belligerence.
To the extent that I have just described the situation, it looks strikingly similar to the situation before the Carter visit. There are significant differences.
First, Kim Il Song died. Since his tearful appearance at his father's funeral, the Dear Leader has kept a rather low profile in public. Indeed, he has been virtually invisible. Earlier this week, Kim Jong Il's ascendancy to the status of Great Leader was proclaimed by his foreign minister at the United Nations. But his curious lack of public visibility; incidents like the unprecedented public intervention of the North Korean military in the negotiations in Geneva; and the occasional incoherence of the North Korean negotiating position indicates that either Kim has not consolidated power, or, if he has, he does not intend to seriously negotiate. In either case, the picture for a diplomatic resolution of the crisis while the Dear Leader purports to be the Great Leader is not bright.
The second change in the crisis concerns the status of the 8000 or more fuel rods. While they remain in the cooling pond, they long ago reached a point where they could be safely reprocessed. North Korea has refused every suggestion for ensuring that these rods not be reprocessed in a way that would easily permit the plutonium they hold to be diverted to weapons production. Dry storage--encasing the rods in steel and concrete where they could be easily monitored--was rejected. Transfering the rods to another country was rejected.
Now, Madam President, the rods' magnesium cladding is believed to have seriously corroded. The import of this development is that at any moment Pyongyang could credibly make the argument that the corrosion of the cladding is about to cause an ecological disaster of such immense proportions that the rods must be reprocessed immediately. Given the possibility that the rods could actually be very dangerous at that point, dry storage would no longer be an option. Nor would any other country likely welcome the arrival of an imminent ecological disaster.
Given the prevailing winds on the Korean peninsula, public alarm over the North Korean warning will be greatest in Seoul and Tokyo, thereby obliging our allies most directly affected by North Korea's nuclear ambitions to accept the warning as fact, and acquiesce to North Korea's insistence that it must reprocess. It is unlikely that the United States will have much of a say in the matter.
No doubt, North Korea will offer assurances that IAEA inspectors will be allowed to monitor the reprocessing to prevent the diversion of plutonium to other uses. But the unfortunate reality is that plutonium is often lost in reprocessing and cannot be accounted for. Plutonium is lost when reprocessed in the United States. If the North Koreans have a secret diversion line in their reprocessing plant--and I am certain they do--we will never detect it. If the Koreans claim that fuel which was diverted to weapons production was merely lost in reprocessing--we will never be able to prove the contrary. In short, we may have already lost our primary objective of preventing the North Koreans from obtaining the material to build four to six additional nuclear weapons.
Coupled with my suspicion that the administration may relent in its insistence that Pyongyang account for its 1989 diversion, this new concern leads me to believe that North Korea is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power. They will have enough plutonium to blackmail South Korea and Japan, and enough to export to Iran, Syria, and Libya. Such a development could undermine our most vital interests in Asia and beyond for a generation.
Let us not be mistaken about the cause of this calamity should it come to pass. The fault will lie with the Carter initiative and with the administration that allowed that initiative to deter it from dealing with this problem forcefully from a position of strength. By allowing ourselves to be drawn into extended and ultimately fruitless negotiations with North Korea, we let the clock run out, and allowed the crisis to become so acute that it lacks a remedy short of military action.
Of course, we have also avoided taking the necessary military precautions that would make a military option a less dangerous proposition than it is; no doubt ensuring that the administration will decline to take this step as well. And while we are still waiting for the bankrupt economy of North Korea to destroy the regime, North Korea will have changed the balance of power in Europe and the Middle East. That it will have changed for the worse is obvious. How bad it becomes will be determined by whether these new nuclear powers use their weapons only to intimidate their neighbors or actually use them on their neighbors.
Madam President, I know that this very bleak scenario is not yet apparent. But I believe it is at least a 50-50 proposition that it will come to pass. I hope that I am as wrong about this as I have ever been wrong about anything. But in the event I am not wrong, I would suggest to the administration the following course of action.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time of the Senator from Arizona has expired.
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Mr. McCAIN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent for 4 additional minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection? Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. WALLOP. Madam President, parliamentary inquiry. It is my understanding that we are in general debate and there is no time allocation.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona had requested 20 minutes in morning business.
Mr. McCAIN. Thank you, Madam President.
Mr. Gallucci should address his North Korean counterpart at their next meeting and inform him that because Pyongyang is evidently not serious about a negotiated resolution to this crisis, these discussions have come to an end. There will be no diplomatic relations, no economic aid, no light-water reactors, and no further discussions until North Korea offers concrete evidence of its good faith--say, an immediate invitation to IAEA inspectors to visit two nuclear waste sites in North Korea, and an urgent request that another country relieve them of the burden of their discharged fuel rods.
In the meantime, the United States will seek in the Security Council a sanctions regime far more seriously than we sought it the last time. Simultaneously, we will seek an immediate interim agreement with Japan to curtail remittances to North Koreans from their relatives in Japan. Finally, Mr. Gallucci should inform the North Koreans that after consulting with President Kim Young Sam, President Clinton signed an order authorizing the dispatch of multiple rocket launch systems and various other artillery to South Korea. They will be in place within a few days.
Mr. Gallucci should then collect his papers, close his briefcase and return to the United States.
Short of persuading North Korea that they have reached the limit of our willingness to be played for fools, I am not sure there is anything else we can do to avert disaster. It is not a risk-free approach. I am not certain it will be successful. Whether we still possess sufficient influence and creditability to enlist other countries in this cause is uncertain. But since we have exhausted our supply of carrots without success, can't we at least make one attempt at pressuring the North Koreans to operate? Wasn't one of the rationales for occupying Haiti the restoration of credibility to the American threat of force?
Should this attempt to coerce North Korea into some semblance of responsible conduct prove unsuccessful we will at least have not made the situation any worse than it is already likely to become. Only the further reckless pursuit of accommodate with a regime that scorns our reasonableness and reviles our purpose could do that. Of that point, I am certain.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
Mr. MITCHELL. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Kerry). The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. MITCHELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
END
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