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Interview: Samore: Limited Progress Possible on Korea, Iran

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Gary Samore, Vice President, Director of Studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg Chair
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

Gary S. Samore, an expert on North Korean and Iranian nuclear issues, cites evidence of changes on both negotiating fronts that might achieve limited progress. Samore, who participated in nuclear talks with Pyongyang during the Clinton administration, says the U.S. negotiator with North Korea appears to be acting with new flexibility in seeking an interim agreement. Samore says he also sees some movement in Iran to ease international pressure, which might lead to a suspension of that nation’s uranium enrichment efforts. Yet even the most optimistic scenarios in both cases, he says, “lead to constraints, limits, delays on the program, rather than the achievement of our ultimate objective, which is to eliminate nuclear weapons in North Korea and to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.”

The Six-Party Talks on North Korea resume on Thursday and Christopher Hill, the U.S. negotiator, seemed pretty upbeat in a briefing he had at the State Department last week. As I recall, the North Koreans at some point in the last two months said some agreement was possible. Are we going to break the deadlock on this issue?

Well, there are certainly some indications that Ambassador Hill has been given more negotiating flexibility than he previously enjoyed. For example, he was allowed to meet bilaterally with his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye-gwan in Berlin in order to set up this next round of Six-Party Talks. As I understand it, Chris is going to be able to explore with the North Koreans a more limited approach toward nuclear disarmament that would begin with an interim step rather than going directly to full disarmament, which is really not a practical objective in the negotiations.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.