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Backgrounder: The Six-Party Talks on North Korea's Nuclear Program

Council on Foreign Relations

Author: Carin Zissis, Staff Writer
June 13, 2007

Introduction

Since August 2003, members of the Six-Party Talks have convened in Beijing for several rounds of negotiations aimed at curbing North Korea’s nuclear program. The summits resulted in a September 2005 agreement in which Pyongyang agreed to abandon its quest to become a nuclear power. Yet North Korea joined the nuclear club when it conducted an underground test in October 2006. And diplomatic standoffs among individual Six-Party member states—particularly between the United States and North Korea—constantly threaten to derail the Six-Party process.

What are the Six-Party Talks?

The Six-Party Talks began in August 2003 as a multilateral approach to ending North Korea’s nuclear program. Early in George W. Bush’s presidency, the White House ended the policy of direct engagement with Pyongyang endorsed by the Clinton administration. Bush included North Korea in the “Axis of Evil” during his 2002 State of the Union address and, that October, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) concluded that Pyongyang was pursuing a uranium enrichment program. According to Washington, this violated the spirit of the 1994 Agreed Framework, in which the United States pledged to provide fuel oil and construct two light-water reactors while North Korea promised to end a plutonium enrichment program in exchange.

North Korea admitted to the uranium enrichment program but refused to end it unless the United States agreed to hold bilateral talks and normalize relations. When Washington rebuffed these demands, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), forced International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to leave, and restarted its plutonium enrichment program. With tensions mounting, including the March 2003 interception of a U.S. spy plane by North Korean fighter aircraft over the Sea of Japan, the United States, North Korea, and China held trilateral talks in Beijing in April 2003.

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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.