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Samore: North Korea May Delay Nuclear Treaty Implementation Until 2009

Council on Foreign Relations

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

January 25, 2008

Gary Samore, an arms control official in the Clinton administration, says the prevailing view in the Bush administration is that North Korea is unlikely to carry out the terms of the international nuclear disarmament agreement it signed in February 2007 until there is a new president in the White House. He says U.S. officials believe that “the North Koreans are certainly not, in the remainder of this year, going to give up their nuclear weapons.”

There’s been a certain amount of public confusion over whether North Korea is complying with the agreement it made at the Six-Party Talks last year, to close down the Yongbyon reactor and also provide full declaration of its past nuclear activities by last December 31 and eventually to close down all these activities. What’s causing this confusion?

You have to separate the two steps that North Korea was required to take. The first step was to disable the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. North Korea, in fact, has taken most of the steps required to disable the five-megawatt reactor. So it would not be easy for North Korea to resume production of plutonium. At the same time it appears that the reprocessing plant at the Yongbyon facility is still intact, so in theory, if the North Koreans wanted to play hardball, if they wanted to create a crisis, they could reprocess the spent fuel they already have on hand to recover enough plutonium for a weapon or two. They still have a threat in their arsenal even though the five-megawatt reactor has been pretty much disabled.

Weren’t they supposed to close down the reprocessing plant too?

Yes, part of the agreement is to disable both the reactor and the reprocessing facility.

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

Copyright 2008 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.