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Samore: More Fluid U.S. Stance on N. Korea Nuclear Weapons

Council on Foreign Relations

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

April 23, 2008

Gary Samore, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations, says the Bush administration has agreed to a compromise on demands for North Korea to confess the extent of its uranium-enrichment activities. Samore, a senior arms control negotiator in the Clinton administration, says the compromise is to allow the United States “to get into what it considers to be the most important element of the deal, the negotiation over the actual elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.”

What’s the status of negotiations with North Korea? A year ago, it looked like we had an agreement. Now critics are saying the Bush administration is giving away the store and selling out.

For over a year the talks have been stuck over the issue of North Korea making a declaration of all of its nuclear activities. The main question there is North Korea’s refusal to acknowledge a secret uranium-enrichment program and then more recently, its nuclear assistance to Syria. So the administration has made a compromise with North Korea. In the compromise the North Koreans will declare how much plutonium they’ve produced over the years and instead of North Korea having to directly acknowledge the uranium-enrichment program and their assistance to Syria, the United States will make a statement expressing its belief that these activities have taken place and the North Koreans will not refute or challenge that U.S. statement.

In exchange for that, the United States will take North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism and remove some of the Trading with the Enemy Act sanctions. Most importantly, once the declaration issue has been resolved, the two sides will begin the serious negotiations over the so-called third phase, which is the plan to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear facilities and eventually eliminate its nuclear weapons.

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.