Friday, September 16, 2005

Not a final deal, just a start

Sep 20th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

After more than two years of talks, North Korea has promised to abandon all its nuclear weapons and programmes, and to let inspectors from the UN’s nuclear agency return. But the deal agreed in Beijing leaves out many of the trickiest issues—not least, how to ensure Kim Jong Il’s regime fulfils its promises

IF IT were simply a matter of agreeing principles, fears of a nuclear conflict in the Korean peninsula would now be banished. On Monday September 19th, an accord was reached in Beijing, after four rounds of talks spread over more than two years, for North Korea to abandon all its nuclear activities and dismantle its existing nuclear weapons, in return for energy supplies and guarantees that America and its allies will not attack it. Inspectors from the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will be allowed back into the country to monitor the scrapping of its nuclear programmes.

Given how the talks had seemed, for much of the time, to be going nowhere, this is welcome news. But the agreement stops well short of resolving the crisis once and for all. The six countries involved in the talks—North and South Korea, America, China, Russia and Japan—only managed to agree on the deal by putting aside some of the most difficult issues. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il, still insists he will not scrap his nuclear programmes until he gets the security guarantees and energy supplies, while the Bush administration still insists it must be the other way round. On Tuesday, North Korea made clear that it would not disarm until the other countries had provided it with a light-water nuclear reactor to produce electricity, even though the agreement reached in Beijing only talks of discussing this at an “appropriate time”.

Above all, given Mr Kim’s unpredictability and his regime’s history of going back on agreements, it would be premature to celebrate the success of the talks until North Korea actually opens its nuclear facilities to the IAEA inspectors and begins to dismantle them and disarm any existing nuclear bombs. So far, there is no timetable for this or for North Korea’s re-entry into the international nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). All that has been agreed is that there will be a further round of talks, in Beijing, in November.

America’s attempts, going back more than a decade, to dissuade Mr Kim from building atomic weapons have had so many setbacks that a fair degree of scepticism is justified. In 1994, North Korea agreed to stop making plutonium, in return for which America and its allies would supply the country with fuel oil and build two Western-designed light-water nuclear reactors (since it is a bit harder to produce weapons-grade materials from such reactors than from the ones North Korea had been building). However, this agreement collapsed in 2002 after America accused North Korea of having a secret programme to enrich uranium—another possible route to making nuclear bombs.

Though North Korea openly admits making nuclear weapons using plutonium, it has still not come clean about its pursuit of the uranium route to the bomb, even though Pakistan’s former chief nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, has reportedly said he sold Mr Kim’s regime some uranium-linked nuclear secrets. Most likely, no one outside Mr Kim’s close circle—not even America’s spies—knows the location or the scale of his regime’s uranium programme, so even if the IAEA’s inspectors are eventually allowed back in, they may find it hard to be sure they are being shown everything.

Despite all these caveats, the tentative deal reached in Beijing on Monday is better than no deal at all. All sides have shown some readiness to compromise. North Korea has acknowledged in principle that it does not need nuclear weapons to protect itself. America is no longer refusing to talk one-on-one with Mr Kim’s regime—indeed there were several bilateral meetings during the latest round of talks. The IAEA’s chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, expressed optimism that the signs of progress from the Korean talks might even nudge Iran and its interlocutors (Germany, Britain and France) to resume their talks, which were broken off last month when Iran resumed some of its controversial nuclear fuel-making activities. Such a chain reaction would be highly desirable, though, given the recent hardening of attitudes by both sides in the Iranian talks, it may be rather a lot to expect at this stage.

Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

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