The US needs a new North Korea policy: a nuclear weapons free zone

In this manner, North Korea continues to exploit the coercive potential of its nuclear capacities, demonstrating what one North Korean told me sixteen years ago, that the nuclear breakout strategy was "the barrier that makes the water flow." However, the current approach is a fundamental reversal of the goal of the nuclear coercive strategy over the previous nearly two decades, which was a slow motion proliferation strategy that aimed to change the United States' hostile policy towards North Korea.

As Hecker noted carefully in his analysis of the significance of North Korea's enrichment capacity, dialogue and sanctions have not achieved American goals. Moreover, given the state of play on the Peninsula, it is not possible to use military force to curtail let alone reverse North Korea's nuclear breakout. Hecker concluded that engaging North Korea to choose nuclear power instead of nuclear weapons "will require addressing North Korea's underlying insecurity."

A new US strategic framework

Fortunately, there is a policy framework available to Obama's White House that, in contrast to the current dead-end policy of "strategic patience," could achieve the policy goal identified by Hecker. This is to shift the frame of reference from one focused solely on North Korea's nuclear threat to a regional strategy that creates a nuclear weapon free zone (NWFZ) covering the two Koreas and Japan.

The fundamental reason that North Korea developed nuclear weapons is because over two decades of talks, the United States did not make a sovereign, reliable commitment to not use nuclear weapons against it if North Korea denuclearised.

Until April this year, the United States told North Korea that only if it became fully compliant with its nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and IAEA-safeguards obligations would it guarantee to not use nuclear weapons against it - but always voided this guarantee because North Korea was allied with a nuclear weapons state. In effect, the United States said that the only way for North Korea to obtain a meaningful negative security assurance was if it abandoned its military alliance with China - even if it fully denuclearised.

Ironically, the United States removed this exclusion in the April 2010 US Nuclear Posture Review to induce North Korea back to talks but by then it was too late - about two decades too late in fact.

If North Korea is to disarm its nuclear weapons, it will require a sovereign American guarantee that it is not targeted by US nuclear weapons. Such a zone is based on a treaty between states and to come into effect requires nuclear weapons states to sign protocols that guarantee they will not fire nuclear weapons into (or out of) the zone. The only way that North Korea can obtain such a guarantee from the United States is via a treaty commitment approved by the US Senate as the law of the land - something the United States has never put on the table. No-one knows if North Korea would accept this framework but there is no way to find out other than proposing it in a dialogue.

What is almost certain is that North Korea will never again accept a merely executive branch declaration of US policy, as occurred in October 2000, the last time the leaders of the United States and North Korea attempted to transform their strategic relationship. At that time, President Clinton committed the United States to move toward "a new direction" in US-North Korean relations wherein "neither government would have hostile intent toward the other." North Korea discovered that such a declaration had little substantive meaning when President Bush Jr. entered the White House in 2001, and henceforth ignored it.

The United States should take the lead in proposing such a zone to North Korea, its allies, and partners in the region. China, Russia, and the United States would encourage North Korea to sign the zone treaty at the outset, but agree that it would waive the nuclear-free requirements until it is secure enough to do so. (This is what Argentina and Brazil did in the Latin American NWFZ treaty. They took eighteen years to remove their waivers.) This approach would recognise North Korea as a legitimate state, but deny it nuclear weapons state-status, and calibrate its gains from joining the zone to the pace of its nuclear disarmament, especially guarantees from nuclear weapons states to not target it.

The zone would require North Korea to reaffirm its goal of denuclearisation and achieving nuclear-free status; and to implement its own announced policy of favouring a nuclear weapon free zone in Korea and beyond - as described recently by a leading North Korean analyst of nuclear policy.

Such a zone would entail cooperation between North Korea, South Korea, and Japan on nuclear fuel cycle activities, including collaboration on uranium enrichment and spent fuel storage and disposal, and establishing regional monitoring and verification standards and capacities. This kind of cooperation is precisely what Hecker suggests is an indispensable element of any strategy to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue rather than continue with ad hoc crisis management and risk-running of immense proportions based on nuclear threat.

Thus, a zone could provide a framework to stabilise the relations between North Korea and the United States on the risks of nuclear war, establish a credible pathway whereby North Korea could obtain meaningful guarantees that it will not be attacked by American nuclear weapons, and ensure that Kim Jong Il and his successor son remain a nuclear outlaw unable to obtain international support for economic reconstruction and the development of nuclear power until such time as North Korea complies with the nuclear free requirements of the zone.