North Korea: No Closer to Denuclearization

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is a hermit no longer. After a little more than six years in charge of North Korea, having taken over following his father Kim Jong Il’s death in December 2011, 2018 marked Kim’s great coming out to the world. In many ways, Kim – the third dynast to rule the juche monarchy that is North Korea – showed how he followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. But matters didn’t end there: Kim gave the world just enough to spark thoughts, near and far, that he might be different enough that the benefits of engaging with him would open the door to a different kind of North Korea.

As 2019 dawns, the verdict remains open on the discontinuities that might be just around the corner on the Korean Peninsula. Long-time analysts of the region have found that it pays to profess pessimism. Two previous rounds of Seoul’s “sunshine” summit diplomacy with Kim Jong Il, in 2000 and 2007, produced a temporary balm for inter-Korean tensions and, in the case of the first summit, left South Korea with a scandal.

But in 2018 alone, South Korean President Moon Jae-in met Kim three times – once on an impromptu basis after U.S. President Donald J. Trump in the final days of May canceled what was then a scheduled summit. That hastily arranged Moon-Kim summit, their second meeting, saved the U.S.-North Korea summit, which took place on June 12, making history.

Where 2017 wrapped up with a sense of grim finality, 2018 offers nothing of the sort on the Korean Peninsula. In the final weeks of 2017, North Korea had declared the qualitative aspects of its nuclear deterrent complete with the first – and to date only – flight test of the Hwasong-15 intercontinental-range ballistic missile. Meanwhile, murmurs circled in the United States that the Trump administration was contemplating a “bloody nose” or limited strike on North Korea, raising the possibility of a nuclear war. In 2018, by contrast, tensions have evaporated. Far from a “bloody nose,” Trump has professed nothing less than his “love” for Kim and expressed eagerness for a second encounter with the North Korean leader in 2019.

As the year ended on the Korean Peninsula, however, there are appearances and there are realities. Based on the year’s record, even as Moon, Kim, and Trump have succeeded in reducing tensions from their 2017 highs, North Korea’s nuclear disarmament remains a distant goal. If anything, 2018 marks the start of Kim’s international legitimation and pursuit of a still poorly understood program of economic reform. As for North Korea’s gestures toward disarmament: they are just that – gestures, cosmetic at best. Kim has held to his 2017 New Year’s Day directive that “[t]he nuclear weapons research sector and the rocket industry should mass-produce nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles, the power and reliability of which have already been proved to the full, to give a spur to the efforts for deploying them for action.”

Since 2018’s third inter-Korean summit in September, the United States and North Korea have little to show for their continued diplomatic interactions. Pompeo went back to Pyongyang for a fourth trip in October and while he got to meet Kim and wasn’t berated for his demands this time (unlike his July trip), he seems to have made little progress with the North on the ever-prickly issue of “denuclearization.” Since then, a follow-up visit by Pompeo’s counterpart, Kim Yong Chol, was postponed by the North Korean side and has yet to be rescheduled. Across all their meetings this year, Pompeo and his interlocutors in Pyongyang haven’t come to a common understanding of “denuclearization” itself.

That bit isn’t surprising. After Kim and Trump’s June 12 summit in Singapore, it became quickly apparent that Washington and Pyongyang remained as divided as ever on that peculiar word: denuclearization. Despite Trump’s exhortations in the weeks after the summit that “total denuclearization” had already started in North Korea, his deputies, left to implement the vague agreement that week, quickly discovered this wasn’t the case. The backsliding in the process began with Pompeo’s early July trip to Pyongyang, which resulted in accusations from Pyongyang of “gangster-like” U.S. demands. (Pompeo had reportedly asked for a down payment from North Korea in the form of 60 percent of its arsenal for talks to continue.)

All of this left South Korea’s Moon to clean up after Pompeo and do what he could to help the two sides find their way back to the negotiating table. The South Korean president’s landing at Pyongyang’s Sunan International Airport – where Kim was overseeing ballistic missile launches some 369 days prior – for the third inter-Korean summit in 2018 conveniently followed confirmation from the White House that Trump and Kim would seek a second summit meeting.

If Moon’s mission was to get the United States and North Korea back on track in the short term, he succeeded. But that is all. While many U.S. analysts immediately zeroed in on the concessions Moon drew out of Kim on denuclearization, they are considerably limited in their value and do not take us any closer to a nuclear-free North Korea. Rather, their presence in the latest inter-Korean declaration allows Kim to continue to keep up the appearance that he is pursuing disarmament while offering up piecemeal giveaways on his own terms. Meanwhile, the U.S.-North Korea process has found itself mired again in quicksand. Pompeo’s October trip yielded but one apparent “concession”: North Korea would allow inspectors to visit the Punggye-ri nuclear test site.

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The Pyongyang Declaration Moon and Kim signed at the most recent inter-Korean summit contained a long list of significant outcomes for the prospect of peace and rapprochement between the two Koreas. The picture on North Korea’s nuclear disarmament, however, is considerably more mixed. Moon did get Kim to sign on to a more specific declaration of intent on measures related to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula than seen at either the April 27 inter-Korean summit or the Singapore summit with Trump. But North Korea still is no closer than before to giving up its nukes.

As always, “denuclearization” in the context of the Korean Peninsula does not mean unilateral disarmament. For North Korea, the term is rather akin to an aspirational objective to remove all nuclear weapons from the peninsula once an ambiguous set of conditions have been established, including the removal of the nuclear umbrella the United States extends to South Korea. The origins of the term date back to January 1992, when the two Koreas first introduced the term “denuclearization” into the global diplomatic dictionary, a few weeks after U.S. President George H.W. Bush ordered the removal of tactical nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula as a part of post-Cold War U.S. unilateral nuclear reductions. The corollary of the reciprocal nature of “denuclearization” is that North Korea’s nukes stick around as long as it has to deal with a nuclear threat from the United States. Keeping this context in mind, Moon and Kim “shared the view that the Korean Peninsula must be turned into a land of peace free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threats.”

What followed in the statement was perhaps the real money for Moon. Kim agreed to “permanently dismantle the Dongchang-ri missile engine test site and launch platform under the observation of experts from relevant countries.” If this mostly sounds familiar, it’s because Trump revealed North Korea’s willingness to dismantle this engine testing site at his press conference after the Singapore meeting. North Korea’s promise back then was a low-cost gesture that would produce the illusion of progress toward disarmament. Moon was now getting the very same concession in writing. While its value for disarming North Korea was dubious, the commitment would go a long way toward convincing Washington that further progress could be made with Pyongyang.

What is interesting about what Moon secured in Pyongyang is the reference to the entire site known as Dongchang-ri, or Sohae, which features a large facility dedicated to North Korea’s space program. From what we knew earlier about the concession made verbally to Trump in Singapore, Kim had only promised to dismantle the engine test stand at Sohae – a small component of the larger site. Kim and his father both insisted that this program was civilian and peaceful, but its inclusion as a denuclearization measure here gives up the charade. While North Korea’s tested satellite launch vehicles at Sohae would have always made lousy missiles with which to strike the United States, they allowed Pyongyang to test important technologies related to the development of long-range ballistic missiles. If North Korea follows through in dismantling the satellite facilities at Sohae, that could go a long way toward limiting the kinds of space activities the country can undertake.

There remain reasons for skepticism, however. Even though North Korea promised to dismantle the Sohae Satellite Launching Center, it could transition to road-mobile satellite launch vehicles, using, for example, a repurposed variant of its large Hwasong-15 intercontinental-range ballistic missile. While unconventional, satellite launches from road-mobile launchers aren’t unheard of; both China and Israel have used this mode to launch satellites. Finally, the reference to the “observation of experts” in the latest inter-Korean declaration is not as solid a verification as arms control experts imagine. Rather, the language included in the Pyongyang Declaration suggests that North Korea will allow foreign observers to watch as it blows up buildings at Sohae – just as it allowed journalists to observe its dismantlement of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in May 2018 and just as it broadcast the demolition of a cooling tower at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center in 2008. While having experts on-site is preferable to North Korea simply broadcasting footage, it falls far short of the hands-on and intrusive pre- and post-demolition measures that would be required for independent experts to really understand how the facilities at Sohae contributed to North Korea’s missile and space launch programs.

Effectively, Moon managed to repackage a concession that North Korea had already given the United States, with an addition of dubious value – much like how Pompeo weeks later would received a repackaged concession regarding inspectors going to Punggye-ri. Above all, none of this takes North Korea any closer to disarmament. The engine test stand at Sohae was associated with the publicized testing of engines that made their appearance later in long-range North Korean missiles in 2017, but North Korea has largely finished the development of these engines. If it will need to prove these engines in a static test stand before mounting them on new missiles, it can do so at another site. Static test stands for missile engines are fairly simple structures; as they become necessary, North Korea can simply construct more.

The Pyongyang Declaration included a convoluted follow-up on other measures that North Korea may be willing to pursue in the name of denuclearization. North Korea “expressed its willingness to continue to take additional measures, such as the permanent dismantlement of the nuclear facilities in Yongbyon, as the United States takes corresponding measures in accordance with the spirit of the June 12 U.S.-DPRK Joint Statement,” the statement notes. The appearance of the word “Yongbyon” was excellent marketing out of that inter-Korean meeting. This is North Korea’s well-known nuclear complex, which includes a large variety of facilities involved with both its production of plutonium-239 and highly enriched uranium production.

But as the syntax made clear, the declaration did not commit North Korea to any particular course of action – and Yongbyon has since not been publicly discussed as a possible site for new concessions in subsequent diplomacy, including Pompeo’s October trip. The September inter-Korean declaration also leaves those dubious actions conditional on a highly ambiguous requirement for the United States to follow through on “corresponding measures.” This is likely a reference to Washington coming around on the issue of a declaration to end the Korean War, something Trump reportedly promised Kim in Singapore, and also includes sanctions relief – a demand that North Korea has made more explicitly in the weeks since the last inter-Korean summit. Moon and Kim hinted at what might lie on the other side of such a declaration, without committing North Korea to anything specific.

Pompeo, at least, bit on this bait and appears to have willfully overrepresented what Kim actually agreed to in Pyongyang, as he did after the Singapore summit with repeated references to the notion that Kim agreed to the “final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea.” The State Department released a statement attributed to Pompeo shortly after the inter-Korean summit noting that he welcomed North Korea’s move to pursue “the permanent dismantlement of all facilities at Yongbyon in the presence of U.S. and IAEA inspectors.” This is nowhere to be found in the agreement that Moon and Kim signed, however. Trump, too, touted that Kim “has agreed to allow Nuclear [sic] inspections.”

To get here, the United States might begin by having its special representative on North Korea, Steve Biegun, enter working-level talks with his North Korean counterpart. But Biegun hasn’t spoken to any North Koreans since accompanying Pompeo to Pyongyang in October. Meanwhile, despite Pompeo’s best guess that Choe Son Hui, a veteran North Korean foreign ministry official experienced in the American portfolio, would be Biegun’s counterpart, North Korea hadn’t confirmed a formal working-level negotiator by the time this issue of The Diplomat went to print.

The confirmation for Moon that his efforts had paid off at the last inter-Korean summit was in what followed from Pompeo: “On the basis of these important commitments, the United States is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations.” Pompeo picked up negotiations with North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations, increasing the odds that Kim gets his second encounter with Trump and a chance to extract an end of war declaration commitment in writing. Pompeo’s October trip to Pyongyang contributed to this objective too. If Moon’s mission in Pyongyang on the denuclearization front was to give Washington enough to return to the table with North Korea, he succeeded. But now, with Kim Yong Chol’s ghosting of Pompeo and a broader logjam in talks until the second Trump-Kim summit in early 2019, the United States and North Korea may be right back where they were in late August 2018.

The bottom line is that North Korea is not moving toward disarmament. All the concessions it has offered up this year, while positive for overall confidence-building and the reduction of tensions, do not take us any closer to a nuclear-free North Korea. By contrast, North Korea’s missile manufacturing, launcher manufacturing, and warhead manufacturing has continued apace, in line with the now mostly forgotten directive from Kim laid out in his New Year’s Day speech to his people. Numerous press reports based on intelligence assessments, as well as independent open source researcher work, has proven this to be the case.

What’s happening now on the peninsula between the inter-Korean diplomatic process and the Trump-led process with North Korea is largely cosmetic. Vague and low-cost measures from North Korea are being marketed as significant steps toward disarmament. Pyongyang, meanwhile, is reducing the prominence that its nuclear arsenal plays in its relations with the outside world as it pursues rapprochement with the South in the pursuit of economic development. The September 2018 military parade to commemorate the 70th anniversary of North Korea’s founding left out its nuclear-capable missile systems, despite their hefty propaganda value. This was far from an olive branch to Trump, despite his praise for Kim’s gesture on Twitter as “a big and very positive statement.” The strategy for Kim is to set his nukes aside and pursue economic development through sustained diplomacy with his willing counterpart to the South, all while retaining the security benefits conferred by such weapons. Trump, in the meantime, is more than happy to play along.

In the short term, Moon got what he wanted: a resumption of diplomacy between the United States and North Korea. For the South Korean president, the next big milestone will be a declaration to end the Korean War, something he and Kim had sought to conclude by the end of 2018. North Korea has realized that Trump, ever eager to be seen as the peacemaker on the Korean Peninsula, may be willing to move forward with the declaration. In 2019, Moon will face the challenge of sustaining this progress in the face of growing North Korean demands for sanctions relief absent real, meaningful denuclearization steps.

On a declaration to end the Korean War and sanctions relief, Trump is largely held back by his cabinet, which understands that the declaration may irrevocably set the United States on course toward an uncertain future on the peninsula and sound a death knell for the alliance with South Korea. A declaration will be an irreversible measure; the United States could not simply declare the Korean War on again should North Korea drag its feet on the denuclearization concessions it has agreed to. Moreover, a declaration will set in place political momentum toward a treaty, a formal legal instrument to end the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War. In the aftermath of a treaty, the raison d’etre for U.S. forces on South Korean soil will have evaporated and Trump, already eager to withdraw U.S. troops based overseas, could see it fit to declare an end to the alliance. North Korea would welcome that outcome.

The account above paints a grim picture of the prospects of North Korea’s denuclearization, but that’s not to say that 2018’s diplomacy has been without value. The inter-Korean confidence-building has been incredibly beneficial in creating the conditions for stability in a crisis, should the diplomatic process veer off-course. It has also had positive spillover effects. For example, as a result of the inter-Korean military dialogue leading up to the September 19 Comprehensive Military Agreement, the hotline between the Korean People’s Army and United Nations Command was reactivated for the first time since March 2013.

A nuclear-free Korean Peninsula must remain a long-term objective, but in the meantime, Moon’s paradigm of seeking peaceful coexistence with North Korea is likely apt. North Korea has never said that it will unilaterally disarm and it won’t anytime soon. The task then will be for the United States, South Korea, and indeed the entire world to live with and manage the risks of a nuclear North Korea while working toward disarming Kim.