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| Authors: | Carin Zissis Jayshree Bajoria, Staff Writer |
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Updated: October 14, 2008
Since August 2003, members of the Six-Party Talks have convened in Beijing for several rounds of negotiations aimed at curbing North Korea’s nuclear program. The summits resulted in a September 2005 agreement in which Pyongyang agreed to abandon its quest to become a nuclear power. Yet North Korea joined the nuclear club when it conducted an underground test in October 2006. And diplomatic standoffs among individual Six-Party member states—particularly between the United States and North Korea—constantly threaten to derail the Six-Party process.
The Six-Party Talks began in August 2003 as a multilateral approach to ending North Korea’s nuclear program. Early in George W. Bush’s presidency, the White House ended the policy of direct engagement with Pyongyang endorsed by the Clinton administration. Bush included North Korea in the “Axis of Evil” during his 2002 State of the Union address and, that October, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) concluded that Pyongyang was pursuing a uranium enrichment program. According to Washington, this violated the spirit of the 1994 Agreed Framework, in which the United States pledged to provide fuel oil and construct two light-water reactors while North Korea promised to end a plutonium enrichment program in exchange.
North Korea admitted to the uranium enrichment program but refused to end it unless the United States agreed to hold bilateral talks and normalize relations. When Washington rebuffed these demands, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), forced International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to leave, and restarted its plutonium enrichment program. With tensions mounting, including the March 2003 interception of a U.S. spy plane by North Korean fighter aircraft over the Sea of Japan, the United States, North Korea, and China held trilateral talks in Beijing in April 2003. These negotiations served as a prelude to the first round of Six-Party Talks, which brought other regional players—South Korea, Japan, and Russia—into the fold.
Yes. After two years of stop-and-go negotiations and four rounds of talks, the Six-Party members produced the Statement of Principles in September 2005. According to the pact, Pyongyang would eventually abandon its nuclear program, rejoin the NPT, and allow IAEA monitors to return. In exchange, North Korea would receive food and energy assistance from the other members. The statement also paved the way for Pyongyang to normalize relations with both the United States and Japan, and for the negotiation of a peace agreement for the Korean peninsula.
However, negotiations hit another roadblock in November 2005 after the U.S. Treasury Department placed restrictions on Macao-based Banco Delta Asia, which Washington accused of laundering $25 million in North Korean funds. The Macanese government subsequently froze Pyongyang’s roughly fifty accounts held in the bank. As the talks fell apart, North Korea stepped up brinkmanship, conducting missile tests in July 2006 and a nuclear test in October 2006.
After the nuclear crisis came to a head, Beijing convinced North Korea to rejoin the talks. In February 2007 during the sixth round of talks, members hammered out a deal—seen by Washington as a means to jump-start the September 2005 statement—involving a sixty-day deadline for North Korea to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for aid and the release of the Banco Delta Asia funds. The deal also involved a series of bilateral talks, including between North Korea and United States.
In an interview with CFR.org’s Bernard Gwertzman, Korea expert Don Oberdorfer said the nuclear test “led surprisingly to a new rash of moves in the diplomatic field which hold the promise of making, for the first time, some real progress toward improved U.S.-North Korean relations.” But David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, warns implementation of agreements with Pyongyang never come easy because “every time there’s a problem that affects North Korea they grind everything else to a halt until that problem is solved.”
In July, the denuclearization program gained momentum with Pyongyang shutting down its main plutonium-producing nuclear plant at Yongbyon. Washington and Beijing moved toward fulfilling commitments for each country to reward North Korea with fifty-thousand tons of heavy fuel oil. Pyongyang received its first shipment of fuel aid from South Korea soon after it closed down Yongbyon.
In October 2007, Pyongyang agreed to end its nuclear program in exchange for aid and diplomatic concessions and started to disable the Yongbyon plant by removing eight-thousand fuel rods from the nuclear reactor under the guidance of U.S. experts.
In May 2008, North Korea handed over around 18,000 pages of documents to the United States detailing production records of its nuclear programs. In June, Pyongyang also handed over the much-awaited declaration as agreed in the Six-Party Talks after a six-month delay and imploded the cooling tower (LAT/video) of the Yongbyon nuclear plant. The destruction of the tower was a largely symbolic gesture, writes Jon Wolfsthal, senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. "None of the steps North Korea has taken thus far are irreversible, but the destruction of this tower makes it harder to reconstitute their plutonium program," he writes. Nonetheless, the Bush administration immediately responded to Pyongyang's gestures by taking North Korea off the Trading with the Enemy Act and notifying Congress of its intention to remove North Korea from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list in the next forty-five days. But when Washington failed to take Pyongyang off the terrorism list after the lapse of the period, saying it hadn't suitably verified records handed over by North Korea, Pyongyang barred all international inspectors from its Yongbyon site and threatened to restart the reactor. In October 2008, North Korea agreed to some verification measures and the United States took it off the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Yet critics of the declaration say the report, which details plutonium-based materials and facilities, falls short on three important counts:
According to the February 2007 agreement, Pyongyang will get economic, energy and humanitarian assistance up to the equivalent of one million tons of heavy fuel oil, in return for a complete declaration of all its nuclear programs and disablement of all existing nuclear facilities. The exchange in June amounts to far less than the Bush administration's goals when it originally agreed to this formula during the Six-Party Talks. But after a compromise in April, the United States appears to have softened its stance on the issue amid criticisms of capitulating to Pyongyang.
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