Serious Talk

North Korea’s October nuclear test has finally focused some minds, and now, the United States delegate to the talks, Amb. Chris Hill, has presented the North Koreans some tangible conditions for progress at the next round. The new demands were presented in a three-way meeting in Beijing to arrange the next negotiating session, whose viability remains a matter of some question. Listen to this … you’ll hardly believe it:

North Korea was urged to completely close the underground facility used for its nuclear explosion test in October in Punggyeri in North Hamgyong Province, by burying it or via other means.

Which is to say, before they get it right ….

Pyongyang must declare all its nuclear facilities and programs.

That means the uranium program that it admitted to having (as confirmed by both James Kelley and Jack Pritchard, a Clinton holdover and opponent of Bush’s NK policies). The North Koreans subsequently denied having such a program, and have avoided re-admitting to it even in the much-heralded September 19, 2005 agreement.

All nuclear-related facilities must be opened for inspections at an early stage by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Essentially, this is a return to IAEA safeguards. In a word, transparency.

Work must cease at an experimental nuclear reactor in Yongbyon that produces plutonium.

Horse, barn, door, you say, but I’m sure we’ll want to at least identify where their processed plutonium is.

And on top of all of this, we’ll demand the complete abandonment of their nuclear programs by the end of 2008. And now, the bad news:

In return, the countries promise to assure North Korea’s safety and improve its economy, while letting it normalize relations with the United States, the news agency said.

I understand that you have to give something to get something, but … assure their safety? Assure the safety of a country that has 250,000 people in concentration camps and starves half of its people to buy weapons? What, are they expecting to be added to the USFK gravy train? Does this mean we’re not allowed to criticize their human rights practices? Or that Freedom House or Radio Free Asia couldn’t provide nonviolent support for dissidents? Or that refugees wouldn’t be welcome here? Or that we deploy 2ID to protect Pyongyang from angry peasants? What about security guarantees for South Korea, in the form of some conventional weapons reductions at some point, maybe before we build an embassy in Pyongyang? Really, I have no idea what that even means, but it certainly sounds unworkable. And unlikely. So we can all relax.

The obvious question this all begs of Kim Jong Il: or else, what? For one thing, we keep or tighten our existing measures against their banking transactions (which we once insisted were a completely separate matter). Another reported suggestion is that the United States will reimpose trade sanctions it lifted in the 90’s, but U.S.-North Korean trade is infinitessimal, so that will have a minimal effect. Personally, I could list a wide range of other options, up to and including showing the countryside with Tokarevs and SKS’s, but there’s no hint of that sort of creative thinking in our government at this time. I hope we have other ideas in mind. We’ve already begun the process of electing our next president.
I suppose the admininistration can’t actually think the North Koreans will take this deal. It really has the sound of “final offer” on it, and there’s probably some desire to show realistic Democrats that the North Koreans really have no desire to disarm. My hope is that once we’ve done that — yet again — more people will finally get the idea here. But past experience is to the contrary.