IAEA Confirms Yongbyon Shutdown

After much speculation, the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that North Korea has shut down its plutonium reactor at Yongbyon.  I have always expected North Korea to go through this part of the deal (full text here), as I expected them to let IAEA inspectors back into Yongbyon and the other  facilities near it.  But to simplify arguments I’ve made here  before, those things cost North Korea almost  nothing:

• It’s easy to kick inspectors out.  They’ve done it before.
• It’s easy to restart Yongbyon.  They’ve done that before, too.  Opportune moments include election seasons and right after a new president is sworn in and ready to be tested.  I’ve heard what I’ll call well-founded rumors that the “shutdown” consists of little more than a strip of tape over each door.  It remains to be seen whether North Korea will permanently disable the facility.
• Yongbyon is probably  a worn-out wreck anyway. 
• North Korea has probably reprocessed all of the plutonium in Yongbyon.  For that reason, it was probably fully prepared to shut this reactor down during a round of bilateral talks in Berlin last December, when the outline of this deal emerged. 
• Remember that even this is three months late, and we should remember why.  We’re behind schedule because North Korea made a new demand that wasn’t part of the deal — the return of $25 million in laundered funds. 
• North Korea gets to  demand extra payoffs now, and although Chris Hill had suggested (and the deal says) that the immediate payoff at this “initial” stage would be a mere 50,000 tons of fuel oil out of a total of 1 million tons, we’re already upping the payday.   The State Department is now  renewing talk of removing North Korea from the terrorism list, despite the lack of progress on North Korea’s continuing terrorism against hundreds —  perhaps even  thousands —  of South Korean, Japanese, and third-country abductees.  We agreed to begin discussing that removal, but the acts that led to North Korea’s placement on that list will probably be forgotten.

North Korea will add other  new demands because (a) it wants the payoffs, (b) it knows that we’ll pay, and (c) it needs to stall because it doesn’t want to make any other concessions.  Raising and accelerating unagreed  demands for its payday is a  classic tactic  from the North Korean playbook.   It  is now demanding the lifting of sanctions, something that should not happen before it fully discloses the extent of its other nuclear programs and weapons.  It is calling for the U.S. and Japan to end their “hostile policy” and saying that continuing complaince depends on us.  It is also demanding direct talks with the U.S. military, although it has never agreed to talks with the South  Korean military  that would substantially reduce the conventional buildup around the DMZ.  Those talks would be an obvious vehicle to link compliance with this agreement to a U.S. troop withdrawal from South Korea.  And although I don’t think we should have ground forces in Korea, those are not the circumstances under which we should reduce or remove them. 

If I’m right, this is the last act of compliance we’ll see from North Korea under this deal.  And because the deal is so vague about sequencing and substance, who is to say that North Korea’s demands are contrary to the terms?  What separates what North Korea has given up so far and what it hasn’t is that from Kim Jong Il’s perspective, Yongbyon is expendable.  His existing bombs, his uranium enrichment program aren’t.  The deal doesn’t even mention the delivery systems  North Korea could use to deliver those weapons, or chemical and biological weapons (also unmentioned).  Those include not just missiles, but tunnels  North Korea  could probably use to drive  its weapons right into Seoul,  or right up to Osan.  

For the Bush Administration and Kim Jong Il alike, the trick now is to preserve the illusion of progress as the disabling of Yongbyon is made permanent or semi-permanent, and as the United States makes a new round of early concessions while North Korea obfuscates on  full disclosure.  For North Korea, the object is to achieve as many concessions as it can from the United States on conventional forces, money laundering, terrorism, trade, diplomatic relations, human rights, and sanctions.  By causing the United States to shift key positions and policies, it will make it all the harder to reassert those positions again in reaction to continuing North Korean misdeeds.  North Korea has already racked up some depressing and  impressive gains, and it will probably win more before this administration is over.