Dozens Shocked by North Korea’s Repudiation of Disarmament Agreement

So much for George W. Bush, Condi Rice, and Chris Hill’s last-minute legacy grasp, the February 2007 deal with North Korea hereinafter referred to as Agreed Framework 2.0. Following a long rejection by the corpus of North Korean belligerence, Agreed Framework 2.0 has ceased to be:

North Korea vowed Tuesday to restore the nuclear facilities that it had been disabling and boycott international talks on its nuclear weapons program to protest against the U.N. Security Council’s reaction to its recent rocket launching. [….]

North Korea, which refers to itself as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK, said in the statement that it “resolutely rejects the unjust action” taken by the U.N. Security Council “wantonly infringing upon the sovereignty of the DPRK.

“There would be no need to hold six-party talks which the DPRK has attended,” it added, as they have “turned into a platform for infringing upon the sovereignty of the DPRK and seeking to force the DPRK to disarm itself.

“The DPRK will never participate in the talks any longer nor it will be bound to any agreement of the six-party talks,” the statement said. [N.Y. Times]

Thank goodness the thoughtful diplomats of the United Nations reconsidered the rash idea of passing a binding resolution.

The major players on the United Nations Security Council reached a compromise to chastise North Korea for its move, while avoiding tough new punishments that Russia and China had feared would drive the North away from negotiations over dismantling its nuclear program.

I shudder to think what North Korea might have done then — perhaps repudiated the Convention Against Torture, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, or possibly the U.N. Charter itself. The United Nations still hasn’t published the text of the presidential statement, but you can read some analysis here. The statement does not even include the word “missile.”

How you see this news depends entirely on your perspective. If you’re focused entirely on the existence of negotiations, take this news calmly; you have nothing to worry about. In due course, the North will let itself be dragged back to a new set of talks to demand a new set of concessions. Despite the complete failure of Agreed Framework 2.0 to disarm North Korea in any way whatsoever, the North Koreans will of course insist on keeping all of the old concessions President Bush gave them (on the terror list, the lifting of bilateral and multilateral sanctions, aid, fuel oil that the Obama Administration has just asked Congress to fund).

If you actually believed in the negotiated removal of North Korea as a WMD and proliferation threat, the time has come for you to declare intellectual bankruptcy and sell your unpublished manuscripts for pulp value. This is now the second attempt, by the second successive U.S. administration (not counting Obama’s), to negotiate a comprehensive nuclear disarmament of North Korea. For the second time, the North has systematically reneged. Agreed Framework 2.0 proponents can no longer claim that North Korea has abided by a single promise it made. This is also a collective failure for our foreign policy establishment and its groupthink consensus that, with the right words and incentives, North Korean can be “managed.”

If I’m right about the next step, our satellites will soon detect a flurry of activity around North Korea’s 50-MW reactor at Yongbyon, which makes more economic sense to start up than the aging, crumbling 5-MW reactor it shut down for Christopher Hill. Throughout the tortured history of Agreed Framework 2.0, this larger reactor was neither inspected nor in any way disabled or dismantled. It was left untouched. Here’s what the Washington Post said about that larger reactor in 2005:

North Korea has said it plans to finish building a 50-megawatt nuclear reactor in as little as two years, allowing it to produce enough weapons-grade plutonium for 10 weapons annually, according to the first public report of an unofficial U.S. delegation that visited Pyongyang in August.

The new reactor would represent a tenfold leap in North Korea’s ability to produce fuel for nuclear weapons, which could give it significant leverage in talks aimed at dismantling its nuclear programs. North Korea tentatively agreed in September to “abandon” its programs, but the talks — which resume today in Beijing — must still resolve how quickly Pyongyang gives up its weapons and what types of incentives it will receive.

North Korea is “moving full speed ahead with its nuclear weapons programs,” said Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, during a presentation at a conference sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. [Washington Post, Glenn Kessler]

That should leave North Korea with enough fissile material to perfect a sufficient arsenal for itself, and to sell off the excess to the highest bidder.

Related: While the Obama Administration is at a loss about what to do next, its Special Envoy to North Korea is conspicuously invisible (love that picture, btw). Take it as a good sign that at least this administration is rethinking things. Meanwhile, North Korea is still holding two American journalists and one (more) South Korean man prisoner. Effectively, all three are hostages. President Bush announced North Korea’s removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on June 26, 2008. Discuss among yourselves.