Author: Liubomir Topaloff, Meiji University Nuclear weapons are primarily defensive in nature. This — and not the ‘historic’ meeting between the leaders of
Author: Liubomir Topaloff, Meiji University
Nuclear weapons are primarily defensive in nature. This — and not the ‘historic’ meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas — must be the backdrop for the Trump–Kim meeting for which expectations have been set unrealistically high.
This is the very beginning, not the end, of a long road that may one day lead to peace with a nuclear-free North Korea. Quite realistically, however, it may not, and US President Donald Trump’s administration may have actually increased the risk of large-scale conflict in the region.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s policy of brinksmanship over the past few years produced a rare agreement in the United Nations Security Council that finally brought China and Russia together and led to the imposition of severe sanctions. It was the effect of sanctions on the North Korean economy, not a policy of brinkmanship, that pushed Kim to step over the Demilitarized Zone on 27 April. Now, both the United States and North Korea seek to cash in on the situation.
The US position for negotiations places precedence on a non-negotiable precondition of ‘complete, verifiable, and irreversible’ denuclearisation (CVID). The North has ‘given up’ its nuclear program one too many times before, going so far as blowing up the cooling tower of the plutonium production reactor at Yongbyon in June 2008 before resuming its nuclear program in April 2013. Only a CVID can guarantee that North Korea’s nuclear program will never be revived again.
Such a step could prove fatal for Kim. The historical records are instructive and North Koreans pay close attention to them. Back in the early 1990s, it was perhaps still possible to embrace a form of peacemaking idealism and give up nuclear weapons in exchange for promises of a bright and prosperous future. South Africa, Brazil and Ukraine all did it. Later, under different circumstances, Iraq and Libya followed. But it is 2018. Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi paid a hefty price for giving up their arms, as did Ukraine.
