Robin Wright on a statement by John Bolton, the national security adviser, claiming that North Korea’s weapons arsenal will be dismantled by the end of Trump’s first term.
In what would be the most accelerated disarmament program in history,
the Trump Administration hopes to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear,
biological, and chemical weapons, and its ballistic missiles, within a
year, John Bolton, the national-security adviser, claimed on “Face the
Nation” on Sunday. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is scheduled to make
his third trip to Pyongyang this week, to begin the process, which he
told Congress needed to be wrapped up by the end of President Trump’s
current term—in two and a half years. Even that time frame is ambitiously
fast, given the scope of Kim Jong Un’s vast arsenal and growing
indications that North Korea hopes to hide at least some of its
weaponry. It has multiple secret
facilities,
as the Washington Post reported over the weekend. U. S. intelligence is
tracking the secret underground Kangsong facility, which may be able to
produce twice as much enriched uranium as Yongbyon can. Yongbyon is the
country’s only declared nuclear-production site.
The first step is for North Korea to provide a full declaration of its
arsenal—the number it has of each of the four deadliest types of weapons, the location
of storage sites and production facilities, detailed lists of
equipment, and the names of all the personnel involved, from scientists
and engineers to lab technicians. The United States, in turn, provides
North Korea with a timetable, a schedule of specific actions required
for each type of weapon. Success will depend on three things: North
Korea’s truthfulness about the past, the integrity of its current
intentions, and its openness about monitoring in the future. For the
United States, the issue is how far it will go to hold North Korea
accountable. Historically, one of the biggest challenges in disarmament
deals is inspection fatigue. Iraq played hide-and-seek with the United
Nations for more than seven years—over the same four types of weapons—in
the ninety-nineties.
“There was neither the will nor the mechanism to sustain disarmament and
intrusive monitoring against Iraqi obstruction,” Charles Duelfer, the
deputy director of the United Nations weapons-inspection group from 1993
until 2000, wrote in his detailed account of the negotiations, “Hide and
Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq.” The collapse of the U. N. effort to
disarm Saddam Hussein’s regime contributed to the Bush Administration’s
decision to invade Iraq, in 2003, even though the country no longer had
weapons of mass destruction by then. But Iraq had lied so often about
its past activities and its future intentions to rebuild that Baghdad
and Washington had reached a dangerous deadlock.
The U. S. effort in North Korea faces similar challenges. “What if we
believe North Korea has enough fissile material for thirty-five weapons
and it only declares thirty?” Frank Aum, a former senior adviser on
North Korea in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, who is now at the
U. S. Institute of Peace, told me. “Will the Administration say, ‘That’s
good enough,’ and declare victory?”
Shortly after his summit with Kim, in Singapore, on June 12th, Trump
declared that North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat.
