30 Years of North Korea Nuclear Issue: Why hasn't it been resolved?

Hyun-ik Hong

Senior Research Fellow

hyunik@sejong.org

For 30 years since the North Korean nuclear crisis, North Korea has threatened to develop nuclear weapons and use them to devastate South Korea and attack the United States. If the North Korean regime's objective is to survive at all costs, South Korea and the United States have set as their objective the denuclearization of North Korea. However North Korea has nearly achieved this goal, and South Korea's and the United States' security policies on the Korean Peninsula have failed. However, the South Korean and U.S. governments, as well as most experts, have placed the blame on North Korea's maneuvering and deception, and have largely ignored, without analysis or reflection of their North Korean policy and frameworks which played a significant role to lose the opportunities of denuclearization of North Korea. As a result, North Korean nuclear talks and negotiations are unlikely to succeed, North Korea's substantial nuclear arsenal and advancement are a foregone conclusion, and North Korea routinely poses nuclear threats to South Korea and the United States.

First, Secretary of State Albright's visit to Pyongyang in 2000 raised trust between North Korea and the United States to the level that would precede the summit. However, the Bush administration since 2001, used its distrust of North Korea to invoke special nuclear inspections before settlement of key components of the reactor, which was a violation of the Agreed Framework between the U.S. and North Korea. In addition, the pressure to relocate North Korean troops near the demilitarized zone destroyed the trust between the two countries.

The U.S., which signed the September 19, 2005, Joint Statement, reserving the provision of the light-water reactor to North Korea, had already sanctioned North Korea three days earlier when the Treasury Department sanctioned the Delta Asia Financial Group (BDA) bank in Macau. North Korea retaliated, conducting its first nuclear test a year later in October 2006.

Finally, Kim Jong Un has rejected any dialogue with the United States because he believes that the Biden administration's failure to implement the 2018 Singapore Summit agreement and its proposal to return to the table in working-level talks showed a lack of willingness to resolve the issue, and he has adopted a course of nuclear rearmament and hostility toward the United States through self-reliance and cooperation with Russia and China as a strategy for regime survival.

Of course, North Korea's complete disregard for the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and its unwillingness to compromise or implement the agreement, using salami tactics to avoid giving up its nuclear weapons, which it saw as the only means of regime survival, were the main reasons for the failure of denuclearization. But we can also see that there were significant policy errors on our side. At this point, the government needs to persuade the U.S. to pursue a more proactive and aggressive North Korea policy in order to break the current situation, which could lead to North Korea's nuclear escalation without a single inter-Korean dialogue.

In addition, in order for the Biden administration, or the Trump administration after a regime change, to achieve and implement the agreement, it is necessary to take steps to ensure that North Korea trusts the United States. In the end, success in denuclearizing North Korea will depend on building mutual trust and making North Korea see the benefits of peace so that it will voluntarily comply with the agreement once it realizes that deception is self-defeating.​