It Is Time for a Realistic Bargain

With North Korea

Denuclearization Is Probably Out of Reach for Now—
but It Might Be Possible to Reduce the Nuclear Threat
BY
ERIC BREWER AND SUE MI TERRY
March 25, 2021
ERIC BREWER is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies who has served on the National Security Council and the National
Intelligence Council.

SUE MI TERRY is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies who has served on the National Security Council and the National
Intelligence Council.

North Korea’s recent missile tests serve as a reminder that U.S. President
Joe Biden faces no more intractable foreign policy problem than Kim Jong
Un. Biden’s predecessors have tried every approach to North Korea short of
war. Over the years, a succession of U.S. presidents have gradually tightened
sanctions, including through multiple UN Security Council resolutions,
while keeping the door open to diplomacy. President Donald Trump amped
up the threat of military action with rhetoric about “fire and fury”—then
tried unsuccessfully to convince Kim to give up his nuclear weapons at
three high-profile summits in 2018 and 2019.
Throughout all of this, North Korea has continued to produce nuclear
weapons at a rapid rate. Estimates vary, but the country produces sufficient
fissile material to make 12 new weapons per year and could now have
enough for a total of 60 weapons or more. In addition to short- and
medium-range missiles that can target Japan and South Korea, North
Korea also produces missiles capable of reaching all of the United States.
Pyongyang might not have perfected this technology, but Americans can
no longer assume they are safe from a North Korean nuclear strike. And the
North is working on missiles that it can launch faster, that are more difficult
to detect, and that are harder for ballistic missile defenses to stop.            

Launching a preventive strike on North Korea—as Trump reportedly

contemplated doing in 2017—is a terrible idea. Such a strike would be
unlikely to eliminate Pyongyang’s entire arsenal but would be virtually
certain to spark a regional war—and potentially a nuclear one. Another
round of all-or-nothing diplomacy aimed at convincing North Korea to
relinquish its nuclear weapons in return for sanctions relief would come
with less downside risk but is unlikely to be any more successful than
Trump’s attempts in 2018 and 2019. And as North Korea reminded the
Biden administration earlier this month by reportedly failing to respond to
backchannel outreach, Pyongyang gets a vote on engagement, as well.
Doing nothing as sanctions continue to bite—a containment strategy—
may be safer than either war or diplomacy, but it still allows North Korea to
expand its nuclear and missile programs.

There is another way the Biden administration could approach North

Korea, however. It could explore a more limited strategy, one that stops
trying to convince Kim to disarm entirely and instead seeks to slow the
growth of his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and reduce the risk of
war. In other words, the United States could seek a freeze or a partial
rollback of North Korea’s capabilities and a lessening of tensions, rather
than the total elimination of Kim’s nuclear arsenal. The United States
should not give up the long-term goal of denuclearization, but in the
meantime, it could try to strike a more realistic bargain and prevent the
threat from getting worse.

Washington should test whether a limited arms control approach could

work. Such a strategy is not guaranteed to succeed—far from it. But its
odds are better than any of the other options at this point, as long as the
Biden administration is clear about what it expects to achieve. A good arms
control agreement that verifiably reduces the threat from North Korea’s
nuclear weapons without endangering the security of Japan or South Korea
—and that does not give the North any unearned concessions—would be a
considerable improvement over the current standoff, but a bad agreement
could be worse than the status quo.

GIVE AND TAKE

There is a wide range of limits that the United States might seek as part of
an arms control approach, everything from shutting down North Korea’s
Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center to halting the country’s production of
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The United States might also
pursue measures—perhaps even unilaterally—aimed at reducing the risk of
inadvertent war, such as a strategic dialogue with North Korea.

Washington should focus its initial efforts on limiting North Korean

capabilities that could pose the biggest threat to U.S. security and that
Pyongyang might consider giving up—likely those capabilities that it has
not yet mastered. This means focusing primarily on delivery systems rather
than on nuclear warheads themselves. For instance, the Biden
administration could ask for limits or prohibitions on the development,
testing, production, and deployment of long-range solid-fuel missiles,
multiple reentry vehicles, and ICBM warheads. Mastery of these
capabilities would enable North Korea to launch missiles faster and with
less warning, improve its ability to successfully strike the United States, and
potentially evade U.S. missile defenses. The United States could also seek to
ban the development of tactical nuclear weapons that Kim might view as
more “usable” and that might therefore generate greater instability during a
future crisis.

Freezing all fissile material production—and thereby preventing North

Korea from increasing the size of its nuclear arsenal—would also be
worthwhile. Yet it is not just the size of Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal that
matters; it is also the quality. For this reason, the Biden administration
should be cautious about entering into an agreement that merely slows the
growth of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal—but does not stop the
improvement of its warheads or delivery systems—in return for substantial
concessions.

In exchange for serious, verifiable limits on emerging North Korean

capabilities, the United States could offer incentives such as waivers for U.S.
unilateral sanctions or the removal of some UN sanctions on North Korea’s
exports or oil imports. Washington should insist on a “snapback”
mechanism similar to the one contained within the 2015 Iran nuclear deal
in case North Korea cheats, although China and Russia may oppose doing
so after the Trump administration abused that provision of the Iran deal. In
addition to sanctions relief, the Biden administration could consider
declaring an end to the Korean War, allowing exchanges of liaison offices (a
measure that was on the table at Trump’s 2019 summit with Kim in
Hanoi), and restarting inter-Korean joint projects. Ultimately, however, the
North will likely value sanctions relief above anything else.
The Biden administration must not pursue an arms control deal at any cost.
Kim will no doubt drive a hard bargain for any attempt to limit North
Korea’s ability to quickly and reliably target the United States—which he
likely views as a key component of his deterrent—if he does not reject U.S.
demands outright. Any U.S. incentives would need to be commensurate
with North Korea’s verifiable concessions.  

What Kim offered Trump during the Hanoi summit in 2019 was a bad deal
and a good reminder of how far apart the United States and North Korea
may be when it comes to even smaller agreements. Pyongyang offered the
permanent dismantlement of its Yongbyon Nuclear Research facility—an
older complex that is likely not its only source of material for nuclear
weapons—in exchange for the lifting five UN resolutions passed in 2016
and 2017 that imposed crippling sanctions on the North’s exports of iron
and coal as well as its imports of petroleum. While Kim insisted that this
was “partial” sanctions relief, the removal of these sanctions would have
unlocked billions of dollars in revenues that Pyongyang could have then
funneled back into the very programs the United States seeks to halt.
Trump was right to reject this offer, and Biden should not accept such a
one-sided deal, either.

KEEPING ALLIES ONSIDE

Should the Biden administration decide to pursue arms control
negotiations with North Korea, it will need to work hard to keep Japan and
South Korea—the United States’ two most important regional allies—on
the same page. Japan and some officials in South Korea will worry that any
kind of limited deal focusing on long-range missiles will solidify North
Korea’s nuclear status in perpetuity and leave short-range capabilities—to
which both countries are particularly vulnerable—in place. Those fears
would be exacerbated if Kim demands adjustments to U.S. and allied
military capabilities and postures that mitigate North Korean vulnerabilities
but leave Japan and South Korea exposed to North Korean attack. For
example, if Biden seeks limits on long-range North Korean systems, Kim
may very well ask for limits to U.S. missile defenses designed to protect
allies and even the U.S. homeland; restrictions on the deployment of
nuclear-capable U.S. aircraft, missiles, and ships to the region; or
restrictions on South Korea’s burgeoning missile program or “kill chain”
strategy, which calls for preemptive strikes against the North’s artillery and
missiles in the event of an imminent attack.

These asks are consistent with North Korea’s long-standing strategy of

using talks to gain international recognition as a nuclear power and to drive
a wedge between the United States and its allies. Biden will therefore need
to weigh the possible effects of negotiations on deterrence, ensure that U.S.
allies are onboard with any concessions, and ensure that North Korea’s
reciprocal actions are commensurate and verifiable. Biden will also need to
examine how such actions would bear on his China policy and vice versa.
The deployment of U.S. intermediate-range missile systems to the region in
order to deter China, for instance, would almost certainly make arms
control talks with North Korea more difficult.

The biggest obstacle to an agreement with North Korea, however, will not
be allied apprehension but Pyongyang’s resistance to verification. As hard as
it is to reach a deal with North Korea, history has repeatedly shown that
enforcing one is even harder. The North is deeply resistant to intrusive
verification measures, in particular the deployment of international
inspectors, which it fears will allow the United States to map its nuclear
facilities for a military strike. Pyongyang allowed international inspectors to
visit the Yongbyon facility after it signed a framework agreement to stop its
plutonium production with the President Bill Clinton’s administration in
1994, but the deal collapsed eight years later after the United States
discovered that the North was secretly enriching uranium. Subsequent
attempts by President George W. Bush’s administration to revive limits on
the North Korean nuclear program in 2005 and 2007 failed because the
two sides could not reach an agreement on verification.

For the Biden administration to reach an agreement—and for Congress

and Republicans to go along with it—verification would need to be robust.
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal subjected key Iranian nuclear facilities to
around-the-clock monitoring and gave international inspectors the ability
to request access to any undeclared sites. But Republicans and even a
handful of Democrats criticized the accord as insufficiently transparent.
North Korea has never agreed to even that level of verification. From a
technical standpoint, verification would be easier for a deal that focused on
a specific number of sites involved in the fuel cycle, because international
inspectors are well equipped for that type of work. But any arrangement
that covered facilities related to warheads or missile production would be
more challenging. U.S. intelligence could plug some gaps, but on-the-
ground inspections would be necessary.  

WORTH A SHOT
An arms control approach might well meet the same fate as other failed
U.S. strategies for dealing with North Korea, but the Biden administration
should still test whether it can work. Last year was one of North Korea’s
toughest since the famine of the 1990s. The measures that Kim took to save
his country from COVID-19—including closing the border with China—
did more economic damage than sanctions have done. Kim has not been
easily swayed by economic pressure in the past, but it is possible he is
desperate enough for sanctions relief—and confident enough in his existing
nuclear and missile capabilities—that he would trade some limits on his
weapons programs for a significant reduction in sanctions.

Such a strategy would not be risk free, and just because arms control aims
for less doesn’t mean it will be any easier to achieve. Unlike the distant
objective of total denuclearization, a limited arms control agreement would
force tough, near-term tradeoffs with other U.S. policy goals. But given the
failure of existing approaches, arms control is at least worth a shot. As long
as Biden doesn’t make premature sanctions concessions in return for empty
North Korean promises, the worst that can happen is that his
administration winds up back where it started with the current
containment regime. 

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