Archive for February, 2007

Progress toward denuclearizing the Korean peninsula

Posted on: February 27th, 2007 by Ernie Regehr

When the six party talks[i] finally produced an agreement to reaffirm the common goal of the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula , along with setting out specific measures to be taken toward that end, there were two primary reactions to the deal. Some welcomed it, saying it was far too long in coming and was a deal that could have been won already in 2002. Others disparaged it, saying it rewarded North Korea ‘s bad behavior.

It is certainly true that with the cooperation of the United States the current deal could have been reached much earlier. The basic elements of the deal go back, not only to 2002, but to 1994 and are really a slightly altered version of the 1994 Framework Agreement reached by the Clinton Administration. And what the deal actually rewards is not bad behavior but an end to bad behavior. This time the deal is linked specifically to behavior and refers to the principle of “action for action” – that is, neither side takes action on the basis of a declaration by the other, but each party acts on the basis of concrete action by the other.

That means in the next 60 days there will need to be verified evidence of action. North Korea, or the DPRK (Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea), must shut down production in the one declared facility it has that is capable of producing fissile materials and must allow it to be placed under the seal and verification of the International Atomic Energy Agency.[ii] That is really the main and essential requirement of Pyonyang. It is a clear and unambiguous action and it is intended to produce another pretty clear action, an initial shipment of 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil.

The February 13, 2007 agreement is partly new and mostly old because it is intended to implement the September 19, 2005 agreement, which in turn more or less updated the 1994 deal.[iii] As the BBC put it: “Prominent members of the US President George W. Bush’s administration make no secret of their contempt for [the Clinton deal, but] now, after years of confrontation, they have signed up to something that looks suspiciously similar – a nuclear freeze in return for economic and diplomatic incentives.”[iv]

A primary difference between 1994 and 2007 is that in 1994 it was a bilateral agreement between the United States and the DPRK, while in 2007 it is a six-party agreement, giving key neighbors, China, South Korea, and Japan, a stake in assuring success this time round.

Success is far from guaranteed. DPRK is required to produce “a list of all its nuclear programs” (Feb. 13/07) and that will prove a challenge. In 2002 the United States accused the DPRK of a clandestine uranium enrichment program. The DPRK at first seemed to admit such a program, but then denied it and has steadfastly denied it since. Washington has never presented public evidence to back up its accusations, which in turn have become increasingly vague over time. The DPRK is unlikely to list what it says does not exist, to which Washington and other skeptics are likely to reply that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Things could go on in that vain at some length. In the end, to build confidence that an enrichment program truly does not exist will require extensive with cooperation with IAEA inspectors. Public discussion of the matter now suggests that the North Koreans did try to acquire enrichment equipment, contrary to the provisions of the 1994 deal, but there is no evidence of the extent to which they were successful and Pyongyang continues to deny the program.

The Globe and Mail carried an op-ed by John O’Sullivan[v] of Washington’s Hudson Institute that typified the claim that the downfall of earlier deals was simple matter of North Korea ‘s cheating and that the new deal rewards bad behavior. In 2002, however, it was the Bush Administration that cut off the energy assistance element of the 1994 agreement amidst Washington ‘s aggressive accusations of another advanced but hidden weapons program (uranium enrichment). Kim Jong-il responded predictably, expelling the international inspectors and pulling out of the NPT.

O’Sullivan also reflected the views of other critics when he wrote that the 1994 Clinton Framework Agreement with North Korea is the reason Kim Jong-il now has “more nuclear weapons.” In fact, the Clinton deal shut down North Korea ‘s plutonium operation, and throughout the deal’s eight-year run not an ounce of weapons material was produced there. That all ended in 2002 with the Bush Administration’s dispute with Pyongyang. It was under the Bush Administration that Pyongyang resumed production of fissile material and successfully (at least partly so) weaponized it.

A number of elements of the agreement involve bilateral issues – between the DPRK and the United States and the DPRK and Japan. Others require unspecified levels of economic, energy, and humanitarian assistance to the DPRK.

The regime that Washington had labeled part of an Axis of Evil is now to enter into bilateral talks and normalized relations with the US: “The DPRK and the US will start bilateral talks aimed at resolving pending bilateral issues and moving toward full diplomatic relations. The US will begin the process of removing the designation of the DPRK as a state-sponsor of terrorism and advance the process of terminating the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act with respect to the DPRK.”

This welcome turnaround by Washington is seen by some as a deliberate decision to go easy on the DPRK and focus the heavy hand on Iran. On the other hand, the new approach to North Korea could also become a model for dealing with Iran – or would that be too much to expect.


[i] The six are, DPRK, ROK, China, Russia, Japan, and the United States .

[ii] The facility in question is the Yongbyon nuclear reactor and accompanying reprocessing facility. The six-party Joint Statement of February 13, 2007 says this facility will be “shut down and seal[ed] for the purpose of eventual abandonment.” The joint statement is available at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2007/february/80479.htm.

[iii] See Ploughshares Briefing 06/6, Ernie Regehr, “Responding to the North Korean bomb” (October 2006).

[iv] Charles Scanlon, “The end of a long confrontation,” BBC News, Feb 13, 2007 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6357853.stm).

[v]”No question, this is a bad deal,” Feb. 21/07.

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Hope and the Doomsday Clock

Posted on: February 18th, 2007 by Ernie Regehr

I began reading Barack Obama’s current best-selling book mainly because of its cover – notably the wonderful phrase of its title: “the audacity of hope.” Obama says he first heard the phrase in a sermon in his home church in Chicago , and now he uses it to advance his own political agenda and ambitions – and that is perfectly fine with me. He talks a lot about “the American spirit” and the need to transcend political discord and focus on a new and compelling common vision. The hope for this kind of renewed sense of common purpose, he says, is embedded in “the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary.”

I haven’t finished reading the book – but I will. I want to hear more from an American politician who seems to reject cynicism and instead nurtures a sense of what is or could be possible.

As I was getting caught up in Obama’s mood of “can do” optimism, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that, on the advice of an impressive gathering of world-renowned analysts and scientists, the Bulletin’s famous doomsday clock was to be moved two minutes closer to midnight. It was 7 minutes, and now is five – and the midnight hour is what you don’t want to reach.[i]

These eminent contemporary prophets go beyond the nuclear peril to also include dramatic changes in the planet’s environmental and climatic conditions. Here is what they say about the nuclear peril: “Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.”

One could elaborate at length, but the message is clear. And then the scientists turn to climate change.

The effects of climate change, they say, may be less dramatic in the short term, but there is no denying that in the coming decades we will face environmental change that will lead to “drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.” The concerns of the Atomic Scientists were, of course, subsequently validated by the report of the International Panel on Climate Change.

Obama seems to have it right – hope, that is our collective hope about our collective future, does seem rather audacious in the face of these doomsday scenarios.

And, of course, there are many facing much more immediate doomsday realities. They don’t read the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and don’t have the luxury of debating changes to a symbolic doomsday clock. In the lives of the world’s marginalized, the hour of midnight has already struck and the bells of alarm ring out to a world that remains steadfastly deaf.

Darfur is the current public word for cries for help that go unheeded. But it is unfortunately a phenomenon that also has other place names. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was in a small room in Nairobi with a Kenyan friend and colleague and three Somali Imams, including Sh. Sariff Ahmed, who had just arrived from Somalia. For a decade and a half, as is by now well-known, Somalia has been without a central government, seemingly a land of perennial despair. The Imams had come to Nairobi to report to diplomats and NGOs and anyone who would listen on conditions in the wake of the latest rounds of Somali fighting – at the end of last year there was the takeover of the capital, Mogadishu, by a national movement of local Islamic Courts, and then a few weeks ago the same Islamic Courts group was driven from the capital with the aid of the armed forces of Ethiopia.[ii]

These three religious men vividly recounted some of the ongoing suffering and perils of Somalis, but what caught me off guard was how quickly they moved to talking about what could and should be done for Somalis to finally turn the corner to greater stability.

They did talk about external assistance, emphasizing the need for international peacekeeping forces (to replace the withdrawing Ethiopians), and especially the importance of getting foreign interests to stop making things worse. They talked in particular about ongoing arms shipments to the various groups and factions enmeshed in conflict – the ubiquitous war lords, of course, as well as what they described as Islamist extremists.

But they also talked about the new opportunities: a new transitional government might gradually come into place; the clan rivalry that helped to fuel much of the decades long fighting was giving way to an impatience with the pervasive chaos; schools were opening to meet the thirst for education. Above all, their demeanor and conversation reflected energy and expectation about the future.

I can think of no better definition of audacity than their assertion of hope in the face of their reality. Their’s was the kind of realism that distinguishes hope from fantasy.

A few weeks ago, there was another display of welcome realism when Henry Kissinger and several other similar luminaries, all of them now apparently lapsed Cold Warriors, issued a statement to insist that the United States must become a leader in the pursuit of a nuclear weapon free world.[iii]

It’s not that Mr. Kissinger has gone soft, I assumer he’s still a cold, hard realist, but I guess he’s finally getting a handle on what reality actually is – notably, the fact that you can’t dissuade, by argument or by bombs, others from pursuing nuclear weapons as long as you regard them as the foundation of your own security.

Obama makes a point of linking hope to compromise and accommodation – serious compromise, even of dearly held values. In a nice passage in the Epilogue of The Audacity of Hope, he recounts how a mentor and veteran civil rights worker had cautioned him about entering either law or politics.

“As a rule,” Obama was told, “both law and politics require compromise not just on issues, but on more fundamental things – your values and ideals.” Obama explains: “he wasn’t saying that to dissuade me. It was just a fact. It was because of his unwillingness to compromise that he had always declined [to enter politics]. ‚ÄòIt’s not that compromise is inherently wrong,’ he said to me. ‚ÄòI just don’t find it satisfying.'”

I must say I was hugely relieved and pleased, however, when Obama admits that “I am perhaps more tolerant of compromise on the issues than my friend was.” Sticking to your position through thick or thin may be more satisfying, but it’s not a formula to fuel hope for peace and social harmony. The other day I heard an interview with Drew Gilpin Faust, the president-elect of Harvard, and she used the phrase “the polarization of unchallengeable certainties.”[iv] Perhaps only a president of Harvard can get away with using a phrase like that in public, but she was making an effective case about public discourse that fails to genuinely engage differing views and perspectives with a view to finding common ground. Competition between “unchallengeable certainties” is not a good foundation for politics; rigid certainty does more to foreclose hope than to nurture it.

The Somalis I met in Nairobi know very well what happens when “unchallengeable certainties” clash. In fact, one of the fundamental conditions of peace, a fundamental requirement of a Community or of a State being at peace with itself, is the unsatisfying art of compromise. A successful State is one with a set of institutions that can successfully mediate – one that can manage compromise – among a broad range of conflicting interests, ambitions, and values. States need mediating institutions – formal ones like Parliaments and Courts, but also informal ones like NGOs, communities of worship, professional organizations, arts groups; institutions that help people focus less on their own very particular ambitions and interests and more on common objectives and shared values. States without those institutions are soon failed states, foundering in the grip of competing extremes.

I trust it is not simply a measure of the depth of one’s despair to cling to the likes of Mr. Kissinger or the travails of Mogadishu for signs of hope. Actually, I think we can take them as reminders that hope emerges in the strangest of places – from the lapsed Cold Warriors of Washington, to Somali Imams, to the writings of unproven politicians.

In collectively contemplating the full message of a doomsday clock edging closer to midnight, audacious hope can and should shape our response – hope that is built on sober assessments of reality, on unswerving commitments to action, and on persistence in the search for common ground.


[i] The January/February 2007 issue explains the decision to move the clock and carries an impressive collection of articles and reflections on the implications.

[ii] See the Jan. 5/07 posting here: “Somalia: Is Iraq or Uganda the Model?” (somaliat).

[iii] See the Jan. 30/07 posting here: “When Kissinger promotes nuclear weapons abolition” (whenkiss).

[iv] The News Hour, WNED, Feb. 12/07 (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june07/harvard_02-12.html).

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Ending the “hurting stalemate” on Iran

Posted on: February 12th, 2007 by Ernie Regehr

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has surprised observers by failing to mark the anniversary of the Islamic revolution with a further escalation of nuclear tension. He was widely expected, over the past weekend, to claim breakthroughs in Iran ‘s nuclear, especially uranium enrichment, program. Instead his tone was conciliatory. He promised to remain within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and declared Iran ready for a new set of talks.[i]

Somewhat more predictably, Ahmadinejad did not agree to remove the central obstacle to such talks, that is Iran’s continuing experimentation in uranium enrichment – a technology for making civilian reactor fuel, but also applicable to making nuclear weapons if the enrichment is taken to high enough levels.

But if a crack in the consensus within the non-proliferation community on how to deal with Iran were to develop, it would probably be over the question of whether a suspension of enrichment activity should continue to be a prerequisite to fulsome engagement with Iran. While the Security Council is now of a single mind on the issue, no small achievement, the expert and advocacy non-proliferation community, while largely supporting that view, is not unanimous.

In the past, Tehran has put forward compromise suggestions that would allow it to enrich a small amount of uranium for research purposes, while agreeing to forgo industrial-level enrichment and to rely on foreign sources, notably Russia , for reactor fuel.[ii]

German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung last year also expressed the view that Iran should be allowed to enrich uranium if it remained at the experimental level and if it was under the reliable scrutiny of the IAEA. “One cannot forbid Iran from doing what other countries in the world are doing in accordance with international law. The key point is whether a step toward nuclear weapons is taken. This cannot happen,” Jung said. According to the Inter Press Service, he insisted that close IAEA oversight could confirm whether Tehran ‘s nuclear program was actually peaceful. “IAEA inspections can provide those assurances through monitoring,” he was quoted as saying. “That is not a problem.”[iii]

By confining itself to research on uranium enrichment, it would be following a much more restrictive path than other states, notably Japan , that are in full compliance with IAEA inspection requirements. Japan is fully engaged in industrial level uranium enrichment, but of course the big difference is that Japan has been open and transparent, whereas Iran has been clandestine and deceitful. But even that distinction suggests that the real objective regarding Iran ought to be transparency and compliance with IAEA safeguards, not a ban on non-weapons enrichment.

Even if Ahmadinejad’s conciliatory demeanor were to hold, he and his country are a long way from winning back the trust of the international community – an essential requirement for any scheme to normalize relations with Iran. One measure of the depth of the mistrust is the unprecedented level of consensus at the UN Security Council. Despite Russia’s strong nuclear links to Iran and the intense suspicion of both Russia and China regarding American motives and actions, the permanent five members of the Security Council (the P5) have come together in a unanimous demand that Iran end all enrichment activity or face escalating sanctions and other unspecified consequences.

That in turn has set up the conditions for a “hurting stalemate”[iv] – that is, a stalemate that is contrary to the interests of all the parties, even if the resort to American/Israeli military force is kept out, as it surely must be, of the equation.

Under this hurting stalemate non-proliferation advocates, notably the three European Union states (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) heading negotiations with Iran, must watch while Iran continues to refuse full cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and edges slowly closer to a nuclear weapons capability, although not necessarily toward a clear intention to acquire such a weapon. Iran , on the other hand faces escalating sanctions and continuing exclusion from beneficial international economic institutions and from cooperation in civilian nuclear power generation that could, by its own account at least, be a welcome diversification of its energy source.

Timothy Garton Ash, a respected analyst frequently turned to by the Globe and Mail, looks for a compelling mixture of carrots and sticks to end this hurting stalemate and to persuade Iran to meet its IAEA obligations and verifiably forgo pursuit of nuclear weapons. He rightly, and thankfully, insists that the threat of military attack be excluded from the array of available sticks,[v] but then more or less concludes there are few prospects that other measures will succeed.

He does, however, hint that it may be time to think again about a compromise on the matter of research-level enrichment. He says “the White House should open direct, bilateral talks with Iran, without conditions,” and that ultimately the US should seek full diplomatic and economic relations with Tehran, “provided Iran desists from developing nuclear weapons and supporting terrorists.”

Does entering talks “without conditions” mean that negotiations should begin even though Iran continues experimental enrichment activity? And is limited experimental uranium enrichment compatible with a verifiable assurance that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons?

Most observers are reluctant to answer in the affirmative on either question, but it may yet turn out that a “yes” on both counts will be the most effective way to call Iran ‘s bluff.


[i] Doug Saunders, ” Iran warms to nuclear talks,” The Globe and Mail, February 12, 2007.

[ii] US, Russia reject Iran Compromise,” BBC News, March 7, 2006 [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4784262.stm].

[iii] Garth Porter, “German Official Urges Compromise on Iran Enrichment,” Inter Press Service, July 4, 2006 (http://www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=9238).

[iv] Bruno Dupre, “Iran Nuclear Crisis: The Right Approach,” The Carnegie Endowmen for International Peace, February 2007 [http://www.carnegieendowment.org/npp/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=19002].

[v] Timothy Garton Ash, “Don’t bomb Iran – don’t let Iran get the bomb,” The Globe and Mail, February 9, 2007.

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