Stanford Report, Jan. 28, 2004

For North Korea, key to diplomacy is market reform
Nuclear weapons expert says context for negotiations changed

BY LISA TREI

Market reforms introduced into North Korea's ailing economy in mid-2002 are providing a new incentive for the country to resolve a high-stakes crisis with the United States over its nuclear program, according to John W. Lewis, a professor emeritus who visited Pyongyang this month.

"It's still a dictatorship; it's still a state controlled by the Communist Party and the army," Lewis told Stanford Report in a Jan. 22 interview. "But the key point is that it's beginning to open up; it's beginning to be a market economy."

Lewis, an expert on China's nuclear weapons program, led an unofficial U.S. delegation to North Korea from Jan. 6 to 10 at the invitation of the country's government. A co-founder of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Stanford Institute for International Studies, Lewis has visited North Korea 10 times since 1987. He is experienced in track-two diplomacy, which brings together representatives from disputing groups to discuss problems in a neutral setting.

Despite pressure from some interest groups in North Korea to maintain a "military first" strategy, Lewis said, market reforms are changing the context for diplomatic negotiations. "We're at a crossroads here," he said. "Those reforms of 2002 are dependent on their opening up to the outside world. In order to continue this, to move it along, they are certain they've got to get rid of that [nuclear weapons] program. I think settlement is no longer a vain hope."

The U.S. delegation's primary goal was to tour a secretive nuclear weapons complex in Yongbyon, but the group also discussed economic reform, academic exchanges, human rights issues and stepping up recovery of the remains of 8,300 U.S. soldiers listed as "missing in action" from the Korean War.

Lewis invited Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Jack Pritchard, who resigned last August as special envoy for negotiations with North Korea. Two Senate Foreign Relations Committee experts on Asian affairs, Keith Luse and Frank Januzzi, also joined the delegation.

On Jan. 21, Hecker testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that based on what he was permitted to see at Yongbyon, North Koreans had reprocessed 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into plutonium to be used for weapons, despite previous assurances to the contrary. "However, I saw nothing and spoke to no one who could convince me that they could build a nuclear device with that metal, and that they could weaponize such a device into a delivery vehicle," he stated.

Hecker also discussed the contentious issue of North Korea's supposed admission in October 2002 that it had a clandestine highly enriched uranium (HEU) program, in violation of the 1994 Agreed Framework. Hecker said a controversy exists concerning whether the North Koreans actually admitted to this in a meeting with U.S. officials. "The disagreement concerns a difference between what DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] officials believe they said and what U.S. officials believe they heard," he testified. Hecker told the committee that the North Koreans insisted they had no HEU program and "had chosen the plutonium path to a deterrent."

During the trip, North Korea's Vice Minister Kim Gye Gwan said his country wants a peaceful solution to the nuclear crisis and a denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Hecker stated: "[Kim] emphasized that the DPRK has been very flexible and very patient, adding, 'I should note that the time that has been lost [in dealing with us] has not been beneficial to the U.S. side. With an additional lapse of time, our nuclear arsenal could grow in quality and quantity. The outcome has not been a success for the U.S.'"

According to Lewis, an outdated view of North Korea as a closed hermit kingdom devastated by floods and famine persists in the United States. "That image is not the right image today," he said. "The economy is improving dramatically," although, he cautioned, change is largely confined to urban areas and life remains stark for most people in the countryside. "A lot are still [living] on the margin," he said.

During the visit to Pyongyang, Lewis visited a sprawling public market crammed with food, consumer goods and shoppers. He said it reminded him of the early capitalist markets in the former Soviet Union and China. "It was wall-to-wall people," he said. South Korean funding is also pouring in to build a large industrial park just north of the Demilitarized Zone, he said. "They've got the Internet coming in and cell phones. They're trying to build an infrastructure for this."

The United States and North Korea share a long history of mistrust and broken promises that will be difficult to overcome, Lewis noted. But, rather than look at past failures, the professor said he told his hosts, "Let's start from today," matching "word for word" with "action for action."

If each side fails to take advantage of the present diplomatic opportunity, Lewis argued, North Korea "will become a nuclear state, it will be semi-isolated or we will have war. War would be horrendous. We've got three choices, and two of them are awful. So let's at least give all attention to a possible settlement."

John W. Lewis