‘Seize The Day’: Asian Financial Crisis Offers Opportunity To End Dangerous Appeasement of North Korea

(Washington, D.C.): If every dark cloud does indeed have a silver lining, the ongoing
financial
crisis in South Korea — and East Asia more generally — may have a strategically critical one. As
Victor Gilinsky and Henry Sokolski observed in an op.ed. published in Monday’s
Washington
Post:

“The South Korean financial crisis is about to undermine the nuclear deal the United
States struck with North Korea back in 1994….[The fact that] the nuclear deal with the
North may have to go back to the drawing-board…isn’t all bad. The twin-reactor
deal never made much sense except on the symbolic level — for North
Korea.”
(Emphasis added.)

In their article (see the attached), Dr. Gilinsky, a former
two-term member of the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Mr. Sokolski, who served as Deputy for Non-proliferation
Policy in the Bush Administration Defense Department and now directs the Non-proliferation
Policy Education Center, powerfully reinforce arguments the Center for Security Policy has been
making ever since the Clinton Administration decided to accommodate — rather than
thwart —
Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions. In 1994, the Center warned:

“The [Carter/Clinton-brokered Agreed Framework accord] obliges the United States
and its allies to pony up untold billions — funds that will wind up providing life support
for the repressive North Korean regime. The total expenditure is unknown at this time.

“It will depend upon the quantity and price of the oil that will be supplied for the
ten years or so that it will take to bring two new 1000-megawatt light water
reactors on- line. Then, there is the roughly $4 billion cost (probably
conservative) associated with the reactors themselves. In addition, and as yet
unmentioned by the Clinton Administration, is the price tag for upgrading North
Korea’s obsolete power grid so as to avoid a catastrophic overload when the new
reactors are plugged into it.”⁽¹⁾

A Good Opportunity to Pull the Plug

Since the South Koreans no longer have the funds necessary to pay for the lion’s share of this
misbegotten initiative, the question Sokolski and Gilinsky rhetorically pose — “What if the South
can’t pay?” — must be urgently addressed. The Center seconds their response that the
U.S.
should not be euchred into paying for this ill-conceived plan:

“There never was any suggestion about the U.S. taxpayer picking up the tab, so that’s
out. Or should be. Administration officials swore up and down about this when they
defended the original deal before Congress. (It wouldn’t hurt to make sure the
current South Korean bailout contributions don’t contain any hidden pass-through for
the nuclear deal.) The United States has already borne the initial burden,
paying more than $80 million so far to provide North Korea with half a million tons
of
heavy fuel oil per year (doing so until the first reactor is built was part of the very
generous deal). The reactors were supposed to be paid for by South Korea — the
country whose national security was most immediately endangered….” (Emphasis
added.)

Dr. Gilinsky and Mr. Sokolski conclude: “We should change the
deal. If the North needs
electric generators, let us find the lowest cost solution — by putting the project out for bid….We
will undoubtedly get a non-nuclear result that will come in sooner and at a fraction of the cost —
maybe something the South Koreans can still afford.”

U.S.-Sponsored Proliferation?

Such a fundamental change is all the more necessary in light of one other implication of the
Agreed Framework: It could well have the effect of exacerbating the proliferation
danger posed
by North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction. In Gilinsky and Sokolski’s words:

“The new reactors, while harder for the North to use for plutonium production,
would produce more plutonium than the small indigenous ones they would
replace. In fact, the new reactors, called ‘proliferation-resistant’ by the State
Department, are essentially the same as those the State Department labeled a
proliferation risk when Russia talked of supplying them to Iran.”

The Center voiced similar concerns in 1994:

“The nuclear reactors to be provided by the United States and its allies are not immune
to proliferation. Fully one-half of the nuclear waste they produce is comprised of
Plutonium 239….
Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary recently recklessly declassified information
that establishes such material can be utilized to make nuclear devices. And if one
is content with using such materials for terrorist purposes — such as laying down
deadly radioactive contamination on populations or territory — Plutonium 239 can be
readily utilized in radiological weapons.“⁽²⁾

Unfortunately, should the North Korean nuclear deal turn out to compound the danger
posed by Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction program, it would hardly be the only instance
of the Clinton Administration pursuing non-proliferation policies that make matters worse. In
fact, a report recently released by the majority of the Senate Government Affairs Subcommittee
on International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services, chaired by Senator Thad Cochran
(R-MS), declares that, thanks to “the Administration’s policy of liberalizing export
control
restrictions on dual-use technologies like supercomputers” and otherwise making WMD-relevant
information and hardware widely available, the “United States has itself become a
proliferator, however unintentionally.“⁽³⁾
(Emphasis added.)

The Bottom Line

If there is any substance at all to President Clinton’s oft-stated pledged to stop the
spread
of weapons of mass destruction, it is incumbent upon him to discontinue an initiative that
will serve only Pyongyang’s interest in acquiring nuclear-weapons relevant material. It
makes no sense in its present form for any of the parties and must be reworked to
ensure it
does serve those of the Western underwriters.

– 30 –

1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Whistling Past Gallucci Gulch: Appeasement Will
Assure — Not Prevent — Conflict with Pyongyang ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_103″>No. 94-D 103, 19 October 1994).

2. See the above-referenced Center paper.

3. For more on the Cochran Subcommittee’s report, see
A Policy Indictment: Sen. Cochran’s
Subcommittee Documents Clinton Incompetence/Malfeasance On Proliferation
(98-D 04, 12
January 1998).