North Korea in 2011: Countdown to Kim il-Sung’s centenary

Abstract

As the diplomatic standoff in North Korea enters its fourth year, the crisis atmosphere on the Korean peninsula sparked by Pyongyang’s military actions in 2010 has eased. Pyongyang has agreed to return to the diplomatic table, its hand strengthened by advancing its nuclear program in the interim. Washington and Seoul remain reluctant to engage, having been burned by Pyongyang’s clandestine uranium enrichment program unveiled in 2010. The authors argue that re-engagement, with the immediate objective to stop a third nuclear test and prevent further missile tests, is imperative to contain the nuclear threat for now; preventing the nuclear program’s expansion and preparing the way for the ultimate denuclearization of the peninsula—critical goals—must be left to a second step.

• enrichment
• North Korea
• nuclear weapons
• plutonium
• six-party talks
• uranium

Acknowledgments

We thank our Stanford University research assistants Niko Milonopoulos and Peter Davis for background research and critical reading of the manuscript.

Funding

The authors acknowledge the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and the Ploughshares Fund.

Notes

Notes

1 Yongbyon officials claimed an annual throughput capacity was 8,000 separative work units (the measurement of the separation during the enrichment process), indicating that the centrifuges were second-generation, or so-called P-2; first generation centrifuges, by comparison, produce an annual throughput capacity of about 2,000 separative work units (Hecker, 2010).

2 Plutonium is used in all states with nuclear weapons. China switched from HEU to plutonium early on in its program, and Pakistan has begun to employ plutonium in addition to HEU.

3 The New York Times has also reported that the Khan network possessed electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon design (Sanger, 2008).

4 Another recent analysis claims a minimum yield of 5.7 kilotons (Rougier et al., 2011).

5 In June 2011, then-US Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted, “With the continued development of long-range missiles and potentially a road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile and their continued development of nuclear weapons, North Korea is in the process of becoming a direct threat to the United States” (Gates, 2011).

6 There is little chance that North Korea has done this anywhere else. Additionally, reactors are difficult to hide and are vulnerable to foreign intervention, as was demonstrated by Israel’s destruction of the Syrian reactor in 2007.

7 These concerns were previously expressed by Siegfried S. Hecker in 2009 (Hecker, 2009) and have been reinforced by the recent IAEA report by the Board of Governors (IAEA Board of Governors, 2011b).

Additional information

Author biographies

Siegfried S. Hecker is co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, USA. He is also a senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and professor (research) in the department of management science and engineering at Stanford. He was director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986 to 1997. He has made seven trips to North Korea, including four to the Yongbyon nuclear complex.

Robert Carlin is a visiting fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, USA. He spent more than 30 years in the US intelligence community concentrating on North Korea. From 1989 to 2002, he was a division chief in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, also serving as intelligence adviser to the chief US negotiators with North Korea. As such, he participated in all of the key US–DPRK negotiations. From 2002 to 2006, he was political adviser to the executive director of the Korea Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO). He has been to North Korea more than 30 times.