Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — If North Korea attempts to sell nuclear weapons the United States should take military action, former U.S. diplomatic envoy Robert Gallucci said today (see GSN, May 6).

The United States should attempt to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the current nuclear crisis with North Korea, but nuclear proliferation is a line that Pyongyang should not be allowed to cross, according to Gallucci, the chief U.S. negotiator of the 1994 Agreed Framework that froze North Korea’s nuclear development program (see GSN, Feb. 27).

“Transfer [of nuclear materials] is the redline” for military force, Gallucci said.

During negotiations in Beijing two weeks ago, North Korea reportedly demanded steep economic and diplomatic concessions in exchange for dismantling its nuclear and missile development programs. North Korean negotiators also told Assistant U.S. Secretary of State James Kelly that they had nuclear weapons and might test them or export them, depending on U.S. actions, according to reports.

Negotiations “start with extreme positions,” said Gallucci, now the dean of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Washington should pursue a diplomatic resolution to the standoff, but it would be “unacceptable” for nuclear weapons to be transferred to terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, he said.

U.S. officials, including U.S. President George W. Bush, have said they support a diplomatic resolution and a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula but Washington has not eliminated the possibility of a military strike.

In support of a diplomatic solution, Gallucci also said it would be hard to detect the export of a baseball-sized piece of plutonium.

“I don’t know how we can see that coming,” he said, adding that Washington should “deal with the problem long before it gets to that.”