Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON -- A senior White House official said Friday that North Korea is unlikely to eliminate its nuclear arsenal as long as leader Kim Jong Il remains in power (see GSN, May 1).

"Will North Korea, at the end of the day, give up their nuclear weapons?" said Gary Samore, the National Security Council's coordinator for preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. "I think under the current regime, that's unlikely."

Speaking at a Brookings Institution event, Samore said negotiations with Kim's Stalinist regime might, at best, "contain" North Korea's weapons and thereby build confidence among Washington's allies in the region. Pyongyang is estimated to have fewer than 10 nuclear warheads.

"I think that by engaging in negotiations we can at least limit their capacity and we can give reassurances to the other countries in the region that the North Korean nuclear threat is being contained," Samore said. "And therefore, Japan and South Korea don't need to build nuclear weapons of their own.

A National Security Council spokesman did not return a reporter's calls seeking to clarify whether Samore's comments reflected official Obama administration policy.

However, Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and moderator of the Friday event, said Samore appeared to be articulating his own perspective.

"I think Gary's expressing his personal view," he said. "I don't believe there is a single, authoritative voice for the administration on North Korea right now. Frankly, the administration's policy seems to be in a bit of disarray."

While Samore heads up interagency WMD proliferation policy, former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Stephen Bosworth is the administration's special envoy for North Korea (see GSN, Feb. 20). Last month, the White House named Kurt Campbell to become assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs (see GSN, April 24). Christopher Hill, who previously held that position, led the U.S. delegation in nuclear negotiations with North Korea before being dispatched to Baghdad as ambassador.

"Partially as a result of this policy disarray, I think there are some, like Gary, who have become very pessimistic about [the] chances of containing and eventually rolling back the North Korean program," Cirincione said today in a telephone interview. "I don't believe that pessimism is justified."

Despite his doubts about disarming Kim's nuclear arsenal, Samore insisted that the United States is "not going to recognize North Korea as a nuclear-weapon state."

Typically, Washington's refusal to "recognize" a nuclear-armed Pyongyang means the United States would not "sign a peace treaty or normalize diplomatic relations with North Korea without their complete denuclearization," said Victor Cha, a former National Security Council Asia policy coordinator under the Bush administration.

That stance, continued from the prior White House, has not precluded U.S. officials from taking a clear-eyed view of the Pyongyang regime, said Cha, who now directs Asian studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

"Anybody who's negotiated with them cannot help but be skeptical" that the North Koreans would give up their atomic arms, he told Global Security Newswire in a Friday phone interview. "I think Gary is expressing that skepticism, as well."

Cirincione said such misgivings are unjustified so early in the Obama administration's engagement efforts with Pyongyang.

"I do not believe it's wise policy to give up the possibility of nuclear dismantlement with the current regime," he said. "We have no idea how long this current regime's going to last."

Obama administration officials do not anticipate a change in North Korea's negotiating posture until it becomes clear which leader might replace Kim, who has been in poor health since suffering a suspected stroke last August, the New York Times reported last month (see GSN, April 15).

To pursue a more coherent nuclear disarmament approach toward Pyongyang, Cirincione recommended that the White House gather the "best advice" from outside the government; coordinate its policy internally; clearly designate a lead official; and pursue bilateral contacts immediately.

For now, six-party talks -- which also include Russia, China, Japan and South Korea -- are on hold, with Pyongyang having kicked out international monitors and restarted its plutonium reprocessing activities (see GSN, April 27).

North Korea took the measures to rebuff international condemnation of its April 5 rocket launch (see GSN, April 6). Pyongyang maintains it deployed a communications satellite into orbit, but experts counter that the event appeared to test long-range missile technology.

Samore said he anticipates Kim's regime would conduct a second underground nuclear test in the coming months, along with other means of rejecting what it sees as international interference in its technology program.

"I believe North Korea -- after they have exhausted all of the options available to them to increase [bargaining] pressure, including another nuclear test -- they will eventually come back to the table, because they don't have any choice," Samore said.

Even if eliminating Kim's nuclear stockpile is unrealistic, negotiations might nonetheless be useful, Cha said.

"There is a reason to keep negotiating, even if you're uncertain of whether they will give up all their weapons, because you want to at least have agreements where you can cap and degrade and disable their programs, until some future event where the opportunity for real denuclearization will present itself," he said.

However, given Pyongyang's recent and anticipated actions, Washington will not return to the negotiating table anytime soon, Samore indicated.

"We're going to have to be patient ... in terms of going through this rough period, where the North Koreans will take provocative actions, like their satellite launch and now their reprocessing," Samore said. "No doubt they will restart the [Yongbyon] five-megawatt reactor. They're going to go through their full catalog of escalatory measures."

The United States and its allies will continue to "respond, as we have in the [U.N.] Security Council, with sanctions and other steps," he added. "And at the end of it all, I think we'll be back in negotiations."

Speaking with reporters following his official remarks, Samore estimated it could take another nine months before Pyongyang would return to the six-party talks.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week it was "implausible, if not impossible" that North Korea would rejoin the multilateral process.

However, to Cirincione, North Korea's recent actions might paradoxically presage an opening for nuclear disarmament.

An argument could be made "forcefully and quite convincingly" that "much of what North Korea's been doing is about improving their negotiating position and is not a sign that they will never give up their nuclear weapons," he said.

President Barack Obama and his administration would be open to engaging Kim's regime directly, but only in the context of the six-party talks, Samore said.

"It's very clear the North Koreans have decided to pick a fight with the [other five] parties. And I think the reason for that may have something to do with their domestic politics," Samore said. "They would like to kill the six-party talks. They want to return to a bilateral nuclear negotiation with the United States."

That will not happen, though, he said.

"The strategy of the Obama administration is to say, 'No. We're not going to kill the six-party talks, although we're happy to have bilateral meetings with North Korea in the context of the six-party talks,'" said Samore.

Cirincione said Washington should not condition a bilateral process with Pyongyang on concurrent negotiations in the six-party forum.

"We need direct, bilateral ... negotiations with the North Koreans as soon as possible," Cirincione said. "We're seeing the secretary of state reflect the dissatisfaction with the current state of our policy."

Yet, after many years of contention in Washington over the issue, Cha now sees the U.S. policy toward North Korea as transcending partisanship.

"The Obama administration comes in without some of the baggage, clearly, and some of the hang-ups that the Bush administration came in with at the beginning," he said, referring to the Republican skepticism about earlier disarmament measures and a reticence to engage with "axis of evil" member Pyongyang. "And yet they're facing the same sorts of problems."

A "silver lining" for the Obama team is that when Pyongyang behaves badly, "no one can blame it on U.S. policy any more," Cha said.

Samore's comments reflect a pragmatic realism commonly found among Korea experts, he said. In terms of engaging Pyongyang, "it's a pretty mainstream view now that ... we have to keep trying, even though we're not certain this regime wants to give up their weapons," he said.