prompted by North Korea’s threats to withdraw from the international Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which was designed to promote global efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and technologies. For two decades prior to Bush’s election, the United States had been wary about the possibility of North Korea’s pursuit of a covert nuclear weapons program, and experts began to sound alarms about Pyongyang’s progress throughout the 1980s. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration seriously considered military options as Pyongyang refused inspections of its facilities and kicked out International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from the country.
The threat of war was palpable. Secretary of Defense William Perry publicly warned North Korea that the United States was determined to stop its nuclear weapons development, even if it meant “facing up to them in a way that could cause a catastrophic war.” In fact, the Pentagon had stepped up military buildup in and around the Koreas, and gone as far as to draw up plans to send cruise missiles and F-117 stealth fighters to strike at Yongbyon, then North Korea’s only reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium. Combined with the fact that around 65 percent of North Korea’s armed forces, as well as 8,400 artillery pieces and 2,400 multiple rocket launchers, had been stationed just sixty miles away from the Demilitarized Zone, as Don Oberdorfer of The Washington Post noted, there were real fears that the stage was set for a military conflict.
The seemingly inexorable march toward war began to dissipate when North Korea invited former president Jimmy Carter to meet with Kim Il Sung, and Carter flew to Pyongyang in June 1994, despite the Clinton administration’s unease. Kim agreed to a temporary freeze of his nuclear weapons program and allowed for inspectors to remain. Subsequently, the United States and North Korea agreed to start negotiations, defusing the first North Korea nuclear crisis. As part of the Agreed Framework, North Korea would freeze its plutonium production program in exchange for economic assistance, the provision of two proliferation-resistant light-water reactors (LWRs), and annual deliveries of five hundred thousand tons of fuel oil (worth about $50 million per year) to meet their heating and electrical needs while the reactors were being built by an American-led international consortium. The agreement also included a pathway for dismantlement of the North Korean nuclear program, eventual normalization of ties, and security assurances. For North Korea, the deal was worth more than $4 billion. The North Korea analyst B. R. Myers observed that the regime characterized this resolution as the result of Kim Jong Il’s firmness and determination, and “thus endowed the heir to the throne with his own myth of national rescue.” For the United States, the deal succeeded in preventing North Korea’s production of potentially scores of nuclear weapons.
The implementation of the Agreed Framework was far from smooth, however, as it was beset with bureaucratic wrangling, budgeting issues, and delays in the construction of the LWRs and delivery of the heavy fuel oil. A frustrated North Korea occasionally threatened to restart its nuclear program even as it continued to work on other aspects of its arms strategy. The regime tested its first long-range ballistic missile over Japan in 1998 and built a massive underground covert nuclear weapons site—in part to extract additional concessions from the Clinton administration.
The Agreed Framework slowed down North Korea’s nuclear program, but it did not eliminate it. The agreement’s death throes and the second nuclear crisis began when Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly confronted North Korean leaders about their covert uranium enrichment program during his visit there in October 2002. Things went from bad to worse, and the threat of a U.S. attack against North Korea grew, following revelations of both its uranium enrichment program and its ability to produce fissile materials for nuclear weapons. That was when North Korea doubled down and became the first country to leave the NPT, in 2003. A few weeks later, North Korean fighter jets intercepted a U.S. Air Force spy plane that was conducting a mission over the Sea of Japan. Global tensions spiked again when the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, on the ultimately false premise that Baghdad was producing nuclear weapons, generating fears that Washington was serious about punishing the countries in the axis of evil.
But at the same time, Washington was exploring diplomatic options and initiated what eventually became the Six-Party Talks—to include the United States, North and South Korea, China, Russia, and Japan—to try