By Lee Tae-hoon
Staff Reporter
The United States will most likely take denuclearization measures that were successfully applied to Ukraine as its solution to deter North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, a parliamentary think-tank said Thursday.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine inherited more than 2,500 tactical nuclear warheads, emerging as the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world. The U.S. provided a package of incentives, including security assurances, dismantlement assistance, economic aid as well as jobs for scientists under the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) agreement in return for denuclearization.
In a paper, titled ``The Obama Administration’s Denuclearization Policy and the North Korean Nuclear Issue,’’ the National Assembly Research Service (NARS) pointed out that Washington is highly likely to offer Pyongyang similar CTR programs it provided to the former Soviet republic.
``Given that the North’s development of nuclear weapons has reached a certain stage and it already has nuclear facilities, engineers and scientists, compensation will be unavoidable,’’ the report said. ``It should be noted that the North is demanding a security guarantee and economic compensation for abandoning its nuclear program.’’
Neither will Pyongyang voluntarily abandon its weapons program, as South Africa did in the early 1990s, nor will Washington choose the denuclearization process of Libya as a solution for dismantling the North’s nuclear arms, the report said.
In the Libyan case, its authoritarian leader Moammar Gadhafi decided in 2003 to eliminate nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs in return for the normalization of ties with the United States. Gadhafi, who seized power in a 1969 military coup, is still ruling the oil-rich North African nation.
Unlike Libya, which has one of the world’s largest oil reserves, the North does not have the bargaining power to maintain its reclusive regime, NARS said.
The report claimed that Gadhafi could be persuaded to abandon nuclear weapons because he feared his country was highly vulnerable to U.S. pre-emptive strikes, which had been launched against Iraq following the 9/11 attacks, since Libya did not have a strong ally like China.
Moreover, the United States is unlikely to accept the North as a nuclear state as it did in the cases of India and Pakistan, because the communist regime’s nuclear weapons are aimed at the Unites States and may fuel an arms race in Northeast Asia, the report said.
It also expressed concern on the possibility of the Barack Obama administration reaching a compromise deal on the denuclearization of North Korea.
``South Korea should strongly protest, if the Obama administration accepts a compromise deal that would result in the North’s incomplete abandonment of its nuclear program,’’ it said. ``One or two nuclear weapons might not be a threat to the United States, but Washington should understand that this could be critical to the South.’’
leeth@koreatimes.co.kr
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