Off the Record on HEU

By Tong Kim
As wire stories are reporting that a solution has been suggested for the transfer of frozen funds in a Macau bank to North Korea, public attention is being refocused on whether North Korea will fulfill its commitment to shutdown its nuclear facilities by April 14 in compliance with the February 13 agreement of the six party talks.

Technically it should still be possible. A shut down means turning the switch off with appropriate safety measures. North Korean engineers at Yongbyun know how to do it for they did it before under the Agreed Framework. Sealing can be done in a matter of hours after the shut down. IAEA inspectors can be brought in a couple of days.

North Koreans must realize that if it further delays carrying out its commitments, the nuclear negotiation will lose its momentum and it will likely turn off the other parties in the talks.

As the crucial phase of “disablement” in the February 13 agreement ? during which the DPRK is also obliged to provide “a complete declaration of all nuclear programs” ? will come next, the highly enriched uranium (HEU) issue remains an unavoidable subject that must be addressed satisfactorily for the nuclear dismantlement talks to move forward.

Skeptics of U.S. policy have raised questions with respect to the authenticity of U.S. information on the DPRK’s uranium enrichment program, and others are still questioning whether the DPRK had actually acknowledged the existence of its HEU program at the October 4, 2002 meeting in Pyongyang between former assistant secretary of state James Kelly and DPRK first vice foreign minister Kang Suk Ju, during which I served as the interpreter for the U.S. delegation.

In response to inquires from several news organizations, I have said that I believed then and still believe that the United States had irrefutable evidence to support the charges Mr. Kelly made concerning North Korea’s pursuit of a covert HEU program to develop nuclear weapons. I also said that after listening to Kang’s response at that meeting the U.S. delegation, including myself and two other members on the U.S. team who listened to Kang both in Korean and English interpretation provided by the North Korean side, concluded that Kang had acknowledged the U.S. charges laid out against the DPRK.

My conclusion was not based on a single particular phrase or sentence but on the totality of Kang’s statements, -- including several revealing sentences of a blunt language and unreserved expressions, and their nuances, which all helped convince me of the foundation of his acknowledgment.

To the best of my recollection, Mr. Kelly did not use the term HEU per se, but his description obviously referred to an HEU program since he said the DPRK was pursuing the uranium enrichment program to develop nuclear weapons. Contrary to initial press reports shortly after the meeting, the U.S. delegation had not “presented evidence to compel Kang to admit the program.” What the DPRK was told was the United States had clear and compelling information regarding Pyongyang’s uranium enrichment program. However, there was no discussion of the status of the HEU program.

The DPRK officially denied its acknowledgement first through its foreign ministry statement broadcast over KCNA (Korean Central News Agency) on October 25, 2002, 21 days after the Kelly-Kang meeting and 10 days after Kang’s acknowledgement was reported in the press. The KCNA’s English version stated, “the DPRK made it very clear to the special envoy of the U.S. president that the DPRK was entitled to possess not only nuclear weapons but any type of weapons more powerful than that…” But its Korean said, “The DPRK was bound to have something more powerful than that.”

“That” in both English and Korean versions referred to the DPRK’s uranium enrichment program, which was the main topic for Kelly’s meeting with Kang. The United States was convinced that the DPRK was pursuing such a program.

The second official denial by the North came during the first round of six party talks in August 2003, when the head of the DPRK delegation, vice foreign minister Kim Young Il, said what Kang said to Kelly was “we are bound to have something more (powerful) than what is produced by way of uranium enrichment.”

The third denial was made by another foreign ministry statement of October 18, 2003, which said “In order to protect our sovereignty from the increasing U.S. threat to crush us to death with nuclear weapons, we merely told him (Kelly) that “we were bound to have something more powerful than nuclear weapons.”

Pyongyang has since consistently denied its initial acknowledgement by the logic that vice minister Kang did not exactly say, “We have an HEU nuclear weapons program.” But I am still convinced, judging from the totality of all relevant factors including a swift shift in position and attitude from the day before, that the DPRK had decided to let the U.S. delegation know that the DPRK had such a program and there would be more to come for the United States to deal with.

In my view, Pyongyang made a big blunder in October 2002 by acknowledging its uranium enrichment program in the mistaken belief that such acknowledgement would induce the United States to negotiations to resolve a newly emerged HEU program as well as other issues of concern to the United States. Pyongyang was wrong if it had thought it could use the HEU program as leverage.

On the other hand it is also possible that the DPRK, out of desperation having lost all of its hope for improving relations with the United States for security and economic benefits, conscious of the fact that it was designated as part of an axis of evil that could be “a target for preemptive U.S. attack, may have decided to prepare itself for the worst case scenario?and to confront and fight U.S. hostility up front. If this was the case, Pyongyang was giving up any chance of engagement.

It appeared true that the administration’s policy toward the North hardened because of Pyongyang’s HEU program, but the hardening of policy had probably been set in motion irrespective and in advance of Kang’s admission. I remember that James Kelly, while serving as the top point man on North Korea, told a public audience that what the United States knew about the DPRK’s HEU program was more important than who said what at that meeting.

The DPRK’s astonishing reaction to the U.S. charges at the time may also be seen in terms of the high expectation it had of the long waited visit of the American presidential envoy to Pyongyang, a year and a half after the inauguration of the first Bush administration and several months after the administration’s announced decision to reengage the DPRK, subsequent to the completion of a year-long North Korea policy review. Although Pyongyang had been getting mixed signals from Washington, it had not at all anticipated Washington to bring up the HEU issue.

Even if Kang Suk Ju had denied North Korea’s HEU program, I doubt the ensuing course of U.S. policy would have been different, given the administration’s revulsion to the North Korean regime and the threatening security environment in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which raised scary concerns about any possibility of transferring weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists.

There are some critics of U.S. policy who are eager to accuse the Bush administration of having fabricated unfounded HEU information to use it as a pretext to refuse engaging the DPRK and who are inclined to interpret vice minister Kang’s acknowledgement as the justification for a turning point in Washington’s North Korean policy. I strongly and totally reject these radical notions. Nothing would be further from the truth.

The recent discussion by U.S. officials indicating that Washington does not know the scope or stage of development of North Korea’s uranium enrichment program is irrelevant to the validity of Jim Kelly’s exposition of 2002. He did not say the DPRK was producing HEU, but that it was pursuing an enrichment program to make nuclear weapons.

If Washington had overplayed the HEU program, it would be “a self-inflicted sticking point for the United States” -- as I said in one interview ? because this question must be answered clearly by the second phase of the 2/13 implementation agreement. In the same context, the DPRK has an obligation as a minimum to explain what it has done with the HEU related equipment and material that the United States knows it has purchased. What’s your take?

Tong Kim is former senior interpreter at the U.S. State Department and now a research professor at Korea University and a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).