What It’s Like to Negotiate with North Korea
The former U.S. Chief Negotiator tells his story
In 1994, the United States and North Korea established the “Agreed Framework” with the goal of freezing North Korea’s suspected nuclear weapons program.
The Agreed Framework was eventually concluded after North Korea agreed to freeze the operation and construction of its nuclear reactors in exchange for new proliferation-resistant light water reactors to be provided by a consortium of nations including the United States. As part of the deal, North Korea agreed to adhoc IAEA inspections and large amounts of heavy fuel oil were to be provided to the country to meet its energy needs during the construction of the new reactors. Negotiations that led to the signing of the agreement not only involved bilateral talks between the U.S. and DPRK but also multilateral talks between the U.S., Republic of Korea, Japan, and other countries from the European Union.
Read Ambassador Robert Gallucci, chief U.S. negotiator at the time, reflect on his experiences:
Q: So, when it came to negotiate the Agreed Framework with North Korea, it seemed like for the Clinton administration there were two sides — one side thinking that North Korea was dead-set on a nuclear weapons program and wouldn’t stop until they got one; and then another side who thought that if the U.S. could give things like security assurances, energy and economic aid, and normalization of relations, that they might give up the weapons program. The latter side’s stance ended up winning it. Why?
ROBERT GALLUCCI: There is substantial truth in the prepositions of the — on which the questions rests. The propositions on which the questions rests. But it makes the policy debate much more stark than I recollect. It seems to me there was continuum of pessimism to optimism about what could be accomplished in negotiations with the DPRK. And those who were more pessimistic thought that the North was committed to this nuclear weapons program, and they weren’t going to give it up during the course of any negotiation. But they might engage in negotiation because they could see some utility in it for them. However they would benefit from negotiation, it was not, for these people, a negotiation that would end up with the North Koreans giving up — truly giving up their nuclear weapons program.
Along this continuum, there are others who said, well, hold on, there are gray areas here. Perhaps the North Koreans would dial it back. Maybe they would limit the amount of fissile material they produced. Maybe they would limit themselves to fissile material and not produce nuclear weapons. Maybe they wouldn’t produce delivery vehicles. Lots of possibilities were there. Maybe they wouldn’t finish those two larger reactors. After all, they only had one operating reactor, something that was rated at five megawatts electric. They had a 50-megawatt and a 200-megawatt reactor under construction. So maybe we could stop that. Maybe we can get a moratorium on reprocessing, separating plutonium from spent fuel.
So there were those who said not so much that we could stop the program cold, roll it back, and end nuclear weapons. But that good outcomes could come from this with respect to their weapons program. And then further along on the continuum of optimism, I think there are others, now I’m going to say of us, who said, look, we actually don’t know. Our situation with North Korea one of ignorance in terms of what they’re thinking. There’s good reason to believe, based on capabilities, that their intentions are to have a nuclear weapons program. But might it be, or it might be, that the North is pursuing this weapons program out of a search for security, and particularly of a desire to get to a place where they cannot, from their perspective, be the victims of an American-launched effort at regime change.
So, if what they’re really looking for is regime survival, maybe they could be persuaded that in a relationship with the United States of America they could get this security benefit in exchange for giving up a nuclear weapons program. It’s, at least, possible. So what I think would be a better characterization is that the administration’s, the Clinton administration, view was that we could test that proposition as a way of putting it. We first understand that the way the negotiations began is that they were aimed at getting the North Koreans back into the NPT, which they had announced their intention of withdrawing from, and get them to abide by the North-South Declaration on Denuclearization, which would have them give up their reprocessing program.
Now, there was something wrong with that proposition technically. They were pursuing a type of nuclear technology, gas graphite, in which the fuel could not — the spent fuel could not remain indefinitely in a pond. Now, this will make some people’s eyes water. But as a result of that little technical factoid, to have the North Koreans keep their reactor but give up the reprocessing of spent fuel is not technically possible over the long term, though that’s precisely that we were proposing that they do. So I would say that we were looking to test what we could get from the North Koreans if we were to try to reassure them about their security.
And so the initial contacts that were in New York at the U.S. Mission at the U.N. and then in the early days of negotiating in Geneva with North Kore. I think it’s fair to say we were to test the proposition that what might be a deal with the North Koreans that could be negotiated that would address their security concerns, even to the extent that they might actually give up their nuclear weapons program. But it was not so much of a conviction on anybody’s part that this was certainly true. It was possibly true, and worth testing.
Q: Now, the North-South Joint Declaration on Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula got incorporated into the Agreed Framework. Now, seeing as the declaration imposed even more restrictions on North Korea than the Nonproliferation Treaty — for instance, it didn’t allow nuclear reprocessing — why do you think North Korea agreed to include it?
MR. GALLUCCI: It is my view that most answers to questions that ask for a judgement about what the North Korean were thinking ought to begin with: I don’t know. Having said that I don’t know why the North Koreans did this, I might guess. The first guess is that they didn’t think that, ultimately, they would be bound by that agreement with the South. It was something to do, the North-South Declaration on Denuclearization. But as it turned out, we — the United States — in our bilateral negotiation with the North Koreans really wanted it referenced, included in the Agreed Framework, in no small part because it was our way of addressing the enrichment issue.
The only way — the only thing that’s explicitly addressed in terms of fissile material acquisition by the North Koreans in the Agreed Framework is plutonium. And so we went after the reprocessing plant and disposition of the spent fuel horizons and not having the reactor run anymore, right? So, with all that there, there was no mention of enrichment. We were certainly aware of that. So the way to — if you’ll forgive this construction — pick up enrichment and add it to the list of things the North Koreans couldn’t do to produce fissile material was to gain in the Agreed Framework a North recommitment to the North-South Declaration on Denuclearization.
So we wanted it. They agreed to it. And perhaps they agreed to it because they intended to abide by it, and indeed, abide by the Agreed Framework. It’s also possible — since we now know that they did have a secret agreement with Pakistan to acquire enrichment technology, that they had no intention of abiding by the agreement. I simply don’t know. I don’t know, indeed, the details of the North Korean-Pakistani deal. I don’t know exactly when it was negotiated. I don’t know exactly when deliveries took place. So it’s very hard for me to say what it is the North Koreans were thinking in agreeing to the declaration with the South, which precluded the deal they were making with the Pakistanis. It’s just too much. I just don’t know — I just don’t know the answer.
Q: So in this Agreed Framework, why do you think North Korea was so eager to trade away its graphite-moderated reactors in exchange for light-water reactors, seeing as the light-water reactors are much more resistant to producing weapons-grade plutonium? Why did North Korea want to acquire them?
MR. GALLUCCI: There is a disagreement here between a man by the name of Jay Kim, who was my principal interpreter — I had more than one through the negotiations with DPRK — but Jay Kim was my principal interpreter. And he and I went to lunch one day with Kang Sok-Ju — excuse me, with — yes, with Kang Sok-Ju and his interpreter. And over — in that lunch, my recollection is that vice foreign minister Kang offered to give up their gas graphite reactors entirely — not only the operating reactor but the two that were under construction — if we, the United States, would help the DPRK acquire, as he put it, by my recollection, modern light-water reactor technology. That’s my recollection.
Jay Kim, who was interpreting for this meeting, and as you may know interpreted very often, had a little steno pad. And they make notes. He is — we have been together on this point a number of times. And he has his notes. And he says: No. This was not Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-Ju’s idea. This was your idea. My idea. And I said to Jay, I think if it was my idea, I’d remember. He said: I’ve written it down as your idea. Well, we’ve never resolved that. When he speaks about this — talks about this as an American initiative, and I talk about it as a North Korean initiative.
In any case, Kang Sok-Ju explained to me why this was good, from his perspective. So unlike other questions about what the North Koreans are thinking, this one doesn’t exactly tell you — I don’t exactly have a way of telling you what they’re thinking. I have a way of telling you what they said they were thinking. And what I recollect Kang Sok-Ju saying was that if we are to give up our current type of nuclear technology, gas graphite technology — this is the moderator, the graphite, in the rector — we need another technology that is better than that technology, more modern, embraced widely around the world.
And we want help acquiring that technology. And if we are able to, then those people in North Korea and the DPRK, who are in the technical community, will not be unhappy about us in this negotiation giving up gas graphite technology because we’ll be acquiring a superior technology. So this had — he was, in a way, inviting me into some of the internal thinking, I thought, of what was going on in the North as they thought about our wish that they stop plutonium production as well as separation.
If Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-Ju was accurately reflecting the calculation, then what was going on was that the North was proceeding as we might have dreamed they would. In other words, they were giving up a technology that produces plutonium of a higher quality, from the perspective of nuclear weapons production — a low — it’s called low burnup fuel with plutonium that has a higher percentage of the odd isotopes, plutonium-239 and -241, which is much better for bomb designing. And they were giving that up to get reactors that would be much larger, producing a lot more plutonium, but high burnup fuel with plutonium which is far less ideal. Still could be used for nuclear weapons, but not what a designer would most like to have, because it would have a higher percentage of the even isotopes of the element plutonium.
So they were doing this with forethought, with the idea that they were going to be embrace a nuclear energy program in terms of a nuclear weapons program. That’s what he was asking me to believe was their motivation. And I’m, on the face of it, prepared to believe it, because indeed in the early days the reactor was shut down — that five-megawatt reactor. The other two reactors under construction, the construction was stopped. The reprocessing plant was shut down.
And even when the Agreed Framework collapsed, and the North Koreans went back to the reprocessing plant and back to the five-megawatt, they never completed the 50 and the 200. They had been working on the construction of a light-water reactor of their own. And in the meantime, when the Agreed Framework did exist, we were busy using the organization KEDO — Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization — to build 2,000-megawatt light-water reactors, just as was, in a sense, anticipated in that lunch in Geneva in 1993.
Q: So, in the process to negotiating the Agreed Framework, many carrots and sticks were considered to encourage North Korea to come to an agreement. One of these carrots was the establishment of diplomatic liaison offices in Pyongyang and Washington to work towards full normalization of relations. Did the Clinton administration create a specific plan for this? Also, how did the South Koreans feel about potential U.S.-North Korean normalization, and was there a plan for managing the friction that might come up as a result of that?
MR. GALLUCCI: My recollection of that period, which is after the Agreed Framework is signed and negotiated — so the fall of 1994 through early 1995 — was that we, the United States, were busy getting ready for the time when we would open a liaison office in Pyongyang and the North Koreans, presumably, would open one in Washington. And we, I have to phrase this right, entertained a North Korean delegation that came to look at real estate. And we brought them to Pentagon City and other places. They lingered, I’m told, in Victoria’s Secret and other stores in Pentagon City, which may or may not be true. That could be apocryphal, but I just don’t know.
But in any case, so we did have them here. And we looked at real estate in Pyongyang. And my recollection, again, is that we were going to take advantage of the rather vast area that was vacated by the East Germans, since there no longer were any East Germans. There was only a Germany at that point. And Germany had an area that was much larger than they actually needed. So my recollection is that was what we were doing. Yes, we were obviously talking to the South Koreans, because there might be sensitivities about an American representation in the North. But my recollection is, again, that the South Koreans were ready to accept this, understood this was part of the Agreed Framework.
But they were coming to a presidential election — or perhaps not — at least elections, if not presidential election — in 1995. And they wished that we not proceed with this until their elections were over. I believe that’s correct. In any event, we were doing the other things which we would do in order to be ready to open a liaison office, which is to say to get staffing ready. And we have identified someone, a foreign service officer, who has broken out of his current course — career course in order to prepare himself to head the liaison office. It wasn’t going to be an embassy. It wasn’t going to be a full ambassadorial level. But it was going to be a liaison office. And this person would head it. And we were getting the proper people with the language skills to serve. And I don’t believe it was many more than five to 10. It was in that range number of officers that we needed for — we thought we needed for the liaison office. And, yes, we were prepared to do that.
As everybody knows, those offices never were opened. And for perhaps a variety of reasons, and not the least of which may have been the cost to the North Koreans of operating the liaison office in Washington, D.C. Again, I’m not certain of that, but I believe that might have had something to do with why they didn’t proceed. We were ready. I believe the South Koreans were prepared to accept this. And I believe the reason we didn’t proceed was DPRK reasons rather than our own.
Q: Was there any thought given to Korean unification if the U.S. and North Korean normalized relations? Did the administration view these developments as a step towards regional peace, or was there a longer-term vision of a better relations leading to a two-state system or eventual reunification?
MR. GALLUCCI: This is — this is hard — I know — I know I said a little bit ago that it’s hard to guess what the North Koreans are thinking. It’s also hard to think what the Americans are thinking because there isn’t just one bunch of Americans who thinks something. And when one talks about the question of Korean unification, it’s quite plausible that the president and the national security advisor, the secretary of state, the assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs, the people in the Pentagon, these people have different views about when that might happen and whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Broadly speaking, as a matter of declaratory policy, the United States has, to my knowledge, favored reunification, but reunification to create a Korea that is free, that is democratic, respectful of human rights, and whose economy’s essentially a market economy. We’re not talking about reunification under a North Korean system. So the question is, when might that happen? And since people differed about the durability of the North Korean regime — some predicting its collapse. There was even talk about whether we should work to create a soft landing or should we allow a hard landing to occur. It turned out the North Koreans decided they’d prefer to keep flying, and so there was no landing. But there was talk about this in — particularly in the late ’90s, in the midst of the Perry Process.
My own view here is that many of us, or most of us, didn’t see reunification as a near-term prospect. Ultimately, getting the Korean people to live together on the Korean Peninsula as one people seemed inevitably the right thing to do, and seemed to consistent with the movement of history around the world. But it wasn’t something that was around the corner or something that we needed to immediately prepare for.
Q: So in any negotiation, there’s the dark moments and the point where you might see the light at the end of the tunnel. At what point were you most discouraged about coming to a negotiated settlement, and at what point were you most optimistic?
MR. GALLUCCI: Yes, the optimistic/pessimistic question that — I always thought that when we went to Seoul that Koreans, particularly the Korean press, loved to ask: Are you optimistic or are you pessimistic? I got that question, by my calculation, 423 million times. I think we were generally pessimistic throughout the negotiations. I mean, we were — we — from my perspective, I was one of those who thought we needed to test this and see whether we could make a deal that was in the national security interests of the United States and its allies. And if we couldn’t, we shouldn’t. And in order to make a deal that fit that description, the North was going to have to give up these programs and we were going to have to meet the concerns of the ally most concerned here — you know, a number of allies were focused on this, the Japanese included — but certainly this was the principal issue domestically and internationally in Seoul.
And the need for the deal with the DPRK that we were trying to strike from an American perspective needed to have a piece that provided for North-South dialogue, or else it was going to be politically unacceptable in Seoul. And the North, in these negotiations, Kang Sok-Ju, was very, very clear that that was never going to happen. I mean, he said a number of things were never going to happen, but that one was really never going to happen. And from our side, there could be no deal if that didn’t happen. So when we got past some of the technical issues — as in the North Koreans giving up their reprocessing plant, giving up their five-megawatt reactor, then giving up both the other reactors under construction — those were the technical — biggest, highest technical obstacles.
Plus, for people who remember this period, the reason why we got into the negotiation in the first place, the reason why we did was because the North had withdrawn from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. And why had the North withdrawn from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty? Because the U.N., acting on an International Atomic Energy Agency Report, had decided to put sanctions, of a kind, on the North. They weren’t really sanctions. They were a statement — a critical statement by the chair of the Security Council. That resulted because the North would not accept so-called special inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
So we needed in this deal to get a bunch of stuff from the North. We needed to shut down their plutonium program. But we also — and I said we needed them in the deal to agree to discussions with the South directly without us involved. And we also needed to address that first issue. And that first issue was those special inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. And the North, when they started they were like the three nos. None of those things were going to happen.
So that when we got the most material of them, which was the plutonium production capability, they would shut that down, the plutonium separation capability and shut that down, we still had two essentially political issues — accepting IAEA special inspections and direct negotiations with the South. And there was a moment when we hit upon some language which had the North agree to accept whatever requirements the IAEA may decide were necessary in order for the IAEA to fulfill its role of certifying that the North was in compliance with its safeguard agreement. We got that. That was probably our most optimistic moment.
Pessimism existed profoundly when the North insisted that we would never accept the language — they would never accept the language that we needed on North-South discussions. Indeed, there was a bizarre moment when we had reached this impasse, focused on it, and I was very unhappy with the situation, and tired. And I said to Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-Ju, we’re going back to the — to the mission in Geneva. And frankly, we’re going to play some touch football. We’re going to play some softball. I just — my team needs a rest. And he said, that’s fine. Good. We’ll resume tomorrow, or whatever.
So we did. We went back, put on shorts, and we went out on the lawn — it was a fairly large lawn at the mission in Geneva — and were playing ball. And then the message came through: The North, as I understood it, and Tom Hubbard, my deputy in this, the assistant secretary at the time, they had — they had agreed, the breakthrough we waited for. And they said, so, we’ll actually together for a ceremony in the evening. So as they said, please dress up. So we all went back, we showered, put on our suits. And when we got to the mission, the press was inside the gates, which had never been seen before. There was literally a red carpet rolled out. Everybody was ready. There were lights, cameras. There was action.
We went in, and there were champagne bottles in buckets. There were flowers. And I sat down with Tom Hubbard. And we both said, now, we’ve finally come to that point. And I said, Tom, have you seen the language — the exact language they accepted? And he said, no. I said, well, maybe we ought to check that language before we drink any champagne. So I said, through the interpreters to Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-Ju, you have accepted the language as we provided it to you? And he said, no. And I said, so why are we here? Why did you call us to your mission tonight? He said, well, I recall you saying — he said to me — that this was the only outstanding issue. Is that not true? And I said, yes. Yes, it is true. And he said: And I told you that we could never agree to this. Did you not hear me? Yes, I did hear you. So we’re done.
I said, ah. I see the confusion now. Maybe you didn’t hear me. (Laughs.) There can’t be agreement from our perspective unless you do agree to dialogue with the South. So we are not done. And he said, but we are all here. The press is outside. We could finish tonight. And I said, we will not finish tonight. And he said, well, are you going to walk out now? And I said, yes, I am going to walk out now. And he said, what are you going to say to the press? I’m going to say that we’re not finished. And this was heard only by my interpreter on one side of me and Tom Hubbard on the other side. And I — the rest of the team was in the same mood I had been coming in. And I had to tell everybody, we don’t have a deal. We’re leaving. Everybody get up and walk out.
And I stopped, to my recollection, in front of one camera and one member of the press and just said, we’re not yet finished with our negotiations, and left. It was pretty much of a downer. As it turned out, again by my recollection, Tom Hubbard and Gary Samore perhaps and Danny Russel perhaps, who’s the current assistant secretary of East Asian and Pacific affairs, met with their opposite members below the level of Kang Sok-Ju, and actually worked out language that was acceptable. And it was language that was — would pass muster in Seoul, which was, of course, our test that the North was agreeing to North-South dialogue being included in the Agreed Framework. And the deal was eventually done. But there was a dark moment for sure there.
Q: In your book, “Going Critical,” detailing the North Korean nuclear crisis ’93-’94, you describe how during the early stages of the negotiations some of the U.S. delegation members saw the North Korean officials as two-dimensional or stereotypical figures. But as time when on, the delegation kind of started to recognize the humanity of these North Koreans. Can you talk about that and what that was like?
MR. GALLUCCI: I would say my relationship with Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-Ju got steadily better over the period of the negotiations, which went on for a year and three months or so, a year and four months. And we began, as you might expect — I had never met a North Korean before. Those first meetings at the U.S. mission in New York in ’93. I had never seen a delegation with little lapel pins with a picture of Kim Il-Sung. I had — I was prepared for the obligatory statements, the opening statements, which both sides make but maybe the North with a tad more formality that is a broadside attack than the opening comments that I had to make.
But pretty quickly, when you’re in a protracted negotiation, certainly when we moved to Geneva and we were there — would come in in the morning, you were — you talk past your talking points at some point. You have instructions. You follow your instructions if you’re a diplomat and want to keep your job. But they only go so far, and then you still have hours left. And so you are speaking without strict instructions. You know, those instructions should presumably guide you in terms of what you say. But you are then flying on your own.
And in those periods, I thought we made progress in terms of knowing one another and each side. And I certainly encouraged members of my team to find their opposite numbers on the North Korean side when we broke for coffee or we were standing around, in order to make some contacts and find out as much as we could about — I mean, ideally you find out some softness in a negotiating position. You might dream about doing that. And I think I made quite a bit of progress in terms of the negotiations in the one-on-ones and two-on-twos I would have, Tom Hubbard and myself, with Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-Ju and his deputy.
And those were times when we did I think connect more. There was a time when the four of us sat down and there was a bottle of liquor between us. And I was sorry to see there was a snake in the bottle of liquor. And I’m not enthusiastic about snakes generally. Certainly drinking a bottle with one in it was not at the top of the list of things I wished to do before I died. It wasn’t on my bucket list. But, you know, so we drank liquor. I decided this was an important thing, because Tom Hubbard was the Foreign Service officer. I’m a civil servant, and I didn’t want to embarrass him by not drinking the snake liquor.
So I did. And Kang Sok-Ju explained to me that the liquor was very high in alcohol content in order to kill the poison from the snake, which was good to hear. Good to know, as they say. I was also surprised to note that Hubbard actually didn’t drink his. And I said, aren’t you the Korea expert, my Foreign Service officer colleague? And he said, actually, I’m a Japanese expert. So it was a great afternoon. There were times when we broke for lunch and the four of us would meet. We did at the Korean mission. And they served us McDonalds, which I thought there was a certain humor to that. So, yes, we had good moments with the North. They were not frequent, but they were there. I think by the time we got to the end of the negotiation I was impressed with the sophistication of the North. And I wouldn’t say subtlety necessary, but sophistication. That they deal with the technical sides of the issues extremely well, and I thought we understood one another.
There was a moment of some tension. And we were at the U.S. mission that day, and Stars and Stripes had published a statement by an American admiral who was leading a group of ships that were operating in the Sea of Japan. And the admiral was quoted by Stars and Stripes as saying that the reasons for the presence of the naval — the naval presence was in part to support negotiations in Geneva. And that was not the most useful thing he could have said, from our perspective.
And Kang Sok-Ju stopped me before going into the meeting and said that he needed to tell me that this was not something they could let pass. The suggestion was that they were going to be intimidated by American naval presence. And he said he needed to say that that was an unacceptable suggestion and a threat. And I said, if you bring this up then I just warn you that I will have to defend the United States Navy. I’m not going to have you criticize their operations and have it stand alone on the record as, in fact, the JCS representative on my team was a naval commander and this would just not stand. So the good news here was that he was warning me that he had to do this. And I was warning him, and I had to respond. We both did what we had to do.
So that’s a kind of thing that would happen after years of negotiation with the Soviet s in the old days, where there’d be this kind of discussion where both sides are asking the other to understand the political sensitivities back at the capital. We were making progress that we were doing that, I think, with the North Koreans.
Q: You’ve said in previous interviews that had former President Jimmy Carter not intervened in the crisis in June ’94, rather than a U.S. airstrike to destroy Yongbyon, it was more likely that a U.N. Security Council sanctions resolution would have been passed to condemn and punish North Korea for violating the nonproliferation treaty and preventing IAEA inspections. Why were the U.N. sanctions expected to pass at that time? And why wouldn’t China have blocked such resolution? And also, what was the Clinton administration doing to ensure that a sanctions resolution would be passed?
MR. GALLUCCI: So the period in question is sort of May/June of 1994. And it was the darkest and most dangerous period because the North Koreans had blocked the type of inspections that the IAEA wanted — or activity the IAEA wanted to engage in, as Hans Blix, the director-general of the IAEA said, to preserve history. And when the North Koreans blocked the activity that the IAEA preferred, he traveled from Vienna to New York and said: The North Koreans had destroyed history. We had warned the North Koreans to not do that, and that this could lead to sanctions.
The North, Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-Ju, put a fine point on their reaction by telling me that since there was only an armistice at that moment in place, following the Korean War of many decades before, that the sanctions and now the resolution — but the imposition of sanctions by the United Nations would be a violation of the armistice. He reminded me, in case I had forgotten, that from the North Korean perspective, the United Nations was not neutral, as it is to many countries or sort of the rest of the world. It was a belligerent in the Korean War. And it would — and the armistice then would be violated between one of the belligerents picking up sanctions against the other.
And so I dutifully reported that Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-Ju said a sanctions resolution and implementation would be an act of war, and that the DPRK would take it as such. And when you report that to Washington, Washington reacts. And Washington was reacting. So we were busy — we, being the U.S. government — getting ready for a contingency in which hostilities began. And hostilities could have begun because of a sanction resolution that passed to which the North Koreans reacted.
Or, the North Koreans might have begun to move spent fuel from the storage pond to the reprocessing facility, where they might have begun to separate plutonium. And if they’d done that, there was a pretty good chance — I would say a probability — that President Clinton would decide to stop them with a military action — airstrikes. One never knows, but certainly plausible. And were that to happen, we would have to be ready for hostilities to begin. And that meant a lot of things had to happen in Seoul, where many, many Americans in South Korea would need to be evacuated. Many more forces needed to flow into the South. So a lot of things would have to happen.
So, while we were thinking all that through, though, we were also busy doing the diplomatic works so that we could have sanctions resolution. And what that would take was, of course, to have the British and the French to join us. And we were confident that would happen. We consulted. Then there was the question of the Russians and the Chinese, and would they block a sanctions resolution with a veto? We prepared a sanctions resolution. I traveled with Secretary of State Christopher to Europe. We met with the Russian foreign minister and we agreed on sanctions resolution language.
That left only the Chinese. I had been to Beijing. I had talked to the Chinese about this more than once in Beijing. We talked to the Chinese in New York. And I can tell you that we don’t know — didn’t know then and certainly don’t know now — what the Chinese would have done. There were three possibilities: They would have voted for a sanctions resolution, which we didn’t think was likely. They would veto a sanctions resolution, which we thought was quite possible. Or they would abstain and let the resolution proceed and pass, which we thought was quite possible, but we didn’t know. And never will, because former President Carter decided to accept the invitation that was outstanding from the North Koreans. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Q: The U.S., South Korea, Japan, the EU, Australia, Canada and even some ASEAN members were part of KEDO. Why was China not a part of this organization?
MR. GALLUCCI: My recollection is that we invited China to join KEDO, and that the Chinese declined. My recollection was not that there was any hostility here, that there was no bad feeling on either side, but that the Chinese thought they could be more helpful outside the organization in encouraging the cooperation of the North Koreans, than if they were part of the operation, in a sense joining other states against the DPRK. That’s how I remember it. But I would be — could be — might well-be corrected by those actually who became part of KEDO. I mean, we were involved, and I was, in the establishment of KEDO. But then, of course, when Steve Bosworth took over the job he was central to that. Mitchell Reiss was a deputy. And there were others who probably could address that question.
Originally published by CSIS Beyond Parallel, May 27, 2016
