Summary: North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Program
Origin, Potential and International Containment Efforts
Sebastian Harnisch
With the resumption of its plutonium based nuclear program and the eviction of IAEA monitors in early 2003, North Korea embarked on a collision course that bears a high potential for escalation and an increased risk of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their launcher systems.
Though North Korea’s nuclear weapons program dates back to the 1960s, when Pyongyang reacted to US nuclear threats during the Korean War and the Cuban Crisis. It was, however, not until the 1990s that it became a known fact that North Korea had continued its efforts, as it repeatedly shut down one of the reactors to extract nuclear material. In May 1993, the UN Security Council demanded that Pyongyang admit IAEA inspectors into the country. North Korea declared itself ready to comply with its obligations, as stipulated in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), and to allow inspectors in. In return, the US eased its sanctions and negotiated the socalled Geneva Framework Treaty, which gained Pyongyang the supply of light water reactors in exchange for abandoning the nuclear program.
During the second half of the 1990s, North Korea upped its provocations in order to extort economic concessions, a policy that worked until the newly elected US President George W. Bush identified North Korea as part of the "axis of evil” in January 2002. Two months later, a US planning document listed the country as a potential nuclear target. Last October the US Foreign Department, for the first time, confirmed the existence of a North Korean covert uranium enrichment program and demanded that it be verifiably abandoned before bilateral talks could be resumed. North Korea reacted to the US suspension of heavyoil imports by toughening its conflict strategy, thus making more and more provisions of the frame agreement void.
In early October 2002, Pyongyang partly admitted the existence of the uranium based nuclear weapons program, he was accused of pursuing. Although the exact reasons for that are unclear, the move is most likely part of an effort to reestablish a basis for talks with Washington.
US intelligence services assume that North Korea already has one or two nuclear warheads, and that by 2003 this number might be brought up to five or six. As of 2005, the uranium based nuclear weapons program may yield two or more per year - enough, to corroborate the fears that Pyongyang intended to proliferate weapons of mass destruction. North Korea’s withdrawal from the nonproliferation regime all too clearly points in that direction.
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