the denuclearization of the communist country in return for sanctions relief and U.S. economic aid.
Japanese schoolchildren take cover under their desks during a drill in 2017 to prepare for a possible North Korean missile attack. Even though President Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to meet with a North Korean leader in 2017, progress between the United States and North Korea on a denuclearization agreement has stalled.
Richard Atrero de Guzman/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Until then, successive administrations had held low-level negotiations with North Korean officials, offering food and other forms of assistance in a bid to get Pyongyang to curtail its fledgling nuclear program. Several times the talks produced agreements, but eventually they all collapsed amid mutual misunderstandings, charges of cheating and deep distrust left over from the 1950-53 Korean War.
To his credit, many arms control advocates say, Trump shattered that diplomatic model. In Singapore, he became the first sitting U.S. president to meet with a North Korean leader, convinced that their personal rapport could pave the way for an historic denuclearization agreement. “We fell in love,” Trump said of his new relationship with Kim.26
At the end of that summit, the two leaders pledged to “work toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”27 As a confidence-building measure, Trump scaled back joint military exercises with South Korea, and Kim reciprocated by declaring a moratorium on North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests. Commentators noted that after a year in which the two leaders had publicly hurled insults and threats at each other, the simple act of talking had changed perceptions on both sides and made conflict less likely.
But the Singapore talks, and subsequent summits in 2018—in Hanoi in February and in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea in June 2019—failed to translate their personal rapport into any meaningful progress. The biggest hurdle, arms control experts say, has been the inability of U.S. and North Korean officials to agree on how the denuclearization process should proceed.
The Trump administration says North Korea must first abandon its nuclear weapons program before Washington provides any sanctions relief, while Pyongyang insists on a gradual process, in which Washington lifts some sanctions in return for each concrete step Pyongyang takes toward denuclearization.
John D. Maurer, an expert in nuclear weapons and geopolitics at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, says the failure of the Hanoi and DMZ meetings publicly embarrassed Kim, who had raised hopes at home that his diplomacy with Trump would result in economic relief. Meanwhile, Trump continued to tout his summit diplomacy with Kim as one of his signature foreign policy achievements.
Kim’s loss of face prompted North Korea’s warning on Dec. 1, 2019, that unless Washington made further concessions by year’s end, Pyongyang would adopt a more confrontational posture.
Trump ignored the deadline. And on New Year’s Day, Kim told his ruling Workers Party Central Committee that he no longer felt constrained by the testing moratorium, he would not surrender North Korea’s nuclear weapons and North Korea would achieve economic prosperity on its own.
Despite Kim’s tough tone, analysts say his speech left the door open for further negotiations by not declaring an end to diplomacy or the resumption of nuclear and long-range missile tests. Going forward, several experts said, Pyongyang’s next moves would be based on Trump’s ability to win a second presidential term in the November election.
“Donald Trump happens to be the first sitting U.S. president to view North Korea as a source of political victory, for domestic purposes,” said Go Myong-Hyun, a research fellow and expert on North Korea at the Seoul-based Asan Institute for Policy Studies think tank. As the election approaches, Go said, North Korea likely will view Trump’s habit of boasting to his base about his accomplishments as a source of leverage in future negotiations.28
But “if they calculate that President Trump won’t be re-elected next year, then their approach is going to fundamentally change,” Go said. North Korea could test another nuclear bomb, he said, resume missile tests or take other provocative steps that would effectively end the diplomatic dialogue that Trump and Kim began.29
Some Democrats say a deal with Pyongyang is still possible, but only if Trump agrees to embrace a step-by-step approach to North Korea’s denuclearization. In a letter to Trump in late December, eight senior Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged him to consider an interim agreement under which North Korea would freeze and roll back some of its nuclear weapons programs in return for some sanctions relief as a first step in executing a “serious diplomatic plan before it is too late.”30
“While such an interim agreement would of course only be a first step in a longer process, it would nonetheless be an important effort to create the sort of real and durable diplomatic process that is necessary to achieve the complete denuclearization of North Korea,” the senators wrote.31
Some analysts believe the prospects are dim for a North Korean denuclearization agreement with any U.S. administration, in part because of Pyongyang’s deep ideological antipathy toward, and distrust of, the United States. But perhaps the biggest obstacle to North Korea’s denuclearization, says Maurer, is Washington’s record of eliminating troublesome foreign leaders, such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
“The North Korean leadership has to look at anything the U.S. government says about cooperation with extreme skepticism,” Maurer says. “From their perspective, the United States goes around the world, killing off all the people on its naughty list. And who’s at the top of that list today? Kim Jong Un.”
Thus, he argues, Kim’s nuclear weapons are not just a tool to win sanctions relief from the United States, they are his insurance that he will not end up like Saddam or Gadhafi.
Background
Nuclear Age Dawns
The nuclear age dawned with a blinding flash on Aug. 6, 1945, when an American B-29 Superfortress dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese port city of Hiroshima.
The explosion leveled the entire city, instantly killing 80,000 people. Three days later, the United States dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, another port city, killing another 40,000 people. Tens of thousands of wounded would die later from severe burns and radiation poisoning. On Aug. 15, Japanese Emperor Hirohito, citing the immense power of “a new and most cruel bomb,” surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II.32
The atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima in 1945 leveled the Japanese port city. Today’s hydrogen weapons are about 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb.
Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images
After years of bloody fighting in Europe and the Pacific, the war’s end unleashed scenes of jubilation across the United States. But the bomb’s enormous destructive power also forced a moral reckoning among some of the physicists who created it. One of them, J. Robert Oppenheimer, said that as he watched the fiery mushroom cloud rise over the New Mexico desert during the bomb’s first test, he remembered a sentence from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”33
Such moral qualms drove the earliest debates in Washington over controlling the spread of nuclear weapons know-how. One group in the Truman administration worried that America’s monopoly over nuclear weapons would spark a dangerous arms race with the Soviet Union, which was competing with the United States in a budding Cold War for global influence. This group proposed sharing the nation’s nuclear secrets with Moscow to establish a parity that