The Fire Last Time

This October marks the tenth anniversary of the Geneva Agreed Framework, which was signed by Washington and Pyongyang on October 21, 1994, ending the first nuclear standoff with North Korea. There will be no champagne toast, however, to celebrate the occasion. The Agreed Framework, sharply contested by Republican critics at its inception and never fully implemented, has been effectively dead since October 2002, when Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly visited Pyongyang. On that trip, the Bush administration's first high-level contact with the North Korean government, Kelly asked his North Korean counterparts about their covert attempts to develop a highly enriched uranium bomb program in violation of the Agreed Framework. The North Koreans responded angrily to Kelly's charge but, in the process, admitted that he was right, thereby igniting the second North Korean nuclear crisis.

Today, many of the events of ten years ago seem to be repeating themselves. Although this crisis has several striking differences from the last one, the Bush administration would do well to study carefully the drama of 1993-94 and reflect on President Bill Clinton's choices before making its own. Fortunately, Washington has a powerful new tool to aid it in this task: Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis, a comprehensive insider's guide to the first North Korean nuclear standoff and an essential tool for comparing today's events to the last round. As the book makes clear, the stakes and the confusion of the original crisis could not have been greater; during its climax in 1994, Clinton even compared it to the Cuban missile crisis. Going Critical also underscores the changing risks of nuclear proliferation in what Yale's Paul Bracken has called the "second nuclear age" and expands on earlier accounts to offer an authoritative discussion of the events of the first crisis as viewed from Washington. Written with the rare benefit of special access to U.S. government documents and incorporating the personal experiences of its three authors, all of whom played significant roles in the events of 1993-94, Going Critical recounts in detail the options that the Clinton administration considered at every stage of the story -- and thus should prove invaluable to the Bush administration today.

LEAST BAD

Although Going Critical seems to have been written with an eye toward justifying the Agreed Framework as serving the U.S. national interest, its authors do not spin the story so as to defend the administration they served. Instead, Wit, Poneman, and Gallucci methodically recount every stage of their deliberations. Going Critical offers a detailed examination of the workings (and limitations) of the interagency process involved with trying to resolve a nuclear dispute and highlights challenges inherent in merging often radically different priorities into an integrated policy.

To their credit, the authors straightforwardly reveal the biases and problems in the Clinton administration's approach, even while they aggressively defend the logic that led to the final deal, which they describe as the least bad option. Keenly aware of the stakes, including the real possibility of military escalation, the Clinton team felt profound relief when it was finally able to gain essential concessions from its tough North Korean counterparts -- even though these concessions were nowhere near enough to satisfy Seoul, Tokyo, and critics in Washington who opposed all concessions to Pyongyang. Indeed, the Agreed Framework was unpopular from the start and contested at every stage of its implementation. But as the authors point out, it also managed to keep North Korea from immediately going nuclear and it avoided a war -- one that would have been costly for all sides.

There were two critical flaws with the American approach in 1993 and 1994, however, as the book -- not to mention the intervening years -- makes clear. First, although U.S. officials did convince the North Koreans to "can" and store their spent nuclear fuel, they were unable to persuade them to give up their nuclear components entirely, as they did with Kazakhstan and Ukraine. This failure gave the North Koreans easy access to spent nuclear fuel that could be reprocessed, which has proved to be their most significant source of leverage in the current standoff.

The Clinton administration also erred by allowing North Korea to delay its return to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) by more than five years. This ambiguity in Pyongyang's status under the NPT made it much easier for North Korea to later declare, in January 2003, that it was no longer a party to that treaty and to exclude the International Atomic Energy Agency (which administers the NPT) from any role in the standoff. Wit, Poneman, and Gallucci assert that North Korea would not have accepted a return to full compliance with the NPT in 1994, but subsequent events have shown that these concessions were nonetheless a mistake; the Clinton administration should have pushed harder for subsequent revisions. Instead, within a year of the signing of the Agreed Framework, Washington had put the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), which administered the deal, on autopilot, and KEDO officials were left complaining that it was harder to get sign-offs from the United States than from Japan or South Korea. By 1998, under pressure from Congress, the Clinton administration reluctantly named former Defense Secretary William Perry as a special coordinator for policy toward North Korea in an attempt to salvage the process. But Perry's efforts only deferred the collapse of the framework until the end of the Clinton administration.

TOUGH TALK