Nuclear security

The real threat from North Korea is the nuclear arsenal built over the last decade

Pyongyang likely had no nuclear weapons in January 2003 when it walked away from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The plutonium produced in the early 1990s had been tied up for almost a decade in spent fuel, which was stored safely with US assistance and kept under international inspection. Today, North Korea may possess a nuclear arsenal of roughly 12 nuclear weapons, half likely fueled by plutonium and half by highly enriched uranium. How did things go so wrong?

I will briefly trace North Korea’s nuclear developments spanning 30 years and five US administrations to underscore that blame for the immensity of this policy failure does not lie solely with one party’s leadership or the other. Nor was it a failure of US policy alone—South Korea’s policies vacillated greatly during this time, none of them proving successful. China placed peace and stability ahead of denuclearization, and along with the United Nations it was slow to appreciate the seriousness of the problem and typically reacted with too little, too late.