Kim Jong Un is doing what he said he would
These bases — and the activity at
them — seem to show that North Korea continues to prepare for a potential
nuclear war despite the historic summit between President Trump and North
Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June. There have also been reports that North
Korea is still producing missiles and
nuclear material. All of this, along with Pyongyang’s reputation for
cheating in prior agreements, has created a minor panic over whether Kim
deliberately deceived the United States about his willingness to dismantle
his nuclear program.
Given the high stakes of the
negotiations, it’s worth examining the allegations of North Korean
deception: What has Kim actually said he would do with his nuclear
weapons program? And why are claims of North Korean deception so worrying?
On the first question, the answer
is a lot.
President
Trump reaches to shake hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in
Singapore on June 12. (Evan Vucci/AP)
Kim kicked off 2018 with a New
Year’s Day speech, one that offered the first hint that Kim was open to
negotiations after a year of weapons testing and increasingly hostile
rhetoric from both Pyongyang and Washington. But there was another part of
the speech that seems just as important in hindsight. Kim hailed the
supposed completion of its nuclear weapons development and said it was time
for a new goal.
“This year, we should focus on
mass-producing nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles for operational deployment,”
Kim said. “These weapons will be used only if our security is threatened.”
“Kim himself proclaimed that they
no longer need to test parts anymore and will just mass-produce
weapons," Duyeon Kim, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New
American Security, said to Today’s WorldView. North Korea has never
publicly repudiated these comments, and the United States has never clearly
stated that Kim rejected them when he met with Trump in Singapore.
On Monday, in response to the
Center for Strategic and International Studies report, Today’s WorldView
reached out to a number of experts to ask whether the continued work at
North Korean missile sites, as well as other reports that North Korean is expanding its missile
arsenal, would violate the agreement reached between Kim and Trump in
Singapore.
All of them agreed — often quite
emphatically — that it did not. “Kim hasn’t broken any promises," said
Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of
International Studies at Monterey. "Instead, he’s making good on one
of them — to mass produce nuclear weapons.”
As such, it’s not surprising that
North Korea would still be manning secret missile bases, or even producing
new missiles or nuclear weapons. “Even though they’re violating all U.N.
Security Council resolutions, North Korea didn’t break any promises with
Trump because there’s no nuclear deal in place yet with Washington —
there’s nothing that prevents them from expanding their nuclear arsenal,”
Duyeon Kim said.
“Like any other nuclear
weapon-possessing state, North Korea is refining the facilities and
procedures associated with operating nuclear forces," Ankit Panda
observed in an analysis for NK News this week.
So if North Korea is doing what it
said it would be doing, why are allegations of North Korean deception so
worrying? Because they reveal how differently the United States and North
Korea perceive what happened in Singapore, a gap that could sink any
diplomatic progress.
Trump himself has consistently
portrayed North Korean denuclearization as a fait accompli. But North
Korea, many analysts believe, sees getting rid of its nuclear weapons as
the last in a long series of peace-building measures that need to be taken
— if it even happens at all.
“Trump seems not to understand that
he did not negotiate a ‘deal’ in Singapore,” Frank Jannuzi, the president
of the Mansfield Foundation and an Asia expert, wrote on Twitter. “He
negotiated only an ‘intent to negotiate.’ The hard work has yet to
commence."
It has not. After the bonhomie
between Trump and Kim faded, working-level meetings between the United
States and North Korea foundered. North Korea has pushed for concessions
such as a formal end to the Korean
War and sanctions relief, and it
has even threatened to restart testing.
Accusations of dishonesty and a
subsequent air of distrust have derailed many previous attempts to find
common ground between Washington and Pyongyang. Certainly, North Korea’s
reputation for obtuseness and disregard for the truth is well-earned. But
so far, North Korea has kept to the vague requirements agreed to in
Singapore.
And if there’s someone confused
about what that summit meant, it doesn’t appear to be Kim.
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