In My Time - Dick Cheney [259]
• In May 2009 they tested a second nuclear weapon.
• In September 2009 they announced they were in the final stages of enriching uranium and weaponizing plutonium.
• In March 2010 a North Korean submarine torpedoed and sank a South Korean vessel, killing forty-six sailors.
• In November 2010 they invited a visiting American delegation to view their uranium enrichment program, unveiling two thousand gas centrifuges operating at the Yongbyon facility, site of the old plutonium reactor on which we had been so focused.
• In November 2010, days after they unveiled their centrifuge operation, North Korea launched a massive artillery barrage at a South Korean island, killing two South Korean marines and two civilians.
• And in February 2011, Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper said in testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the North Koreans did indeed have a uranium enrichment facility at Yongbyon, a disclosure that “supports the United States’ longstanding assessment that the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] has pursued a uranium-enrichment capability.”
In addition, Clapper said that given the “scale of the facility and the progress the DPRK has made in construction, it is likely North Korea has been pursuing enrichment for an extended period of time. If so, there is a clear prospect that the DPRK has built other uranium enrichment related facilities in its territory.”
AS I HAVE NOTED before, we accomplished a great deal in our first years in office in slowing the proliferation of nuclear materials and technology. As we dealt with North Korea, particularly throughout 2007 and 2008, the president would sometimes refer to one of those accomplishments—getting the Libyans to turn over their nuclear materials—and say he was looking for the North Koreans to have their “Qaddafi moment.” That is what we all hoped to achieve, and I don’t believe the president himself ever lost sight of that as the objective. But I think Secretary Rice and Assistant Secretary Hill did. For them, the agreement seemed to become the objective, and we ended up with a clear setback in our nonproliferation efforts.
In early 2001 the president had it exactly right when he decided to set a new course for dealing with North Korea and made other countries, most importantly China, a part of the negotiations. When our diplomats began meeting bilaterally with the North Koreans again, sometimes in contravention of their instructions, China was essentially sidelined, as were our allies the Japanese and the South Koreans. We missed a number of important opportunities to use our leverage to get them to play a more constructive role. There is no question but that the challenge of North Korea’s nuclear program was one of the toughest we faced during our time in office. As we worked to meet this challenge, I wish the president had been better served by his State Department team.
THE STORY OF OUR diplomacy with North Korea, particularly in the second term of the Bush presidency, carries with it important lessons for American leaders and diplomats of the future. First is the importance of not losing sight of the objective. In this case, the president had made clear that our goal was getting the North Koreans to give up their nuclear weapons program. However, as negotiations proceeded, the State Department came to regard getting the North Koreans to agree to something, indeed anything, as the ultimate objective. That mistake led our diplomats to respond to Pyongyang’s intransigence and dishonesty with ever greater concessions, thereby encouraging duplicity and double-dealing. And in the end it led them to recommend we accept an agreement that didn’t accomplish the president’s goal and even set it back. A good model for future leaders is Ronald Reagan’s approach at the Reykjavik Summit with Gorbachev in 1986. He wasn’t so desperate for an agreement that he would take whatever he could get. He would not concede America’s right to missile defense, and when the Soviets refused to grant that