HOOVER INSTITUTION

What to Do about North Korean

Nuclear Weapons
Allied Solidarity, the Limits of Diplomacy,
and the “Pain Box”

Christopher A. Ford

The vexed issue of the nuclear program of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)
has run, in some sense, like a leitmotif through much of this author’s career in Washington—or
at least the portions of it that touch on US diplomacy. I began my first tour at the US Department
of State just after North Korea had destroyed the Agreed Framework deal that it had struck
with American officials in 1994. In 2002, US diplomats had presented DPRK officials with
evidence of North Korean cheating on that agreement—in the form of secretly pursuing a
uranium pathway to nuclear weapons—and in 2003, Pyongyang promptly abandoned the
agreement and withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The State Department bureau for which I then served as principal deputy assistant secretary
(then called the Bureau of Verification and Compliance) ended up being closely involved in
supporting the tense diplomatic negotiations that followed during the Six-Party Talks period,
primarily with regard to verification issues—that is, how it might be possible to verify whether
North Korea had actually complied with the terms of the “denuclearization” accord it was
the objective of those talks to negotiate. We were also part of some challenging interagency
debates over the nature and extent of the uranium-based nuclear weapons program that
North Korea then had underway—an effort that turned out to have included significant col-
laborative input from Pakistan.1

A few years later, I continued to struggle with DPRK nuclear issues as a think tank scholar,
drawing upon our bureau’s experience with the dismantlement of Muammar Qaddafi’s
nascent (also Pakistan-assisted) nuclear weapons program, and suggesting a model
whereby North Korea might agree to denuclearization as part of a broader accord with the
United States leading to the relaxation of many of the sanctions pressures we had imposed
on that country. (That particular gambit went poorly, however, because no sooner had

A Hoover Institution Essay

 I submitted a paper to this effect for a US-DPRK Track 2 conference,2 the Obama admin-
istration and its European allies decided to bomb Libya and depose Qaddafi. This rather
soured our DPRK interlocutors at that conference on the idea of a “Libya model” of
WMD renunciation.)

But that wasn’t the end of my engagement with DPRK nuclear challenges, for some years
after that—when back at the State Department as assistant secretary for International Security
and Nonproliferation—my bureau was called upon to provide technical support to the effort
then underway in connection with President Trump’s personal summits with DPRK dictator
Kim Jong-un. That is, bureau staff helped lead interagency planning for what we would actu-
ally do to cooperatively dismantle the DPRK nuclear program (and to verify that it was really
gone) on the off chance that Kim said yes to American proposals for such denuclearization.
We also had the departmental lead for enforcing US and international sanctions against the
DPRK regime—an effort that included repeated (and generally unsuccessful) efforts to get
the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to stop its disgraceful and unconscionable secret
efforts to help Pyongyang evade United Nations sanctions.

Most recently, I was the subject of a “spear-phishing” campaign apparently undertaken

by North Korea in an effort to survey the views of portions of the US policy community about
North Korea—perhaps in anticipation of a possible changing of the guard in the White House
next year. In fact, the essay you are reading is an indirect result of that spear-phishing effort,
for to the degree that my personal views on this subject do to some degree prove interesting,
I see no reason not to share them with as wide an audience as possible.

Having apparently been unable to escape these North Korea debates, therefore, I hope this
essay will serve to cast some light on them and offer at least some insights into what might
pass for a way forward. So what are we to make of the DPRK nuclear challenge?

THE UGLY BACKSTORY

From this vantage point, at least one thing seems woefully clear: the DPRK never seems to
have been serious about “denuclearization” at any point, and has been a congenital viola-
tor of every nuclear-related agreement it has ever signed. The reader may find that a strong
statement, so perhaps it is worth recapping that grim history.

North Korea built a nuclear research complex at Yongbyon in the late 1950s, first became inter-
ested in developing nuclear weapons in the early 1960s, and had acquired a five-megawatt
reactor from the Soviet Union and put that facility into operation by the mid-1980s.3 Despite
a continuing interest in nuclear weapons, however, Pyongyang joined the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1974 and signed a limited (INFCIRC/66-type 4) safeguards
agreement with that agency in 1977.5 Thereafter, the DPRK joined the NPT in December 1985.6

The end of the Cold War between the United States and the USSR seemed initially to make
progress on DPRK-related nuclear issues possible, as the United States withdrew its own

2   CHRISTOPHER A. FORD  U  WHAT TO DO ABOUT NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS

forward-deployed nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1991, and the DPRK and South Korea
began negotiating over their nuclear futures.7 In the resulting Joint Declaration of 1992,
in fact, the two Koreas supplemented their already-existing obligations under Article II of
the NPT 8 with a further joint promise to “use nuclear energy solely for peaceful purposes,”
“not test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons”
and “not possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment facilities.”9 North Korea also
signed a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (CSA) (a.k.a. INFCIRC/153-type agreement 10)
with the IAEA in 1992.11

The DPRK, however, appears never to have intended to comply with these restrictions and
certainly didn’t do so. In the early 1980s, it had secretly built or acquired a second nuclear
reactor, and

other elements of a nuclear weapons program—an explosive detonation site to test

nuclear warhead designs, various secret military facilities, and eventually a plutonium
­reprocessing plant—began appearing on [US] satellite photos. And North Korean
defectors talked of covert plans to produce nuclear weapons, based at Yongbyon
and elsewhere.12

By 1989, North Korea was constructing a third, even larger reactor at Yongbyon and by 1992
had constructed a huge plutonium reprocessing facility as well. (Soviet intelligence reports,
in fact—buttressed by accounts from defectors—suggested that the DPRK may have already
conducted some kind of nuclear weapon test at least as early as 1990.)13

The DPRK reported the existence of a remarkably large nuclear infrastructure to the IAEA in
1992, after which agency inspections revealed that it had reprocessed plutonium more times
than it had declared.14 When, in light of these revelations, the IAEA asked the UN Security
Council for authority to conduct ad hoc inspections in the DPRK, the North Korean govern-
ment announced in March 1993 that it was withdrawing from the NPT.

The DPRK agreed to “suspend” this withdrawal shortly before it became effective, however.
Under the Agreed Framework reached with the Americans in 1994, the country promised
to “freeze its graphite-moderated reactors and related facilities and . . . ​eventually dismantle
these reactors and related facilities”15 in return for fuel supplies and an international agree-
ment subsequently to provide it with light-water nuclear reactors. A Korean Peninsula Energy
Development Organization (KEDO)—managed by the United States, South Korea, Japan, and
the European Union’s atomic energy agency and with financial contributions from a number
of countries, including the United States—was established in 1995 to provide this assistance
to Pyongyang.16

Despite these promises and this largesse, however, North Korea continued to pursue nuclear
weapons in violation of its NPT obligations. While its plutonium-production facilities remained
under the 1994 “freeze,” it began secretly pursuing a separate fissile material production pro-
gram for nuclear weapons based on uranium—with assistance from the notorious Pakistani

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 nuclear smuggler A. Q. Khan, which reportedly included not only uranium enrichment cen-
trifuges but also actual nuclear weapons designs, in return for which Pakistan is said to have
received DPRK assistance with its ballistic missile program.17 When confronted by US officials
in late 2002 with evidence of its violations of the NPT and the 1994 agreement, North Korea
admitted this work 18 and in 2003 declared the completion of its (previously “suspended”)
withdrawal from the NPT.19

Diplomatic overtures sputtered on for some years after this withdrawal, first with the so-
called Six-Party Talks hosted by China20 and then with President Donald Trump’s short-lived
summitry with Kim Jong-un, the latest heir to the Kim dynasty.21 By this point, Pyongyang
had tested nuclear weapons on at least six occasions—including a thermonuclear device
(a.k.a. “H-bomb”) in 2017—and had developed a nuclear arsenal currently estimated at
between twenty and sixty warheads, along with an expanding range of intercontinental bal-
listic missiles (ICBMs) for their delivery.22 (Most recently, the DPRK claimed to have made
progress in “miniaturizing” nuclear weapons to permit them to be used with a greater vari-
ety of delivery systems.23) Despite Pyongyang’s promising South Korea once more in 2018
that it would “fully implement all existing agreements and declarations adopted between the
two sides thus far,”24 there does not seem to be any nuclear agreement that the DPRK has
ever kept.

OUR CONTEMPORARY PROBLEM

And this, of course, raises the question of why nuclear weapons are so important to the
Kim dynasty. After all, although it professes to be worried about aggression and attempts at
regime change by the United States, North Korea would seem to have been notably suc-
cessful in “deterring” any such attack for the last seventy years since the armistice that
ended hostilities in the Korean War. Indeed, the only imaginable threat of US military action
that the Kim dynasty faces today (or has faced for many years) is in potential response
to North Korean provocations—such as a DPRK invasion or the use of weapons of mass
destruction (WMDs) against the United States or the Republic of Korea (ROK), to either
of which Washington and Seoul might together feel they have to respond with an effort
to topple the DPRK dictatorship.

Long before Pyongyang had any nuclear weapons, its formidable array of artillery just
across the border from the populous and highly vulnerable South Korean capital—part of a
DPRK arsenal that is presumed to include chemical and biological weaponry—appears to
have done a very effective job of ensuring that neither the United States nor the ROK desired
a fight as long as the DPRK itself refrained from attacking. And indeed, the specifically
nuclear aspects of any notional “threat” to North Korea decreased dramatically more than
thirty years ago when the United States withdrew its forward-deployed nuclear weapons from
South Korea in 1991. For decades, therefore, there has been essentially zero chance of any
kind of “out-of-the-blue” US-ROK move against the North—and, if anything, the net existen-
tial “threat” to the Kim regime has actually fallen considerably since the years of the Cold War.

4   CHRISTOPHER A. FORD  U  WHAT TO DO ABOUT NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS

It is conceivable that despite all this, the DPRK regime’s mind-set is so deeply pathologi-
cal and paranoid that it really does feel a real and perhaps worsening threat from the
United States, however unmoored from actual reality such an assessment would be. And,
truth be told, the US military interventions since the early 2000s to remove Saddam Hussein
and then Muammar Qaddafi from power—two “rogue regime” dictators who notably lacked
nuclear weaponry at the time of American intervention despite prior efforts to acquire it—
surely could have contributed to such conclusions.

Yet it is also the case that the North’s fixation on nuclear weaponry abated not at all despite
the fiercely anticommunist South Korean military government’s replacement since the late
1980s with a vibrant democratic system that includes leftist or center-left parties that periodi-
cally hold power in Seoul and sometimes rather desperately seek accommodation with the
DPRK. To the contrary, the pace of the North Korean nuclear program accelerated during that
period—picking up, in particular, in the early 1990s, after US nuclear weapons were removed
from the ROK. Especially through the prism of Soviet-derived concepts of the “­correlation
of forces”25 —some mutant version of which likely forms at least part of the worldview of
North Korea’s Stalinist leadership—the DPRK has pursued nuclear weapons with ever-
greater vigor even as the objective threat facing it from across its southern border has
shrunk. All this makes “fear”-based explanations at least somewhat problematic.

Another possibility is that North Korea means what it has always said—and what it has
­continued to say—about having the ultimate strategic objective of achieving “reunifica-
tion” of the Korean Peninsula, a goal it has cherished from the DPRK’s founding, and which
in 1950 led it (with Soviet and Chinese support 26 ) to invade South Korea, thus setting off
the bloody Korean War. Some commentators today discount DPRK talk of reunification as
mere rhetoric,27 but others do not.28 For my part, I think it would be foolish simply to dismiss
North Korea’s enduring discourse of unification simply because to our eyes it appears fantas-
tically unrealistic.

Through the prism of a DPRK strategic objective of coerced “unification” with South Korea,
Pyongyang’s fixation on nuclear weapons is arguably more rational than it would be merely in
response to some supposed threat of a US-ROK invasion of the North. Through DPRK nuclear
threats to the US homeland, the Kim dynasty may feel, Washington might be deterred from
coming to South Korea’s aid in a conflict—that is, out of a presumed unwillingness to “sac-
rifice San Francisco to save Seoul”—thus effectively shattering the US-ROK military alliance
and leaving the South to face the DPRK alone. By means of such a nuclear-facilitated “decou-
pling” of South Korea from the United States, North Korea might assume that Seoul can be
compelled to agree to unification on terms favorable to the DPRK.

Is that the DPRK’s strategy? As with so much about the secretive regime in Pyongyang, it
is difficult to say with assurance. Nevertheless, one certainly cannot rule it out, and indeed
such an explanation would actually seem much more consistent with long-standing DPRK
pronouncements and policies than the sort of breezily facile assumptions one sometimes
sees being made by Western journalists that Kim Jong-un engages in nuclear and missile

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 provocations simply because he seeks Western “attention,” craves “status” in the world, or
wants to accumulate “bargaining chips” for some hypothesized future negotiation that never
seems to occur. Some of those things may in some sense be true too, but there could be
rather more to it than that—and it’s never wise to assume one’s adversary is too stupid to
have a real grand strategy.

In any event, whatever the explanation, it seems clear that the DPRK nuclear problem is not
going away anytime soon. And it certainly seems unlikely to go away in the ways for which
we have hoped during three decades of US “denuclearization” diplomacy.

THREE OPTIONS?

And so, what might our options be for dealing with this continuing problem? To my eye, there
are at least three: (1) continue with our long-standing efforts to negotiate “denuclearization”;
(2) pivot to a policy of seeking “arms control” with the DPRK in hope of establishing limits on
its program; or (3) adopt a strategy of indefinite pressure, endeavoring to keep North Korea
in what I call the “pain box” while maintaining adamantine US-ROK solidarity in the name of
deterrence.

DOUBLE DOWN AND TRY AGAIN, HARDER?

The first option would simply be, in effect, to “double down” and “try again, harder” to
make a success of the kind of denuclearization diplomacy US officials have pursued with
the Agreed Framework, in the Six-Party Talks, and in President Trump’s ill-conceived and
ill-fated summitry with Kim Jong-un.29 I fear, however, that this approach would amount to
little more than what is apocryphally attributed to Albert Einstein as a definition of insanity:
“doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

To begin with, as noted, there has essentially never been any sign of DPRK good faith in
such negotiations. Rather than approaching denuclearization negotiations with the out-
side world as a means to explore possibilities for actual denuclearization, Pyongyang
seems to have employed diplomacy over the years in ways that, while often oddly
deft, were fundamentally simply tactical and temporizing. Thus, for instance, has the
North Korean regime:

• Sought sanctions relief in return for the DPRK’s mere presence in talks (e.g., demand-
ing the end of US financial sanctions against DPRK global banking in the Banco Delta
Asia episode, as a condition of returning to the Six-Party Talks30);

• Traded meaningful Western concessions for largely empty North Korean ones (e.g.,
“freezing” the plutonium program in return for economic and technological assistance
under the 1994 Agreed Framework while secretly pursuing uranium weapons);

6   CHRISTOPHER A. FORD  U  WHAT TO DO ABOUT NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS

 • Used the negotiating process to distract and redirect American officials from con-
templating military action against North Korea (e.g., as the Clinton administration was
­considering just before the Agreed Framework31);

• Taken showy but merely symbolic steps that seem to signal seriousness about denuclear-
ization in order to elicit continued Western engagement in talks but involve no meaning-
ful sacrifice (e.g., dismantling an unneeded reactor cooling tower 32 or dynamiting the
entrance to a nuclear testing tunnel33); and

• Used ostensibly “denuclearization”-focused diplomatic engagement as a means by

which to enhance the perceived prestige and status of the Kim dynasty (e.g., through
one-on-one meetings with a naively credulous and megalomaniacally overconfident
US president ignorant of history 34).

Against this history, and North Korea’s violation of every nuclear agreement it has ever
entered, it is difficult to discern any sign of DPRK good faith at all, at least with regard to the
fundamental question of denuclearization. With hindsight, it may be that all efforts to negoti-
ate a solution to this problem were doomed from the start by the simple fact that the regime
in Pyongyang never wanted—and, to all appearances, never even considered—anything other
than what it has done: that is, to develop an increasingly large and powerful nuclear arse-
nal and a range of missile systems with which to deliver such devices. (And if such hopes
of negotiated denuclearization came to naught even when the DPRK’s nuclear effort was
merely nascent, moreover, how would it be possible to imagine Kim dismantling the fairly
large and robust program he has today?) In truth, it would be difficult for the North Koreans
to be any clearer than they have been that the country will “never” relinquish its nuclear
weapons,35 and we have every reason to take them at their word on this point.

Moreover, even if by some miracle a denuclearization agreement did somehow emerge, it is

very difficult to see how it would be implemented. In this respect, it is instructive to recall how
challenging the “implementation” issue was, even back when the DPRK nuclear program was
relatively small and primitive. There are at least two major aspects of this problem: (a) actually
dismantling the program itself and (b) verifying that all of it has in fact been eliminated.

For a time, it was at least possible to argue that the “dismantlement” prong was fairly easy.
Back in the early 2000s when the United States first discovered North Korea to be cheating
on the Agreed Framework by pursuing uranium enrichment for weapons, for instance, the
clearest evidence the United States had of this cheating reportedly pertained only to DPRK
efforts to purchase centrifuge-related equipment and materiel such as electrical-frequency
converters, high-purity cobalt powder for magnetic-top bearing assemblies, and high-strength
aluminum tubes.36 In theory, if this were really all the illicit procurement that had occurred by
that point, the “dismantlement” prong might not have consisted of any more than turning over
those particular items to US or international experts for destruction.

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 But the DPRK dismantlement problem was not so simple even then, as some of us argued
inside the government at the time, in the face of a good deal of wishful thinking, and a touch
of dishonesty, by others.37 As we now know, even then the DPRK uranium program was fairly
advanced, involving important inputs from abroad such as equipment and technology from
Pakistan,38 and even North Korea’s export of uranium hexafluoride enrichment feedstock to
Muammar Qaddafi’s nuclear weapons program in 2001.39 (There may also have been DPRK
nuclear weapons collaboration with Pakistan beyond simply receiving Pakistani uranium
enrichment technology.40) This was also about the time that North Korea also began build-
ing a plutonium production nuclear reactor for Syria, a deal for which negotiations report-
edly began as early as June 2000 and for which the first DPRK technicians arrived in Syria
in 2002.41 This was not a merely notional or embryonic program at the time of North Korea’s
withdrawal from the NPT.

And with every passing year since, the DPRK program has grown larger and more com-
plex. As mentioned earlier, in 2018, in connection with President Trump’s summits with
Kim Jong-un, the Department of State led an interagency effort to prepare dismantlement
contingency plans for the much larger North Korean program that by then existed, hoping
to be prepared to implement an agreement if Kim agreed to US denuclearization proposals.
By that point, however, the problem was extraordinarily challenging—in fact, at the ragged outer
edge of the achievable under any reasonable set of operational and political assumptions—and
things seem to have progressed even further in North Korea since then.

And that is just the “dismantlement” part of the problem. It is also instructive to recall how
problematic verification turned out to be, even back in the 2000s. As this author summarized
in describing US-DPRK diplomatic negotiation during the Six-Party Talks period, for example,

US authorities submitted a denuclearization verification proposal to the DPRK in 2008. . . . ​

Under that plan, verification activities involving “weaponization-related activities, infor-
mation, facilities, or material” were to be carried out by “experts from the [NPT] Nuclear
Weapon States.” Information about weaponization-related work in the DPRK would be
shared with other Six-Party partners only “to the extent consistent with the NPT,” and pro-
vided to the IAEA only through communications with “select [IAEA] inspectors from the
Nuclear Weapons States” and only where specifically necessary for the Agency to per-
form its duties. The US proposal envisioned that the IAEA would be involved “[w]hen nec-
essary” in order provide “consultancy and assistance,” and would generally handle issues
related to dual-use technology. . . .

[This plan] envisioned investigative authorities that were indeed quite broad. These
included “full access” to all facilities where nuclear materials had at any point been
stored, or where any weaponization-related activity had been carried out, as well as to
“any site, facility or location,” whether or not declared by the DPRK, “in order to confirm
the absence of undeclared nuclear material, equipment, or related activities.” (Broad pro-
vision was also made for access to and review of documents, interviews with personnel,
and a variety of investigative measurement activities.) 42

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That 2008 plan, however, was rejected by the DPRK as unacceptably intrusive. Pyongyang
was willing to talk only about beginning verification activities at the long-declared and already
episodically inspected Yongbyon plutonium facility43 —that is, a location where it surely wasn’t
keeping all its secret weapons work—and no approach to verifying denuclearization was ever
agreed.

The problem here is thus not hard to see. The DPRK nuclear program is by this point quite
extensive and well established, being not merely fairly large but also in important respects
concealed, with key elements presumably hidden away in various bunkers and protected
enclaves in order to reduce their vulnerability to detection and hence attack. North Korea’s
track record of chronically violating nuclear-related agreements, moreover, makes it madness
to rely upon Pyongyang’s good faith in any meaningful way. As a result, any plan for verifying
the achievement of denuclearization would have to be extraordinarily intrusive—and even
more so today than in 2008, when the DPRK rejected the last detailed US verification pro-
posal. This very intrusiveness, however, is likely to make any good verification plan entirely
unacceptable to the secretive and paranoid North Koreans. And so we have the catch-22 of
DPRK denuclearization diplomacy: no negotiable deal is likely to be verifiable, and no verifi-
able deal is likely to be negotiable.

To be sure, these may be points of merely academic or theoretical interest, for there
seems little or no chance of any denuclearization agreement being reached in the first place.
Nevertheless, this discussion illustrates the problems of a “try again, harder” approach to
denuclearization diplomacy. North Korea, alas, seems to have largely taken this option off
the table.

“ARMS CONTROL”?
But what about the “arms control” option? Might it be possible—as US Under Secretary of
State for Arms Control and International Security Bonnie Jenkins suggested late last year44 —
at least to negotiate limits on North Korea’s nuclear program?

Kim Jong-un, at least, would presumably like this idea, for it would represent an unearned
diplomatic windfall for North Korea perhaps even more significant than the one given the
Kim dynasty by President Trump’s summitry. But would it be a good idea? And could
it work?

My hunch is that it wouldn’t, and it couldn’t. (And I am not alone. Jenkins’s suggestion about
arms control with the DPRK was promptly caveated even by the Arms Control Association
and was effectively walked back by other State Department officials, including one of her
own subordinates.45 ) Let’s unpack some of the reasons why the idea seems so problematic.

To begin with, it is in no way clear how one might approach negotiating an arms control
agreement with North Korea without in the process affording it the very status of “legitimate”
nuclear weapons possessor it has been claiming for years—and that it has hitherto been a

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 key element of US policy to avoid conferring. Thus rewarding Pyongyang’s years of violating
nuclear agreements and its provocative development of nuclear weapons after withdrawing
from the NPT would truly be an enormous concession, and one that the United States would
have irrevocably made, in effect, merely by sitting down with the North Koreans for such
negotiations, and largely irrespective of the outcome of such talks.

It is no small thing, after all, to convene for arms control talks as a notionally “equal” coun-
terparty to a superpower. The reader may recall, for instance, that the Russian Federation
insisted on making the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty of 2002 (a.k.a. the Moscow
Treaty) a legally binding agreement. Notably, Moscow made this demand not because the
Kremlin worried that US officials would not follow through with nuclear weapons cuts that
the George W. Bush administration had already decided to make unilaterally. Rather, Moscow
sought a legally binding treaty so that a diminished Russia could still claim the symbolic status
of being the kind of great power that gets to have strategic nuclear talks with the American
colossus in the first place.46 Kim Jong-un would surely be delighted to claim such status too,
but we ought to think carefully before we consider giving it to him.

Quite apart from whatever happens with the DPRK’s nuclear program itself, moreover, a US
negotiating acceptance of de facto North Korean nuclear weapons legitimacy might send a
catastrophic message to would-be proliferators. Such a concession would likely be seen as
validating and rewarding NPT and other nonproliferation violations, thus creating an enormous
moral hazard problem and gravely undermining the global nonproliferation regime. In that way,
the effort to find a diplomatic answer to a short-term North Korea negotiations problem might
well end up being, over time, a global proliferation-encouraging “cure” that proves worse than
the DPRK-specific “disease.”

And even this assumes that we could trust the Kim regime to keep to such future “arms con-
trol” terms in the first place—which is conceivable, I suppose, but in no way supported by
any of North Korea’s past behavior. In a second but related difficulty, it also assumes that an
arms control deal with Pyongyang would be effectively verifiable. (While the verification chal-
lenge here would presumably be less staggeringly difficult than the one associated with full-
scale denuclearization, it would by no means be trivial.) One should not take either of these
assumptions at face value.

Another challenge for arms control with the DPRK would be that of reciprocity. Would
North Korea accept terms (e.g., in talks with the United States) under which Pyongyang alone
accepted limits on nuclear capabilities? Or would it demand “reciprocal” nuclear restric-
tions from the United States—promises that Washington would surely refuse to give, not least
because it would be madness to restrict our nuclear capacities merely for North Korea in a
context in which the revisionist near-peer great powers of Russia and China are expanding
their nuclear arsenals in very dangerous and provocative ways. (Nor, I might add, is it clear
what “reciprocal” nuclear terms would even be intelligible in a US-DPRK arms control agree-
ment in the first place, given the vast asymmetries between the two countries and the breath-
taking differences in their respective strategic contexts.)

10   CHRISTOPHER A. FORD  U  WHAT TO DO ABOUT NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Conceivably, rather than asking directly for some form of US nuclear restrictions, the
North Koreans might make other demands. They might, for instance, insist upon a complete
lifting of all sanctions and other economic pressures against their country, perhaps along
with great dollops of international economic assistance and reintegration into global com-
merce. (Even if the DPRK didn’t demand this, it would likely prove much more difficult for the
United States thereafter to insist upon continued international sanctions against the North
for a nuclear program the existence of which the Americans themselves had effectively sig-
naled and, through an arms accord, they now accepted. One way or the other, reaching an
arms control agreement with Pyongyang might thus spell the end of the sanctions regime.)
Alternatively or additionally, Pyongyang might demand terms that would amount to a de facto
dissolution of the US-ROK alliance—a step that would effectively achieve for North Korea what
its nuclear weapons program has arguably been trying to accomplish all along, leaving Seoul
without American support while nevertheless confronting the nuclear weaponry that such a
deal would still allow Kim Jong-un to retain.

All in all, it is thus very difficult to imagine any US leader agreeing to all the various conces-
sions that any arms control agreement with North Korea would likely inherently entail. One
should not go so far as to depict the idea of arms control here as being insane, but on both
substantive and political grounds, it is hard not to see such an agreement as extremely prob-
lematic, and unlikely either to be negotiated or to succeed in practice.

THE “PAIN BOX”

With those two alternatives looking decidedly unattractive, I come now to the third—one that,
while still notably unattractive, is nonetheless on the whole arguably the “least bad” of these
contending approaches. This option is what I refer to as the “pain box.”

Under this approach, we would (explicitly or implicitly) give up on the fool’s errand of negoti-
ated denuclearization, while also eschewing the practical and moral hazard nightmares of
trying to make arms control negotiation with North Korea work effectively. Instead, we and
our partners in the international community would simply resign ourselves to a prolonged
policy of indefinite duration, under which we would work to keep the DPRK in as isolated
and constrained a “box” as possible. Continued or increased sanctions and other pressures
would aim both to impose at least some de facto, indirect, resource-based constraints
on North Korea’s nuclear, missile, and other military programs and to make the example of
DPRK nuclear weapons proliferation as unattractive as possible to other would-be NPT
­violators and nuclear weapons proliferators around the world.

At the same time, this “pain box” strategy would focus resolutely on shoring up the US-ROK
alliance, strengthening its ability to deter DPRK aggression and denying the North’s attempt to
“decouple” the United States from its long-standing ally and reap strategic gains from devel-
oping weapons of mass destruction. (Increasingly robust US missile defenses, jointly with
the ROK on the Korean Peninsula, with our Japanese allies, and more broadly, would also be
an important part of this effort.) In effect, therefore, the “pain box” approach would seek not
just to deny Pyongyang the anticipated benefits it wanted from its nuclear program but also

HOOVER INSTITUTION  U  STANFORD UNIVERSITY   11

 to punish it on an ongoing basis, and for the foreseeable future, for these provocations—not
merely as a matter of just deserts, but also, as it were, “pour encourager les autres.”47

This strategy would certainly be no panacea. It would entail real and continuing risks of
confrontation and potential escalation, and under the best of circumstances would likely be
difficult, protracted, and laborious. Nevertheless, given the fraught situation on the Korean
Peninsula and the exceedingly poor alternatives available, this “pain box” strategy may just
be the best available option. (It would also have the advantage of offering some flexibility,
for in principle, it would not preclude a subsequent pivot to either of the other two alterna-
tives discussed herein should—for some unforeseen reason—either of them suddenly seem
more advisable than they are at present.) Strategy must be devised based on the world as it
is, not the world as we would wish it to be, and this uncomfortable and indefinitely prolonged
approach may well be the least bad of the poor alternatives available to us.

CHINA’S ROLE

Before concluding this paper, it is useful to say a word about China’s role in the DPRK
nuclear saga. It has long been part of the conventional diplomatic wisdom that Beijing is
the “key” to solving the DPRK nuclear problem and that “if China wanted to” it could solve
this problem for the world. At this point, however, I doubt this is true anymore, if indeed it ever
were. In fact, it is today far from clear that the Kim dynasty would surrender its weapons of
mass destruction even if strongly urged to do so by its financiers and quartermasters in the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Nonetheless, while we need to overcome our Western ten-
dency toward wishful thinking in anticipation of some sort of benevolent Sinic deus ex machina
that will miraculously solve the DPRK nuclear problem for us, China still has much power to
contribute—for good or for ill—to how the North Korean problem is managed in the years ahead.

But we need to be realistic about China’s role and to admit to ourselves that China prob-
ably does not want to see North Korean denuclearization. I have no doubt that Beijing does
not want to see war or utter chaos on the Korean Peninsula. In fact, that might represent
something of a nightmare for the CCP, in terms of a massively stepped-up US presence and
operational military activities along China’s border, potential mass refugee flows into the
PRC, possible DPRK nuclear weapons use, and plausibly a perceived need for China itself
to intervene—either (once again) to save the Middle Kingdom’s North Korean vassal state
from destruction at American and ROK hands or simply to seize and secure the DPRK’s
nuclear weapons before they fall into US (or South Korean!) control.

But not wanting to see a war is not the same thing as desiring denuclearization, and Beijing
seems perfectly happy with a nuclear weapons–possessing DPRK, provided that things don’t
quite spiral into chaos. Whereas China might to some extent share North Korean worries
about potential regime vulnerability there if the Kim dynasty relinquished its nuclear arsenal,
the CCP would appear to be pleased with a nuclearized status quo. After all, as things cur-
rently stand, Pyongyang’s provocations tie down US forces on the Korean Peninsula and
keep those forces facing North instead of West, and periodically distract Washington from

12   CHRISTOPHER A. FORD  U  WHAT TO DO ABOUT NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS

maintaining a strategic competitive focus on China and the threats that the CCP regime pre­
sents to the sovereignty and autonomy of nations throughout the Indo-Pacific.

This surely helps explain Beijing’s ongoing role in assisting Pyongyang in evading
United Nations sanctions, its willingness to extend economic and other assistance to the
DPRK, and its diplomatic role in periodically protecting the North from additional inter-
national pressures in diplomatic fora. This does not make Pyongyang China’s obedient
“lapdog,” and I cannot imagine that the two regimes truly trust each other. But they do
share interests, which are in both cases notably contrary to our own and those of our allies
and partners, and the two regimes cooperate at least on that basis. As long as the DPRK’s
provocations aren’t “too big,” therefore, a nuclear-armed North Korea is very much in
China’s strategic interest—and denuclearization is not. I see little or no chance of that
changing, especially if China remains under the thumb of Xi Jinping’s increasingly milita-
rized regional imperialist paranoia.

So can China play a more constructive role here at all? It certainly could if it wanted to, though
for the most part, as noted, it has chosen otherwise. Perhaps the only faint hope here lies in
Beijing’s interest in not seeing DPRK provocations do too much to drive the South Koreans
and the Americans into a robust, effective, technologically sophisticated, and ever-better-
armed military alliance. The CCP’s revisionist China surely wants the US-ROK alliance to be
weaker rather than stronger, and this might offer at least some slender reed of hope for con-
structive Chinese behavior vis-à-vis the North.

Specifically, to the extent that North Korea’s continued expansion of its nuclear and missile
capabilities is seen to be driving the United States and South Korea closer together in mili-
tary terms, this may provide Beijing with an incentive to press North Korea to moderate its
behavior. As noted, this is very unlikely to include pressure for actual denuclearization, but it
is not beyond imagining that China might wish to press Pyongyang to slow or stop the growth
of its arsenal to reduce the degree that North Korea gives Washington the “excuse”—as the
CCP might see it—to further militarize the Korean Peninsula and its relationship with the ROK.
Such pressure, even if successful, would naturally not “solve” the DPRK nuclear problem, but
it would nevertheless represent an advance over today’s status quo of rapid North Korean
expansion.

This possibility also provides another argument for the abovementioned “pain box” strategy—
in particular, for its emphasis on shoring up the US-ROK alliance. A resolute policy of but-
tressing that alliance and strengthening joint deterrence against the DPRK notwithstanding its
nuclear and missile capabilities would represent both a means by which directly to fend off
DPRK threats and a means by which indirectly to incentivize China to press its Korean partner
to avoid the worst of excesses.

The “pain box” approach I recommend would not be a happy and congenial road, much
less an easy one. It likely represents a realistic path, however, and an approach that finally
eschews the magical thinking of assuming that with enough good-faith effort, diplomacy will

HOOVER INSTITUTION  U  STANFORD UNIVERSITY   13

 always find a way to reach congenially “win-win” solutions even with the worst miscreants.
It would be better were that the case, of course, but it is not, and at least in dealing with the
DPRK regime and its nuclear program, we should learn the lessons of a bitter history and gird
ourselves for what will probably need to be a prolonged period of stern resolution in the face
of Pyongyang’s provocations.

NOTES
1. ​See, e.g., Mike Chinoy, “How Pakistan’s A. Q. Khan Helped North Korea Get the Bomb: Islamabad
and Pyongyang Exchanged Technology, Cash, and Expertise,” Foreign Policy, October 11, 2021,
https://­foreignpolicy​.­com​/­2 021​/­10​/­11​/­aq​-­khan​-­pakistan​-­north​-­korea​-­nuclear​/­; R. Jeffrey Smith,
“Pakistan’s Nuclear-Bomb Maker Says North Korea Paid Bribes for Know-How,” Washington Post,
July 6, 2011; Larry A. Niksch, “North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” Congressional Research
Service, Issue Brief for Congress, March 17, 2003, 1, 6, https://­nsarchive2​.­g wu​.­edu​/ ­NSAEBB​
/­NSAEBB87​/­nk24​.­pdf.
2. ​Christopher Ford, “Challenges of North Korean Nuclear Negotiation,” Aspen DPRK-USA Dialogue,
ed. C. K. Mallory IV (Berlin: Aspen Institute Germany, 2011), 63–83; see also Christopher Ford, “Nuclear
Negotiation with the DPRK: Where Now?,” remarks at a Track II dialogue sponsored by the Aspen
Institute Germany, March  28, 2011, https://­w ww​.­newparadigmsforum​.­com​/­p 804.
3. ​See, e.g., Michael J. Mazarr, North Korea and the Bomb: A Case Study in Nonproliferation (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 24, 29; Mike Chinoy, Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear
Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 4.
4. ​See International Atomic Energy Agency, “The Agency’s Safeguards System (1965, as Provisionally
Extended in 1966 and 1968),” INFCIRC/66/Rev.2, September 16, 1968, https://­w ww​.­iaea​.­org​/­sites​
/­default ​/­files​/­publications​/­documents​/­infcircs​/­1965​/­infcirc66r2​.­pdf. (INFCIRCs are IAEA information
circulars.) INFCIRC/66 agreements apply only to specific facilities or materials, but under their
provisions countries promise not to employ the particular nuclear material, facilities, or other
items that are subject to the agreement for the manufacture of any nuclear weapon or to further
any military purpose. See US National Nuclear Security Administration, “Determining Nuclear
Safeguards Applicability,” n.d., https://­rains​.­doe​.­gov​/­page​/­applicable​-­s afeguards​-­agreements.
5. ​See Mazarr, North Korea and the Bomb, 25, 29.
6. ​See, e.g., United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea:
Accession to Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT),” 2021, https://­treaties​.­unoda​
.­org ​/­a​/­npt ​/­democraticpeoplesrepublicofkorea​/­ACC​/­moscow.
7. ​See, e.g., Joel S. Wit, Daniel B. Poneman, and Robert L. Gallucci, Going Critical: The First North Korean
Nuclear Crisis (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2004), 9–10.
8. ​See Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (signed July 1, 1968, and entered into
force March  5, 1970), https://­w ww​.­un​.­org ​/­disarmament ​/­wmd​/­nuclear​/­npt ​/­text. According to Article  II
of the treaty, “Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the
transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or
of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; not to manufacture or
otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive
any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.”
9. ​Joint Declaration of South and North Korea on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula
(entered into force February  19, 1992), Articles 1, 2, and 3, https://­w ww​.­nti​.­org​/­wp​-­content​/­uploads​
/­2 021​/­0 9​/­korea​_­denuclearization​.­pdf.
10. ​International Atomic Energy Agency, “The Structure and Content of Agreements between
the Agency and States Required in Connection with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of
Nuclear Weapons,” INFCIRC/153 (Corrected) (June  1972), https://­w ww​.­iaea​.­org ​/­sites​/­default​
/­files​/­publications​/­documents​/­infcircs​/­1972 ​/­infcirc153​.­pdf. INFCIRC/153 agreements are the
form of safeguards required under Article III of the NPT, which requires, inter alia, that “[e]ach

14   CHRISTOPHER A. FORD  U  WHAT TO DO ABOUT NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS

non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes to accept safeguards, as set forth in
an agreement to be negotiated and concluded with the International Atomic Energy Agency in
accordance with the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Agency’s safeguards
system, for the exclusive purpose of verification of the fulfilment of its obligations assumed under
this Treaty with a view to preventing diversion of nuclear energy from peaceful uses to nuclear
weapons or other nuclear explosive devices. Procedures for the safeguards required by this Article
shall be followed with respect to source or special fissionable material whether it is being produced,
processed or used in any principal nuclear facility or is outside any such facility. The safeguards
required by this Article shall be applied on all source or special fissionable material in all peaceful
nuclear activities within the territory of such State, under its jurisdiction, or carried out under its
control anywhere.”
11. ​See, e.g., International Atomic Energy Agency, “IAEA and DPRK: Chronology of Key Events,” n.d.,
https://­w ww​.­iaea​.­org ​/­newscenter​/­focus​/­dprk ​/­chronology​-­of​-­key​-­events.
12. ​Mazarr, North Korea and the Bomb, 36.
13. ​Mazarr, North Korea and the Bomb, 46, 56, 101–02.
14. ​Mazarr, North Korea and the Bomb, 82–83, 94–95.
15. ​Agreed Framework of 21 October 1994 between the United States of America and the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea, INFCIRC/457, Article I (3), November 2, 1994, https://­w ww​.­iaea​.­org​/­sites​
/­default ​/­files​/­publications​/­documents​/­infcircs​/­1994​/­infcirc457​.­pdf.
16. ​See, e.g., Nuclear Threat Initiative, “KEDO: Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization,”
June  2009, https://­w ww​.­nti​.­org ​/­education​-­center​/­treaties​-­and​-­regimes​/­korean​-­peninsula​-­energy​
-­development​-­organization​-­kedo​.­
17. ​See, e.g., US Department of State, Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control,
Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments (Washington, DC, 2005),
89–90,  https://­2 009 ​-­2 017​.­state​.­gov​/­documents​/­organization​/­52113​.­pdf; Chinoy, “How Pakistan’s
A. Q. Khan Helped North Korea Get the Bomb.”
18. ​See, e.g., David Sanger, “North Korea Says It Has a Program on Nuclear Arms,” New York Times,
October 17, 2002.
19. ​See “Text of North Korea’s Statement on NPT Withdrawal,” Atomic Archive (translation of text of
DPRK announcement of January  10, 2003), https://­w ww​.­atomicarchive​.­com​/­resources​/­documents​
/­deterrence​/­dprk​-­npt​-­statement​.­html; CNN​.­com​/ ­World, “N. Korea Withdraws from Nuclear Treaty,”
January  10, 2003, https://­w ww​.­cnn​.­com​/­2 003​/ ­WORLD​/­asiapcf​/­east ​/­0 1​/­10​/­nkorea​.­pact.
20. ​See, e.g., Kelsey Davenport, “The Six-Party Talks at a Glance,” Arms Control Association,
January  2022, https://­w ww​.­armscontrol​.­org ​/­factsheets​/­6 partytalks.
21. ​See, e.g., Katie Stallard, “Donald Trump’s North Korea Gambit: What Worked, What Didn’t, and
What’s Next,” Asia Dispatches, November  26, 2020, https://­w ww​.­wilsoncenter​.­org ​/­blog​-­post ​/­donald​
-­trumps​-­north​-­korea​-­gambit​-­what​-­worked​-­what​-­didnt​-­and​-­whats​-­next.
22. ​See, e.g., Mary Beth D. Nikitin, “North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons and Missile Programs,”
Congressional Research Service, January  23, 2023, 1, https://­sgp​.­fas​.­org ​/­crs​/­nuke​/­IF10472​.­pdf.
23. ​See, e.g., Pablo Robles and Choe Sang-Hun, “Why North Korea’s Latest Nuclear Claims Are
Raising Alarms,” New York Times, June  2, 2023, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­interactive​/­2 023​/­0 6​/­0 2​
/­world​/­asia​/­north​-­korea​-­nuclear​.­html#:~:text​=­North%20Korea%27s%20new%20wave%20of,and​
%20to%20the%20United%20States.
24. ​Republic of Korea and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, “Panmunjom Declaration for
Peace,” April  27, 2018, available at https://­w ww​.­ncnk​.­org ​/­resources​/­publications​/­panmunjeom​
_­declaration​_­for​_­peace​.­pdf​/­file​_­view.
25. ​See generally, e.g., Michael J. Deane, “The Soviet Concept of the ‘Correlation of Forces,’ ”
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, SRI Project 4383, Technical Note SSC-TN-4383-1,
May  1976, https://­apps​.­dtic​.­mil​/­sti​/­pdfs​/­ADA027223​.­pdf.
26. ​See, e.g., John W. Garver, China’s Quest: The History of the Foreign Relations of the People’s
Republic of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 61–66.

HOOVER INSTITUTION  U  STANFORD UNIVERSITY   15

 27. ​See, e.g., Robert E. Kelly, “North Korea Probably Does Not Seriously Seek Unification,” Interpreter,
January  9, 2018, https://­w ww​.­lowyinstitute​.­org ​/­the​-­interpreter​/­north​-­korea​-­probably​-­does​-­not​
-­seriously​-­seek​-­unification; Josh Smith, “ ‘Cuddled in Kim Jong Un’s Arms’: North Koreans Envisage
Unification Ahead of Summit” (quoting South Korean professor Lim Eul-chul that “North Korea’s
rhetoric gravitates around unification not because they really believe in an immediate unification
but it’s a powerful slogan that gives justification for them to improve inter-Korean relations”),
Reuters, September  17, 2018, https://­w ww​.­reuters​.­com​/­a rticle​/­u s​-­northkorea​-­s outhkorea​
-­unification​/­cuddled​-­in​-­kim​-­jong​-­uns​-­arms​-­north​-­koreans​-­envisage​-­unification​-­ahead​-­of​-­summit​
-­idUSKCN1LX0F0; see also, generally, Charlie Campbell, “What Would Korean Reunification Look
Like? Five Glaring Problems to Overcome,” Time, April 28, 2018.
28. ​See, e.g., Matthias Maas, “North Korea’s ‘Endgame’: Peaceful Two-State Solution or Coercive
Unification?,” North Korean Review 15, no. 1 (Spring 2019), 109–17; Benjamin R. Young, “North Korea’s
Push for Reunification Isn’t Just Empty Rhetoric,” World Politics Review, November 18, 2021, https://­
www​.­worldpoliticsreview​.­com​/­pyongyang​-­s​-­push​-­for​-­korean​-­reunification​-­isn​-­t​-­empty​-­rhetoric.
29. ​Cf. Uri Friedman, “Inside the Collapse of Trump’s Korea Policy,” Atlantic, December 19, 2019,
https://­w ww​.­theatlantic​.­com​/­politics​/­archive​/­2 019​/­12 ​/­donald​-­trump​-­kim​-­jong​-­un​-­north​-­korea​
-­diplomacy​-­denuclearization​/­6 03748.
30. ​See, e.g., Juan C. Zarate, Treasury’s War: The Unleashing of a New Era in Financial Warfare
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 239–42, 251–57, 264–66.
31. ​For a discussion of declassified documents collection, see National Security Archive, “Engaging
North Korea II: Evidence from the Clinton Administration,” December 8, 2017, https://­nsarchive​.­g wu​
.­edu​/­briefing​-­book ​/­korea​/­2 017​-­12​- ­0 8​/­engaging​-­north​-­korea​-­ii​-­evidence​-­clinton​-­administration.
32. ​See, e.g., Jon Herskovitz, “North Korea Set to Destroy Reactor Cooling Tower,” Reuters, June 26,
2008, https://­w ww​.­reuters​.­com​/­article​/­idUSSP145294.
33. ​See, e.g., Anna Fifield, “North Korea Declares Its Nuclear Test Site Disabled Hours before Trump
Cancels Summit,” Washington Post, May 24, 2018.
34. ​Cf., e.g., Dennis Romero, “Trump-Kim Summit Coin Is a Collectible Punch Line,” NBC News,
May  24, 2018, https://­w ww​.­nbcnews​.­com​/­news​/­us​-­news​/­trump​-­kim​-­summit​-­coin​-­collectible​-­punch​
-­line​-­n877336.
35. ​See, e.g., Ellen Kim, “North Korea States It Will Never Give Up Nuclear Weapons,” Center for
Strategic and International Studies, September  9, 2022, https://­w ww​.­csis​.­org ​/­analysis​/­north​-­korea​
-­states​-­it​-­will​-­never​-­give​-­nuclear​-­weapons.
36. ​See, e.g., Selig S. Harrison, “Did North Korea Cheat?,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2005).
37. ​See generally, e.g., Christopher Ford, “Some Thoughts on How Not to Do WMD Intelligence:
Lessons of Politicization after Iraq,” New Paradigms Forum, January 4, 2010, https://­w ww​.­newpara​
digmsforum​.­com​/­p 83; Christopher Ford, “Politics and Verification: Lessons of North Korea,” New
Paradigms Forum, December  1, 2010, https://­w ww​.­newparadigmsforum​.­com​/­p 593.
38. ​See Chinoy, “How Pakistan’s A. Q. Khan Helped North Korea Get the Bomb”; Smith, “Pakistan’s
Nuclear-Bomb Maker Says North Korea Paid Bribes for Know-How”; Niksch, “North Korea’s Nuclear
Weapons Program”; US Department of State, Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control,
Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments.
39. ​See, e.g., David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “Evidence Is Cited Linking Koreans to Libya
Uranium,” New York Times, May  23, 2004, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2 004​/­0 5​/­23​/­world​/­evidence​-­is​
-­cited​-­linking​-­koreans​-­to​-­libya​-­uranium​.­html; Thomas  C. Reed and Danny  B. Stillman, The Nuclear
Express (Minneapolis: Zenith Press, 2009), 277.
40. ​See, e.g., Sharon A. Squassoni, “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Trade Between North Korea and
Pakistan,” Congressional Research Service report RL31900, March 11, 2004, CRS-8, footnote 29
(recounting unconfirmed reports that DPRK experts were in attendance at Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear
tests), https://­sgp​.­fas​.­org​/­crs​/­nuke​/ ­RL31900​.­pdf; David  E. Sanger and William  J. Broad, “Pakistan May
Have Aided North Korea A-test,” New York Times, February 27, 2004 (recounting speculation about
nuclear collaboration). Squassoni notes also that there was “some speculation that Pakistan tested a

16   CHRISTOPHER A. FORD  U  WHAT TO DO ABOUT NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS

North Korean plutonium device during those tests, but there is little public evidence to support this
latter claim.”
41. ​See, e.g., Marcel Serr, “North Korea Built a Nuclear Reactor for Syria (And Israel Destroyed It),”
National Interest, January  4, 2018, https://­n ationalinterest​.­org ​/­blog ​/­the​-­buzz​/­north​-­korea​-­built​
-­nuclear​-­reactor​-­syria​-­israel​-­destroyed​-­it​-­23922; see also, generally, David Albright, Peddling Peril
(New York: Free Press, 2010), 154, 166–67; David E. Sanger, “Bush Administration Releases Images
to Bolster Its Claims about Syrian Reactor,” New York Times, April 25, 2008.
42. ​Christopher A. Ford, “Thinking About a Korean Denuclearization Treaty” (citing “US Government
‘Verification Measures Discussion Paper’ [2008]” as published in Washington Post), Hudson Institute,
April  2012, 6, 32–33, https://­ciaotest​.­cc​.­columbia​.­edu​/­wps​/­hudson​/­0 031505​/­f​_­0 031505​_­25553​.­pdf.
43. ​Ford, “Thinking About a Korean Denuclearization Treaty,” 33.
44. ​See “US Official’s Suggestion of ‘Arms-Control’ Talks with North Korea Raises Eyebrows,”
Reuters, October  29, 2022, https://­w ww​.­cnn​.­com​/­2 022 ​/­10​/­2 9​/­asia​/­us​-­north​-­korea​-­nuclear​-­policy​
-­unchanged​-­intl​-­hnk ​/­index​.­html.
45. ​“US Official’s Suggestion of ‘Arms-Control’ Talks with North Korea Raises Eyebrows” (citing Arms
Control Association Executive Director Daryl Kimball, State Department Spokesman Ned Price, and
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Alexandra Bell).
46. ​See, e.g., Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Moscow Treaty letter of submittal, n.d., noting that
“[t]he Moscow Treaty codifies the deep reductions . . . ​announced [by President George W. Bush]
during the November 2001 Washington/Crawford Summit and President Putin announced at that time
and a month later. It reflects the shared desire to conclude a legally binding document that would
outlast both . . . ​presidencies and to provide openness and predictability over the longer term in this
important area of the U.S.-Russian relationship,” https://­2 001​-­2 009​.­state​.­gov​/­t ​/­ac​/­trt ​/­18016​.­htm.
47. ​After a British fleet under Admiral John Byng retreated from the defense of Minorca in 1756,
leading to Byng’s court martial and execution, the French philosophe Voltaire wrote in a letter to
Duke Richelieu that in England it was felt necessary “to put an admiral to death now and then, pour
encourager les autres” (to encourage the others). See, e.g., “On the Case of Admiral Byng, 3 lettres,”
n.d., https://­w ww​.­whitman​.­edu​/ ­VSA ​/­letters​/­12​.­1756​.­html.

• • •

The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of anyone else in
the US government or elsewhere.

HOOVER INSTITUTION  U  STANFORD UNIVERSITY   17

The publisher has made this work available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs
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Copyright © 2023 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

The views expressed in this essay are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
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29 28 27 26 25 24 23    7 6 5 4 3 2 1

HOOVER INSTITUTION  U  STANFORD UNIVERSITY   19

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHRISTOPHER A. FORD
Christopher A. Ford is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a visiting
professor with Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic
Studies. His prior government service includes as assistant secretary of state
for international security and as National Security Council senior director for
weapons of mass destruction and counterproliferation.

Synopsis

Recounting the history of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and the failure of past efforts at negoti-
ated “denuclearization,” this essay explores the options of continuing with denuclearization diplomacy
or pursuing “arms control” with North Korea. The author instead recommends a policy of prolonged pres-
sure and isolation to limit the development of North Korea’s capabilities as much as possible and make its
example unattractive to future would-be proliferators.

Hoover Institution, Stanford University Hoover Institution in Washington

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