When the Same North Korea Policy Fails Over and Over Again

When Siegfried Hecker visited North Korea in 2004, a senior North Korean nuclear scientist asked him, “Would you like to see our product?” Within minutes, Hecker, then a senior fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was holding North Korean plutonium, a building block for Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. In the just-released Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program, written with Elliot Serbin, Hecker provides an in-depth look at his visits to North Korea over seven consecutive years, from 2004 to 2010.

There is a vigorous debate among North Korea scholars on U.S. policy toward Pyongyang, but the consensus is that the policy has been a failure since 1994. Five presidents, Republican and Democratic, have failed to convince three generations of the Kim family that it is less secure with nuclear weapons. North Korea has pointed to Iraq and Libya—and the fates of their former leaders—as cautionary tales of what can happen to a nonnuclear country. In 1994, Ukraine famously gave up its Soviet-era nuclear warheads and strategic bombers to Russia in return for a security guarantee from Moscow, Washington, and London—and North Korea is noting how that ended. Hecker’s book, the newest entry into the North Korea discussion, is therefore an interesting and timely read for experts and nonexperts alike.

Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program, Siegfried S. Hecker with Elliot A. Serbin, Stanford University Press, 410 pp., $40, January 2023

Hecker is upfront with the reader, explaining that he rejects the “conventional wisdom” that “good faith American efforts to halt the North’s nuclear program were circumvented by the North’s repeated violations of diplomatic agreements”—a perspective that he calls “neither true nor helpful.” Hecker believes that “each of the Kim regimes had a genuine interest in diplomacy,” and the book’s central thesis is that U.S. presidents since 2001 have “failed to weigh the risks and rewards presented by a particular combination of diplomatic and technical factors.” Hecker illustrates this through six moments that he calls “hinge points” in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, writing that an “honest account” of this history is “not kind to Washington.”

Throughout the book, Hecker’s impeccable nuclear credentials are clear to the reader. The Los Alamos laboratory played a central role in the U.S. development of nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project, and Hecker worked there for several decades, including nearly 12 years as its fifth director. He describes his expertise as “primarily in the technical domain,” but his work with nuclear scientists in Britain, France, China, and Russia means that he is, as he writes in the book, “no stranger to political and diplomatic issues.”

The book is a fascinating inside look into North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. But while Hecker believes his policy prescriptions are novel, they are, in fact, a repeat of the same unfortunate approach that has not worked for nearly three decades: paying North Korea to repeatedly close the same nuclear reactor.

The most compelling stories in the book come from Hecker’s first and last visits to North Korea. In 2004, he visited the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, which houses Pyongyang’s main nuclear reactor, where plutonium for nuclear weapons is produced. Since 1993, the U.S.-North Korea dispute has centered on the operation and ultimate disposition of this nuclear complex, which sits 56 miles north of Pyongyang. Hecker describes the dramatic moment during a meeting with Yongbyon Director Ri Hong Sop when Ri motioned for his subordinates to show the valuable material. Hecker immediately recognized this as a staged moment, noting in the book that Ri’s subordinates did not just happen to be walking in the hallway with a substance “more valuable than gold.” This was a pivotal moment in North Korea’s nuclear program, when it dropped any pretense that Yongbyon was part of a civilian nuclear program and underscored that the Kim regime was moving forward with its nuclear weapons efforts.

Hecker’s policy recommendations are clearly not effective; Washington ultimately adopted his preferred course of action, and it failed each time.

North Korea had a “bigger surprise” for Hecker during his final visit in 2010, when he was escorted to a secure facility in the Yongbyon complex and Pyongyang’s uranium enrichment facility was revealed. North Korea’s enrichment efforts were the central focus in the 2002 dispute with the Bush administration, and Hecker calls President George W. Bush’s subsequent decision to deal a “fatal blow” to the 1994 Agreed Framework negotiated by former President Bill Clinton the “most fateful hinge point.” According to Hecker, the administration did not fully evaluate or properly appreciate the “risks of walking away.”

In 1994, the Clinton administration had nearly gone to war to stop Pyongyang from accessing plutonium produced in the Yongbyon reactor. The two sides eventually struck a deal, the Agreed Framework, which Hecker calls “one of the major foreign policy accomplishments of the Clinton administration.” The crux of the deal was that North Korea would end its production of plutonium for nuclear weapons by halting operation of the Yongbyon reactor and, in exchange, Washington and its allies would create a consortium to build two light-water reactors that would provide energy and not plutonium.

In a 2002 report to Congress, the CIA said the United States “had been suspicious that North Korea has been working on uranium enrichment for several years.” The CIA noted that it had obtained “clear evidence” in mid-2002 “indicating that North Korea had begun acquiring material and equipment for a centrifuge facility.” In October 2002, the Bush administration understandably confronted the Kim regime with this intelligence, noting that North Korea was pursuing uranium enrichment as an alternative, covert pathway to a nuclear weapon. Hecker challenges the administration’s stated reason for exiting the agreement, writing that it was “largely political,” pointing to where John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security at the time of the exit, stated later that he wanted to drive a stake through the agreement.

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The two sides eventually returned to negotiations, issuing a joint statement in 2005 during the fourth round of the Six-Party Talks in Beijing; the statement was remarkably like the Agreed Framework and centered on North Korea’s Yongbyon facility. Hecker identifies this as the second hinge point, noting that the Bush administration undermined the agreement immediately after it was signed. About a year later, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test.

Pyongyang had not halted its proliferation activities, sending nuclear material to Libya for Tripoli’s covert nuclear weapons program. Pyongyang also helped build a nuclear reactor in Syria that was destroyed by Israel in 2007, which U.S. intelligence assessed was similar to North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor and would have been used by Damascus to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.

Yet even after Pyongyang’s actions, the Bush administration tried to rescue the disarmament deal. During his second term, Bush rejected the advice of the “hard-liners” who Hecker suggests were driving North Korea policy and ultimately capitulated to Pyongyang’s demands. Washington removed the restrictions on Pyongyang imposed by the Trading With the Enemy Act and the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. The Bush administration paid $2.5 million to North Korea to destroy the Yongbyon reactor’s cooling tower.

Hecker identifies three hinge points during the Obama administration and asserts that it “never gave the North Korean threat the priority it required until it turned the issue over to [President Donald] Trump with the dire warning.” On this, he is correct; President Barack Obama’s policy of strategic patience was a disaster, sowing the seeds of North Korea’s escalations in 2017 and 2018. Obama did attempt a limited deal with North Korea in 2012—the Leap Day Deal—but each side had a different interpretation of its stipulations. After Pyongyang conducted a missile launch that scuttled the deal in Washington’s eyes, Obama put it on the back burner in favor of a nuclear deal with Iran.

Hecker calls Trump’s decision to walk away from the 2019 Hanoi summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un the “most serious hinge point,” claiming that Kim “appeared willing to take big steps to scale back the nuclear weapons program.” But that is not correct. Kim believed that Trump would strike a deal where Washington provided concessions for reversible actions at the Yongbyon complex. It is hard to blame him, since his grandfather Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea, and his father, Kim Jong Il, received similar deals from Trump’s predecessors. Trump, however, pushed back, demanding more for the kinds of concessions that his predecessors were willing to make for less.

Hecker’s policy recommendations are clearly not effective. The United States did ultimately adopt his preferred course of action, and it failed each time. The lesson from the history of U.S. policy on North Korea is that limited nuclear deals do not work and only delay the eventual expansion of nuclear programs. A better approach is using all available tools—diplomatic, economic, informational, and military—to address proliferation challenges. That’s an important lesson for the Biden administration as it decides its next steps on Iran’s nuclear efforts and Russian nuclear threats over Ukraine.