President Donald Trump disembarks from Air Force One for a second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at Hanoi, Vietnam, on Feb. 26. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
There are a number of ways to make real progress with Kim Jong Un at the leaders’ second summit in Hanoi.
A major nuclear breakthrough with North Korea is a long shot this week for President Donald Trump, but there are a number of ways to make real progress with Kim Jong Un at the leaders’ second summit in Hanoi.
The two countries could agree to shutter North Korea’s plutonium and uranium enrichment plants, adopt a road map for inspections or put an end to Pyongyang’s missile tests — all of which would represent significant steps toward pulling the Korean peninsula away from a nuclear conflict.
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Interviews with weapons scientists, arms control experts and former diplomats reveal some of the signs they will watch for when gauging the prospects for measured progress — along with grave warnings about the consequences of failure.
Here’s a rundown on some of the commitments the experts would like to see emerge from Hanoi:
1) Shuttering North Korea’s nuclear production
North Korea has conducted at least six underground nuclear tests since 2006, most recently in 2017. Yet while the regime hasn’t conducted further underground explosions since then, it still maintains facilities for producing highly enriched uranium and plutonium, the primary ingredients for making nuclear bombs — as well as tritium, which is required for constructing a hydrogen bomb.
“They’ve continued to run those facilities and make more bomb fuel — maybe for half-a-dozen bombs’ worth of fissile material,” said Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory who has visited North Korea seven times and toured some of its most sensitive weapons sites.
The most worrisome site is the main plutonium reprocessing facility at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, which North Korea previously agreed to dismantle only to renege on the pledge. “It has been frozen at various times and it is time to kill it,” Hecker said.
Meanwhile, North Korea’s facilities for enriching uranium will be harder to deal with, he noted. Compared with plutonium reprocessing plants, the uranium sites are more difficult to monitor using spy satellites or other means of intelligence collection.
Still, any new North Korean commitments to close the uranium reprocessing centers would lend the Trump-Kim talks much-needed credibility, said Patrick Cronin, who chairs the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank.
“What they have to do is make sure in the document that it’s not just Yongbyon,” he said.
Getting Kim to recommit to the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and pledge “to come back into compliance,” would also be a breakthrough, said Henry Sokolski, a former Pentagon official who now runs the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.
Under the pact, Pyongyang agreed not to develop nuclear weapons. But it pulled out of the treaty in 2003.
2) Full disclosure and inspections
By definition, a pledge to halt the production of nuclear material means getting North Korea to first come clean on what it has where, said Bruce Klingner, a former CIA deputy division chief for Korea who is now a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“We need a commitment to providing a data declaration on all of its nuclear missile programs — that would be production facilities as well as the arsenal itself,” Klingner said. “That includes plutonium processing, uranium enrichment, refining of the fissile material, tritium production, the list goes on. Hopefully, North Korea will put more meat on the bones.”
He also sees a pressing need for both sides to put down on paper what they define as “denuclearization,” so that the common goal is crystal clear.
The North Koreans “believe that denuclearization means they will go to zero when the rest of the United States and the rest of the world goes to zero,” Klingner said.
Pledges to disarm cannot rest simply on Kim’s word, the nuclear experts say, noting the regime’s long history of deception and its violations of past agreements. And that means laying out a process for international inspections of weapons sites and bases — including on short notice.
“We need to get real inspectors in and get them visiting sites at a time of our choosing, not when they’ve kind of cooked the books and set up a ‘special’ tour,” the Hudson Institute’s Cronin said.
Any North Korean commitments to freeze its production of fissile material “should be done in a verifiable way, preferably with the International Atomic Energy Agency doing that work,” said Richard Johnson, the former director of nonproliferation on the National Security Council who is now at the non-profit Nuclear Threat Initiative.
3) A permanent ban on missile testing
Another major issue is the missiles that North Korea is designing to carry miniaturized nuclear bombs that could strike South Korea and Japan, American military bases in the region or possibly the continental United States.
After the first Trump-Kim meeting, North Korea declared it would continue to halt its long-range missile tests, dramatically slowing down its efforts to perfect the means of delivering nuclear weapon. In Hanoi, a pledge to keep that self-imposed moratorium indefinitely and broaden it to more types of missiles could be a real win for Trump.
“Formalize the current testing ban to try to make it permanent, and extend it to cover shorter range missiles,” advised David Wright, co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
He noted that North Korea’s announcement last year covered only missiles with ranges longer than about 5,500 kilometers, or 3,500 miles. That leaves North Korea “with the option to develop and test intermediate and shorter-range missiles … that may be able to reach U.S. military bases in Guam.”
Wright also urged the United States to demand a pledge not to test missile engines or launch satellites, which rely on ballistic missiles.
Klingner said he also sees a new and more expansive commitment from Kim on missile testing as a crucial goal in Hanoi. As a guide, he cited an informal set of international export restrictions known as the Missile Technology Control Regime, which covers missiles with ranges of 300 kilometers and warheads that weigh up to 500 kilograms.
4) Confidence-building measures
Getting Pyongyang to rein in its nuclear and missiles programs will require a carefully calibrated give-and-take on both sides to build trust for future negotiations.
One paramount issue will be the concessions the U.S. offers in return for North Korea’s commitments to give up nukes. High on the suspected North Korean wish list are the lifting of economic sanctions; the granting of full diplomatic relations; a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War in place of the current armistice; and the further curtailing of U.S. and South Korean military exercises that Pyongyang considers threatening.
One initial diplomatic overture, Klingner offered, “would be exchanging liaison officers or establishing liaison offices in each other’s capital.”
But the United States needs to be careful about what it agrees to, Johnson warned. “I am concerned we might give away more than we get,” he said.
He cited the bitter experience of North Korea’s 2007 agreement to close the plutonium processing facility at Yongbyon, where he was one of the on-site monitors.
“All the steps they were taking were reversible and of course they did reverse them,” he recalled. “The steps the U.S. took, which was to provide heavy fuel oil — essentially energy assistance — those were irreversible. Once they had that they could make electricity.”
The North Koreans, too, should be expected to offer confidence-building measures of their own. Those could include pulling back all the conventional artillery they have positioned just across the demilitarized zone from South Korea, as well as other issues that have given the U.S. cause for complaint over the years.
“You want a new relationship? Then we don’t want your cybercrime,” Cronin said. “You want a new relationship? We can’t abide by your human rights abuses. This is a very nasty, stinging-eyed onion that’s grown up since 1953, and as we peel back the layers of this onion, it’s going to take some time to hit all of these issues.”
At minimum, Johnson said, Trump needs to come back from Vietnam with a formal process of nuclear negotiations — one in which diplomats on both sides are empowered to stay on a path that is likely to take years if it is to lead to success.
“The time has come to getting to the hard work of drafting a real roadmap, if you will, for denuclearization,” he said. “That is not going to happen at the leader level, regardless of who the leaders are.”
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