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Permitting North Korea Even a Few Nuclear Weapons is a Mistake

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Posted: August 2nd, 2017

By Ambassador Joseph DeTrani, Former director of East Asia Operations, CIA

Ambassador DeTrani served as the U.S. Representative to the Korea Energy Development Organization (KEDO), as well as former CIA director of East Asia Operations. He also served as Associate Director of National Intelligence and Mission Manager for North Korea, was the Special Envoy for the Six-Party Talks with North Korea, and served as the Director of the National Counter Proliferation Center, ODNI.  He currently serves on the Board of Managers at Sandia National Laboratories.

My first meeting with the North Korean delegation to the Six Party Talks in 2003 was instructive.  Their lead negotiator, First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-Gwan, said the U.S. should accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state, and like Pakistan, North Korea would be a good friend of the U.S.  I said this would never happen; denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was U.S. policy.

In late September 2016, in a Track 1.5 meeting in Kuala Lumpur with North Korea’s Vice Foreign Minister Han Song-Ryol and his delegation, Han said the U.S. should accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state, saying that they would be a responsible nuclear state, friendly with the U.S.  I repeated what I said in 2003, but this time as a civilian, expressing my view that the U.S. would never accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state.

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