Permitting North Korea Even a Few Nuclear Weapons is a Mistake

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.