[Interview] Bad deal is better than no deal to halt North Korea's nuclear ambitions

A video grab shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, right, showing his watch to then U.S. President Donald Trump during the second U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Feb. 27, 2019. EPA-Yonhap

Nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker encourages Yoon, Biden to devise fresh approach at April 26 summit to dismantle North Korea's nuclear program

By Kang Hyun-kyung

Siegfried Hecker, professor emeritus at Stanford University and director emeritus at Los Alamos National Laboratory / Courtesy of Siegfried Hecker

In 2019, then U.S. President Donald Trump received bipartisan support, despite coming home empty-handed on the heels of a failed summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Vietnam's capital.

The rationale of U.S. senators who backed Trump, regardless of their party affiliations, was that sometimes no deal is better than a bad deal to curb North Korea's nuclear ambitions. And this was also true at that time, because the U.S. would have made too many concessions otherwise to strike a deal with North Korea.

But Siegfried Hecker, an internationally renowned expert in plutonium science and nuclear security, questions whether American public opinion in favor of the failed Hanoi summit four years ago helped the U.S. achieve its foreign policy goal to denuclearize the North in a firm and verifiable manner.

He believes the opposite may be true.

If a deal was signed back then between Trump and Kim to freeze the Yongbyon nuclear complex and shut down the Nuclear Weapons Institute (NWI) in return for lifting sanctions imposed on the North, Hecker claims that the U.S. would now have been able to gain insight into "many of the uncertainties of North Korea's nuclear capabilities."

However, due to the diplomatic stalemate that ensued after what he called the missed opportunity, he says North Korea's nuclear program has remained in the dark.

The competition between democracies and autocracies after Russia's invasion of Ukraine has further complicated the denuclearization of North Korea, according to Hecker.

He encouraged South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and U.S. President Joe Biden to "take a fresh look at" North Korea during their summit scheduled to take place in Washington D.C. on April 26.

"Pyongyang has not only greatly increased its nuclear capabilities, but it apparently has also fundamentally shifted its 30-year attempts to reach normalization with Washington in favor of aligning itself with Moscow and Beijing," he said in a recent email interview with The Korea Times.

His remark indicates that the dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear program has become trickier than ever before as the North is poised to shift its focus to bolstering ties with Russia and China from its decades-old pursuit of seeking direct negotiations with the U.S.

Hecker, a professor at Texas A&M University, professor emeritus at Stanford University and director emeritus at Los Alamos National Laboratory, says the Hanoi summit was one of the opportunities, which if managed well, could have resulted in a diplomatic breakthrough in dismantling North Korea's nuclear program.

Unfortunately, however, he says that it became a missed opportunity because of Washington's "short-sighted" policy choices, infighting between doves and hawks, and their failure to dive deeply into North Korea's proposal.

On top of Washington politics, Hecker hinted at a perception gap about denuclearization between Washington and Pyongyang as another challenge that caused the summit to fail.

Kim seemed to have believed his commitment to close the Yongbyon nuclear complex to stop producing future nuclear weapons, while keeping its existing nuclear weapons intact, was sufficient to meet the conditions for denuclearization. The U.S., however, viewed denuclearization as a status that could be achieved only when North Korea gives up all of its existing weapons and drops any plan to build nuclear bombs in the future.

"I understood Kim Jong-un's comments to mean he was prepared to take steps right away to roll back the nuclear weapons program ― for example, by shutting down the Yongbyon nuclear complex and by closing the Nuclear Weapons Institute," Hecker said. "However, he would not give up any of the weapons themselves until the end of the diplomatic process because that would leave North Korea too vulnerable."

In the September 6 letter disclosed in Bob Woodward's book, titled "Rage," Kim was quoted as telling Trump that he would be willing to completely shut down the NWI as a meaningful step to prove his seriousness about denuclearization.

In his new book, titled "Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea's Nuclear Program," Hecker disclosed that the North Korean leader elaborated on his strategic policy shift from the nuclear program to the economy during a summit with then South Korean President Moon Jae-in, saying this is what he heard from unidentified "South Koreans who were intimately familiar with the summit."

"He planned to denuclearize and concentrate fully on the economy," the nuclear scientist quoted the South Korean sources as saying. "Kim repeated the offer to dismantle the Yongbyon facilities. He had previously offered to dismantle an engine test stand at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station. Now, he would offer to dismantle the entire launch site because he realized that if they only dismantled the test stand, it would be heavily criticized by the United States."

Kim, however, said that he would not give up the weapons until the end.

Kim's confusing remarks in the two different events show that he was willing to stop producing more nuclear weapons, but he had no intention of dismantling existing nuclear bombs that North Korea currently possessed.

Siegfried Hecker, then senior fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, briefs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on his recent inspection of North Korean nuclear facilities in this 2004 file photo. AP-Yonhap

Hecker revisited what went wrong with the 2019 Hanoi summit held between Trump and Kim in "Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea's Nuclear Program."

He said U.S. officials' limited understanding of nuclear technology and how it works was another challenge that made the U.S. government "waste the opportunity."

He claimed Kim Jong-un's offer to shut down the NWI and its possible impact on the North's nuclear program were not thoroughly reviewed by the U.S. side.

He explained the NWI is North Korea's equivalent of the combined Los Alamos and the Lawrence Livermore national labs in the United States, describing it as the brain center of the North's nuclear program.

"What is so significant about Kim's offer is that shutting down the NWI (like shutting down Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore labs) means the eventual end of the nuclear weapons program. It is not possible to deploy nuclear weapons without the scientists and engineers from the labs: those who designed them, those who helped to assemble them, and those who oversee their maintenance and disassembly," his book reads.

Despite its significance, Hecker said few U.S. officials seemed to have fully understood the meaning of the complete closure of the NWI.

This satellite image, released by 38 North on Nov. 24, 2021, shows North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex, north of Pyongyang. Yonhap

He also claimed that North Korea's offer to shut down the Yongbyon nuclear complex in return for lifting sanctions imposed on the North was another key issue that also should have been thoroughly analyzed back then.

During the Hanoi summit, Trump demanded Kim shut down all five nuclear sites, when the North Korean leader mentioned only Yongbyon as a nuclear site to be shut down. Lifting sanctions in return for the closure of Yonbyon was the sticking point that triggered the breakdown of the Hanoi summit. After the summit, Trump said, "They wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety and we couldn't do that."

Hecker said Yongbyon facilities were still the heart of North Korea's nuclear materials production complex, although much of its nuclear program, such as the weaponization facilities and missile production and testing facilities were known to be outside of Yongbyon.

"Yongbyon housed all of the North's nuclear reactors capable of producing plutonium and tritium. The modern centrifuge facility I visited that had doubled in size a few years later was there," he wrote.

Hecker, along with two then Stanford University colleagues, visited North Korea annually between 2004 and 2010. He became a headliner in 2010 after he was known to have visited the Yongbyon nuclear complex and experienced in person the 25 to 30-megawatt electric experimental light-water reactor in the early stage of construction.

"I concluded in 2010 that the North had additional centrifuge facilities outside of Yongbyon: how many, their capacities and their location remained uncertain. These sites likely depend on the Yongbyon chemical processing facilities to help produce highly enriched uranium and influence the size of its stockpile," he said. "More importantly, however, was that without Yongbyon, the North could not produce additional plutonium and tritium, thereby limiting its ability to enhance the sophistication of its nuclear weapons."

Hecker said the road ahead for the denuclearization of North Korea has become murkier than ever before, as a slew of opportunities over the past two decades had been wasted.