April 4, 2018
Jeffrey Lewis
The following is an excerpt from The New York Times.
There has been a lot of talk lately about Kim Jong-un’s willingness to discuss the “denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula. It’s a cumbersome word and one that has given rise to more than a few misunderstandings.
Many people, including President Trump, seem to hear “denuclearization” and imagine a promise by Mr. Kim to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, recently acquired at great cost. But the term means more than the North’s disarmament. It imposes obligations on the United States, too — even if Americans don’t want to hear that part.
The word “denuclearization” is more or less native to the Korean Peninsula. This wasn’t the term experts used to talk about the elimination of nuclear weapons programs in South Africa, Iraq or Libya. In those contexts, the word was almost always “disarmament.”
So why have diplomats this time chosen the far more complicated word “denuclearization”? Because the situation is, well, far more complicated.
The term itself is a relic from the 1990s, the moment in which the ongoing crisis over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions began. At the end of the Cold War, the only nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula were American. The problem, from an American perspective, was that North Korea wanted to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities of its own. Ultimately, President George H.W. Bush’s administration chose to withdraw American nuclear weapons from South Korea as part of an effort to seek a diplomatic solution to the North’s nuclear ambitions. For a moment, it seemed like it would work: After the 1991 withdrawal of American nuclear weapons, South Korea and North Korea signed in 1992 a joint declaration on “the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
Continue reading at The New York Times.
