... clearly no longer suit his son Kim Jong-un. Too much effort and money has been invested in nuclear missile capabilities, and these have too much symbolic and practical significance for Pyongyang today. We should remind that further amendments to the DPRK Constitution, promulgated in late September 2023, enshrined the country’s strategy aimed at intensifying the development of nuclear weapons to ensure “survival rights” and “war deterrence” amid North Korea’s escalating confrontation with the United States and its allies in Northeast Asia.
It is also clear that any new bilateral talks with Washington or Seoul will not change Pyongyang’s position, for all the importance North Korea attaches ...
... weapons. At major Track II diplomacy conferences as well as in other situations, we often heard the following remarks addressed to North Korean representatives: if you claim to be a nuclear state, then at least present your nuclear doctrine to the global community,... ... the “nuclear five” have developed and which would define the nature, objectives, functions, terms of use, and storage of nuclear weapons, etc. The DPRK representatives could not say anything meaningful to these questions, since no national nuclear doctrine had been developed....
... when U.S. President Donald Trump, speaking at the UN General Assembly, responded by talking about the complete destruction of North Korea.
Inter-Korean normalization could give a powerful impetus to resolving the nuclear problem since North Korea’s nuclear ... ... the North Korean leadership implementing their nuclear missile program in violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Yet there is another component, the inter-Korean crisis, with the Korean nation being split into two separate ...
... non-proliferation multilateral regime. It joined the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1994, ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 2002, and became party to the Additional Protocol of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
in 2004
.
The DPRK began to pursue nuclear weapons in 1963, but their requests for help in this endeavor were denied by both China and the Soviet Union. Soviet scientists were sent in early to help North Korea develop peaceful nuclear energy. In 1985, North Korea ratified the NPT, but
refused
to include the IAEA safeguard agreement until 1992. The country was largely noncompliant with the NPT and continued to pursue nuclear weapons. In 1994, the ...
... to do with realities that emerged over recent years.
The
Soviet Union was the first to recognize the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
(DPRK) on October 12
th
, 1948. Following the Korean war (1950–1953) where the Soviets had been supporting North Korea, in 1961 the two states signed a bilateral agreement on “friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance.”
The USSR was instrumental in the development of the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program in the 1970s
. Then-leader of the DPRK Kim Il Sung visited the USSR twice – in 1984 and 1986 – to sign additional treaties on cooperation and trade. The Soviet Union has been North Korea’s biggest trade partner with a
trade ...
The Dialogue with the North Korean Leadership Now Has to be Conducted from a Position of Weakness, Rather than one of Strength
The crisis unfolding ... ..., etc.). Voluntary or even forced “disarmament” of an established nuclear state has never been done. The renunciation of nuclear weapons by former Soviet states (Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus) can hardly be seen as a precedent for North Korea: in ...
... escalation could happen at any moment.
The Northeast Asian drama involves three main actors: North Korea, the United States, and China. What are the motives behind the key characters... ... to safeguard itself against its external enemies and preserve sovereignty is to have nuclear weapons.
Alexey Arbatov:
U.S. Nuclear Warheads' Scary Modernization
The U.S... ... extra-regional forces in Northeast Asia and its build-up under the pretext of counteracting the DPRK’s missile and nuclear programmes.”
In effect, Russia and China explicitly called...
