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“Nuclear Bullies” to meet: Will North Korea Denuclearize?

—- Reviewing past attempts to denuclearize North Korea

—- Planning for the big meet: A US Security Nightmare

—- Why is no one talking about denuclearizing the United States?

The very reclusive 34-year-old, North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un who met with South Korean officials for the first time this week, is, reportedly, set to meet with United States President, Donald J. Trump, in the next two months.

The message which was conveyed to President Donald Trump by South Korean envoys on Thursday is yet to be confirmed directly by North Korea. President Trump’s aides have expressed concerns over the possibility of Kim Jong-un following through with the meeting plan.

White House officials have begun planning, however, for a high-level diplomatic encounter “so risky and seemingly far-fetched” that some in the White House believe it will never happen. The officials also stated worries that the North Korean leader may not make firm his promise to halt nuclear and missiles tests.

President Donald Trump, has, however, stated via his Twitter account that the meeting would hold and that the deal with North Korea is still very much in the making and would be if completed, a very good one for the World. A specific time and place is yet to be communicated but a senior State Department diplomat noted that the most obvious venue is the Peace House, a conference building in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.

Daniel R. Russel, a former Asia adviser to President Barack Obama recently declared that the offer from North Korea should be properly and conspicuously examined and cross-examined in order to avoid misunderstandings that can be avoided. He said:

“North Korean offers typically come with caveats and asterisks that need to be examined. We all hope that the multiyear pressure campaign has had an effect, but we shouldn’t prematurely celebrate.”

With all the potential traps and internal misgivings, some officials say they believe the chances of the meeting between the two leaders actually happening are less than 50 percent.

Why is no one talking about denuclearizing the United States?

While, the world is clamouring for the denuclearization of North Korea, with several world leaders calling on the North Korean leader to cease his nuclear and missiles tests, it is important to note that there have been no calls for the same course of action for the US.

The fact that the US acts, in most cases, as a watchdog for who deserves to be armed with a nuclear weapon and who doesn’t, irrespective of the fact that the United States is the only country that has ever used a nuclear weapon against another country is one of the bold but hardly asked questions in today’s international relation.

The United States is one of the five recognized nuclear powers by the signatories to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and as of 2017, has 4,018 (four thousand and eighteen) nuclear weapons in either deployment or storage.

There is a Nuclear Policy known as No First Use (NFU) which holds that countries that adopt it will not use nuclear weapon on other countries except such country attacked it first with a Nuclear Weapon.

The United States has refused to adopt this policy as it claims it reserves the right to use nuclear weapon first on another country.

Reviewing past attempts to denuclearize North Korea

Shortly before news of the planned Trump-Kim summit broke, former Defense Secretary Bill Perry told Uri Friedman of The Atlantic that Kim Jong-un’s seeming willingness to talk about denuclearizing is because his nuclear-weapons program is now so advanced that he believes he can deter aggression by his enemies and garner international respect. He said:

“We had the opportunities to keep [North Korea] from getting a nuclear weapon and that would have been far better, but we blew that opportunity. Now they have a nuclear arsenal, and that’s the reality. They’re going into this discussion from a position of relative strength.

“I don’t think [the North Koreans are] going to want to negotiate giving up all their nuclear weapons. Even if they did, I have no idea how we could verify it.”

Recall that there have been attempts to denuclearize the North Korea in the past and Mr Perry experienced one of such attempts first hand as Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary.

In 1999, President Bill Clinton had instructed Mr Perry to salvage and expand on a fraying 1994 agreement that had shut down the North’s rudimentary nuclear-weapons program. Mr Perry had travelled to Pyongyang, Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, met with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, and a top North Korean military officer sat down with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office.

By 2000, there was some noise about President Clinton himself heading to North Korea to commence the establishment of normal diplomatic relations with America’s longest foe in exchange for Kim to stop working on nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles. Then came the 2000 Presidential Elections.

George W. Bush took a stricter route on North Korea and in 2002 discovered that the North Koreans were clandestinely enriching uranium for nuclear weapons. That initiative fell apart.

On January 20th, 1992, North and South Korea agreed to sign an action item entitled the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the primary objective of the action item was to eliminate the danger of nuclear war through denuclearization of the peninsula.

The action item stated the following:

  1. The South and the North Korea shall not test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons.
  2. The South and the North Korea shall use nuclear energy solely for peaceful purposes.
  3. The South and the North Korea shall not possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment facilities.

The action item was signed by Chung Won-Shik Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea; and Yon Hyong-Muk Premier of the Administration Council of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea DPRK.

This agreement was obviously compromised.

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