Six-Party Talks

Summary: Since 2006, the main focus of negotiations with North Korea to curtail its dual programs of building nuclear weapons and long-range missiles to deliver them to prospective targets that include the United States, South Korea, and Japan has centered around an initiative known as the Six-Party Talks. These negotiations include North Korea, the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea. They represented a shift in American policy away from bilateral talks with Pyongyang or efforts to isolate the North Korean regime and towards developing a more regional negotiating stance. One hope was that North Korea's Asian neighbors, especially its long-standing ally, China, might be more influential with the sometimes intransigent "rogue state." The Six-Party Talks have been marked by periodic threats by North Korea to withdraw from earlier agreements and subsequent agreements by North Korea to resume multilateral negotiations. Although the Six-Party Talks have been the main focus of efforts to persuade North Korea to end its decades-long isolation, they never wholly replaced bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang-countries which never concluded a comprehensive peace treaty after the truce that ended fighting during the Korean War of 1950-1953.

The announcement by North Korea in the summer of 2006 that it had successfully conducted an underground test of a plutonium bomb, along with medium- to long-range missiles to deliver warheads at least as far as Japan, sparked a series of talks involving the United States, South Korea, China, Russia, Japan, and North Korea called the Six-Party Talks, beginning in October 2006. It was a rare example of previous adversaries in the Cold War coming together to deal with a prospective regional threat from what was widely described as a "rogue state" operating outside the realm of international agreements governing nuclear proliferation.

In particular, the talks brought together North Korea's long-standing closest supporter, China, and its long-standing most potent adversary, the United States, in a joint effort to defuse regional tensions raised by the prospect of a nuclear-armed North Korea, the last state still playing the same role as it had for most of the Cold War era. The Six-Party Talks also raised two broader issues: could multilateral negotiations succeed in averting further proliferation of nuclear weapons—a point also raised by Iran's nuclear program—and how would China behave as a regional leader and economic superpower in the post-Cold War era?

The participants.

• The United States. The administration of President George W. Bush agreed to the multilateral approach towards Korea, which was in distinct contrast to its approach towards another would-be nuclear power, Iran. The contrast was two-fold: agreeing to participate in direct negotiations before any concessions were made and agreeing to a multi-lateral approach versus a unilateral boycott of talks, like the administration's policy towards Iran. The United States also brought to the talks the background of having conducted a ground war to prevent North Korea from taking control of the entire Korean peninsula and being a guarantor of the security of South Korea for more than half a century.
• China brought a very different perspective to the table. It had supported North Korea with its troops during the Korean War and had long been the closest ally of Pyongyang and a significant supplier of aid and weapons. Nominally, both countries were controlled by Communist Parties. Still, China had pursued a very different path in economic development and international trade, making it an Asian economic superpower and a significant trading partner with the United States. As part of the initial condition for the Six-Party Talks, China was chosen as the chair of the negotiations.
• North Korea. The government in Pyongyang has long been closed to Western journalists, leading to descriptions such as "secretive" and "mysterious" to discuss a country with one of the world's largest military forces. and, since 2006, nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. At the same time, North Korea has experienced recurring food shortages. In August 2008, questionable political stability since the widely reported stroke suffered by its leader, Kim Jong-Il. By 2009, the country withdrew from the Six-Party talks and stated it would no longer honor its previous agreements.
• South Korea. South Korea was invaded by the North in 1950 and, since a cease-fire in 1953, has been defended by a significant American troop presence. Unlike the North, South Korea has long pursued a private-enterprise economic model, which has made it a leading Asian exporter and led to a relatively well-off population. South Korea's military is about half the size of North Korea's.
• Russia. When viewed as the successor to the Soviet Union, Russia has long supported North Korea, a perceived counterweight to American power in East Asia and a leading nuclear-equipped military power. The Six-Party Talks were, in part, a chance for Russia to reassert its influence, reflecting its new-found economic prowess when the price and volume of oil and natural gas exports were rising rapidly. (Since the Six-Party Talks began, oil prices went from about $59 a barrel in October 2006 to over $144 a barrel in July 2008 and back down to about $60 a barrel in May 2009.) Along with China, Russia's posture at the Six-Party Talks was partly to serve as an implied backup to North Korea to counter American military power.
• Japan. Tokyo entered the Six-Party Talks in a unique position: on the one hand, it was East Asia's dominant economic power while simultaneously being largely disarmed since World War II. (With about 239,000 troops, Japan ranks twenty-first among the world's militaries.) At the same time, Japan felt distinctly threatened by North Korea's "mid-range" ballistic missile capability, widely thought to deliver a nuclear (or conventional) weapon anywhere in Japan, making it a kind of hostage to North Korea's implied threats.

Progress of the Six-Party Talks. The immediate objective of the Six-Party Talks when they opened in October 2006 had seemingly been achieved on the first anniversary. On October 3, 2007, the six participants announced that North Korea had agreed to disclose all its nuclear programs and to dismantle uranium enrichment facilities in return for about $500 million in economic aid. The agreement also called for the United States to remove North Korea from its list of sponsors of terrorism. The agreement did not say when North Korea would surrender the nuclear weapons it had already developed.

Three months after that announcement, in January 2008, the United States said North Korea had failed to meet a December 31, 2007, deadline for full disclosure of its nuclear programs. North Korea insisted it had done so in the form of a draft report submitted in November 2007 and, in turn, accused its negotiating partners of failing to deliver on the promise to provide 950,000 metric tons of fuel oil, or its equivalent in economic aid.

On January 7, 2008, Christopher Hill, the American envoy to the Six-Party Talks, said North Korea was "prepared to give a declaration which wasn't going to be complete and correct" and urged Pyongyang to deliver a complete report, including details of which other countries had received North Korean aid in developing their weapons. At the same time, American officials said North Korea had made substantial progress in dismantling its nuclear plant at Yongbyon. Other participants in the talks also criticized North Korea's November draft declaration for being incomplete and said other parties to the agreement had failed to deliver all the foreign aid promised. In the United States, President George Bush's representative to separate talks on human rights in North Korea, Jay Lefkowitz, predicted North Korea would "remain in its present nuclear status" when Bush left office in January 2009. His statement and criticism from former administration officials were described in published reports as evidence of a split in the administration between hardliners in the camp of Vice President Dick Cheney and a more conciliatory faction represented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. President-elect Lee Myung-bak proposed eliminating the agency responsible for reconciliation with North Korea and folding its functions into the foreign ministry in South Korea.

In February 2008, North Korea allowed a Western news organization to visit and videotape its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, where the chief engineer said the process of disabling the reactor was proceeding but at a slower pace. The following month, North Korea allowed the New York Philharmonic orchestra to visit in what was widely viewed as a move to improve relations with the United States. That initiative was offset by a test of short-range missiles that raised alarms in South Korea. In April 2008, the Bush administration showed Congress a video showing a North Korean-style reactor in northern Syria at a site bombed by Israel in September 2007. The tapes were meant to demonstrate that the United States was aware of North Korean nuclear initiatives that had not been previously disclosed.

At the end of May 2008, North Korea turned over 18,000 pages of documents it said covered the history of its nuclear program since 1990. North Korea said the documents gave details of three separate nuclear weapons programs in 1990, 2003, and 2005. The documents did not disclose information about a separate uranium enrichment program or about providing other countries with nuclear materials.

Three months later, on August 26, 2008, Pyongyang announced it had stopped dismantling its uranium enrichment plant in protest against Washington's refusal to remove North Korea from the list of sponsors of terrorism. In October 2008, near the second anniversary of the start of the Six-Party Talks, after a last-ditch diplomatic effort by the lead American negotiator, North Korea evicted international inspectors from its plant and announced it was planning to resume uranium enrichment.

End of the Six-Party Talks? In May 2009, North Korea announced it had conducted a second underground test of a nuclear weapon and also fired at least half a dozen medium-range missiles in "tests" evidently meant to demonstrate Pyongyang's ability to deliver warheads to at least two members of the Six-Party Talks, South Korea and Japan. Unconfirmed media reports from South Korea said the North had also restarted its uranium enrichment plant. News reports following the North Korean tests widely suggested that two key members of the Six-Party Talks, the United States and China, had lost patience with the North Korean regime and were willing to entertain stronger sanctions in the context of the United Nations Security Council.

Bibliography

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Mohammad, Alam, et al. “North Korean Nuclear Program and Six-Party Talks: A Critical Analysis.” Liberal Arts and Social Sciences International Journal (LASSIJ), vol. 5, no. 2, 2021, pp. 178–192. doi.org/10.47264/idea.lassij/5.2.12. Accessed 5 Oct. 2023.

"The Six-Party Talks at a Glance." Arms Control Association, 2022, www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/6partytalks. Accessed 5 Oct. 2023.