New Study Group on the Economics of Security in a Post-9/11 World

We would like to invite you to attend the inaugural meeting of the Study Group on the Economics of Security in a Post-9/11 World, co-sponsored by the Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA) and the World Policy Institute (WPI) at New School University (NSU).

Lee Sigal of the Social Science Research Council will speak on the situation in North Korea (read his recent Baltimore Sun commentary below). Bill Hartung, Director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at WPI will be the discussant. This inaugural meeting will take place on Friday, September 19, 2003 from 2:30 - 4 p.m., with coffee available from 1:30 p.m., in Room 510 at 66 West 12th Street, just east of Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. There will also be refreshments available after the formal presentation for participants who are able to stay for additional, informal discussion.

Lee Sigal is Director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council. He was previously a member of the New York Times editorial board, has worked at the State Department and the Brookings Institution, and taught at Wesleyan, Columbia and Princeton. His books include Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton, 1998) and Hang Separately: Cooperative Security Between the United States and Russia, 1985-1994 (Century Foundation, 2000).

The Study Group is being organized as a successor to the group ably led by Ann Markusen at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1995 to 2002. Many of you attended meetings of that group. Although operating on a limited budget, we are aiming to maintain the ambience and collegial atmosphere that characterized that group's efforts. We will hold meetings approximately once a month, with each meeting lasting for up to two hours, with coffee and edibles available prior to and after the sessions. Whenever possible, papers or other material will be posted on the WPI web site prior to the meeting.

This initial mailing has gone out to a broad range of potentially interested individuals, many of whom are outside of New York City. For those of you who can't make it to New York for the sessions, we hope to make the web site a useful source of background on the study group's activities. In the future, we will also look for opportunities to take the study group on the road, to Washington, DC, and beyond.

Following the initial session, future meetings currently scheduled include:

October 17, 2003 - Rachel Stohl of the Center for Defense Information will discuss the new book she and Tamar Gabelnick have edited on arms export reform, Challenging Conventional Wisdom: Debunking the Myths and Exposing the Risks of Arms Export Reform. Chapter authors for the report include an impressive array of independent experts and current and former government officials involved in crafting and implementing arms export policies and practices. We hope to have one or more of the chapter authors join Rachel on a panel discussing their findings, funding permitting.

November 14, 2003 - David Gold of GPIA will present a paper, "The Coming Bush Defense Budget Train Wreck in Historical Perspective."

We hope you will be able to join us for the September 19 session. As space is limited, if you would like to attend, please RSVP to Frida Berrigan at berrigaf@newschool.edu, or 212-229-5808, ext. 112.

N. Korea: Fibs vs. facts
By Leon V. Sigal
Baltimore Sun, August 5, 2003

WHILE ITS faith-based intelligence and downright deceptions about Iraq are now being exposed, the Bush administration has been just as misleading about North Korea.

North Korea has grudgingly accepted multiparty talks. It had been balking - not, as administration officials suggest, because it was insisting on bilateral talks with the United States, but because Washington has shown no interest in negotiating.

In three-way talks in Beijing in April, North Korea made a proposal to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear programs. Allies South Korea and Japan want the Bush administration to make a counterproposal, but it has not. Yet administration officials say they seek a "diplomatic solution."

Winston Churchill would have called that a "terminological inexactitude." That phrase was Mr. Churchill's way around a rule in parliament against accusing fellow MPs of lying. The Bush administration is propagating other inexactitudes on North Korea, all of them designed to keep talks from turning into negotiations and all of them at odds with the facts.

One is that North Korea is determined to nuclear arm, so negotiating is an exercise in futility. Yet Pyongyang has said repeatedly it will accept a verifiable end to both its plutonium and uranium programs and yield any weapons it has. It will not give them away for nothing, however. It wants a written pledge from the United States not to attack it, impede its economic development or attempt to overthrow its government.

It insists on dealing directly with the United States, whether or not China, South Korea, Japan and Russia are at the negotiating table, because none of them can give security assurances on behalf of the United States. For the past two years, it has been talking nonstop with South Korea and Japan to ensure that they provide aid and investment as part of any nuclear deal.

North Korea will let U.S. inspectors monitor its nuclear sites, but it won't submit to international inspections until Washington ends what Pyongyang calls its "hostile policy."

North Korea will keep reprocessing plutonium and generating more spent nuclear fuel in its Yongbyon reactor. It will also continue to build gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. It wants an agreement in principle committing America to satisfy its security and economic concerns before it will stop.

This is intended to underscore North Korea's basic stance that if the United States remains its foe, it feels threatened and will seek nuclear arms and missiles to counter that threat, but if the United States ends enmity, it says it will not.

Does North Korea mean what it says? There is no way of knowing for sure without putting an offer on the table that satisfies both sides' interests. History does suggest the North is willing to deal. Under the Agreed Framework of October 1994, it froze work at facilities that by now could have been generating at least 30 bombs' worth of plutonium a year. That is a real nuclear weapons program. Its enrichment effort, by contrast, won't be ready to produce much weapons-grade uranium until mid-decade at the earliest, according to U.S. intelligence.

A second inexactitude advanced by the administration is that the United States kept its word but North Korea cheated. As President Bush said March 6, "My predecessor, in a good-faith effort, entered into a framework agreement. The United States honored its side of the agreement; North Korea didn't. While we felt the agreement was in force, North Korea was enriching uranium."

His advisers misinformed him. The fact is, Washington got what it most wanted up front, but it did not live up to its end of the bargain. When Republicans captured control of Congress in elections just days after the Agreed Framework was signed, they denounced the deal as appeasement. Afraid of taking them on, the Clinton administration backpedaled on implementation. It did little easing of sanctions until 2000. Reactor construction was slow to get under way. Although we pledged to provide the two reactors "by a target date of 2003," we did not pour the concrete for the first foundation until August 2002. We did not always deliver heavy fuel oil on schedule. Above all, we did not live up to our promise, in Article II of the Agreed Framework, to "move toward full normalization of political and economic relations" - to end enmity and economic sanctions.

When Washington was slow to fulfill the terms of the accord, Pyongyang in 1997 threatened to break it. Its acquisition of technology to enrich uranium from Pakistan began soon thereafter. That was a pilot program, not the operational capability that the North moved to acquire in 2001 - after the Bush administration refused to negotiate and instead put it on a target list for nuclear attack.

A third inexactitude is that North Korea is on the verge of collapse and that an economic embargo and naval blockade will bring it down. But trying to compel North Korea will provoke it to nuclear arm a lot sooner than to collapse. A strategy of strangulation cannot be effective unless all of the North's neighbors are willing to join in. None is willing to. They know exactly what the Bush administration has yet to learn, that pressure without negotiations won't work with Pyongyang.

Leon V. Sigal is director of the Northeast Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York and author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton Press, 1999).

Copyright (c) 2003, The Baltimore Sun