Abstract
Solving the North Korean Nuclear Puzzle is aptly named. Nearly everything about North Korea is a puzzle. How much weapons-grade plutonium did its secret program produce? How much could it have produced if the program had not been discovered? How far along was the North in actually designing workable nuclear weapons? How many weapons might it have been able to make by now, if left unchecked? What was the purpose of the program?
More fundamentally, why—more than a decade after the end of the Cold War and nearly 50 years after the death of Stalin—does North Korea persist in perpetuating a closed, Stalinesque regime? And how should the United States deal with it?
Puzzle does not provide all the answers. But it does have many answers and insights that will help readers parse the ups and downs of U.S.-North Korean relations during the Bush administration.
Because of its fact-based historical material and its sensible, forward looking analyses, Puzzle will be valuable to foreign policy buffs. That is not surprising. The Institute for Science and International Security (isis), the tiny Washington think tank that compiled and published Puzzle, has done much path-breaking work on North Korea in recent years. Its founder and president, David Albright, is particularly well known to readers of the Bulletin.
Albright has been producing solidly documented Bulletin articles about North Korea for a decade. In Puzzle, he is joined by his colleagues at isis— Holly Higgins, Corey Hinderstein, and Kevin O'Neill. The other contributors include Mitchell Reiss, an international affairs heavyweight at the College of William & Mary and formerly an official in the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization; Leon Sigal, author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea; and Joel “Wit, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and formerly a State Department official involved in North Korean policy.
It took the Clinton administration several years and many false starts to figure out how to deal with North Korea. But it finally got it right with its policy of engagement. In the words of Albright, Higgins, and O'Neill: “To abandon engagement now would likely mean a return to heightened tensions and possibly military conflict, including a resurgence of North Korea's nuclear weapons program.”
One can only hope that the Bush administration reaches a similar conclusion without a great deal of delay.