Читать книгу Disarmament and Decommissioning in the Nuclear Domain - Jean-Claude Amiard - Страница 34

Similarly, North Korea, which joined the NPT in 1985, has delayed concluding a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the IAEA for several years. This agreement was concluded a few days after the January 20, 1992 declaration on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, in which both Koreas “agree not to test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, stockpile, deploy or use nuclear weapons”. At that time, suspicions about the conduct of military nuclear activities were already widely shared in the international community. In fact, the North Korean authorities immediately obstructed the verifications that the IAEA intended to carry out as part of the implementation of the safeguards agreement, going so far as to announce, in March 1993, their withdrawal from the NPT, a decision they would go back on three months later.

In early 1994, the Americans discovered that the North Koreans had begun to produce plutonium. President Bill Clinton wanted to make a pre-emptive strike on the reactor, but President Jimmy Carter went to Pyongyang and negotiated with Kim Il Sung, and then, following the latter’s death in July 1994, with his son Kim Jong-il. At the end of the agreement, concluded in October 1994 with the United States, North Korea froze its military-scale activities, notably the Yongbyon reactor and reprocessing facilities intended to produce plutonium, in exchange for the construction of two light-water reactors by an international consortium (KEDO) and the delivery, until their entry into service, of 500,000 tons of oil per year. The United States did not respect this agreement. Oil deliveries carried on despite North Korean complaints in 1997, which explained the North Korean position [MOR 18]. Moreover, this agreement did not improve the IAEA’s ability to control the non-diversion of nuclear materials. Also, no guarantee could be obtained on the existence of plutonium coming from the Yongbyon reactor, and whether there was a sufficient quantity to build one or more nuclear devices, before the suspension of its operation. On the contrary, from 1994 to 2002, North Korea pursued, without the knowledge of the international community, a program of uranium enrichment. It recognized this fact in 2002, which led to its withdrawal from the NPT in 2003 [CHE 10].