Panel addresses North Korean nukes

North Korea's nuclear ambitions can only be deterred through united international pressure, a panel of experts said to a packed lecture room in Aaron Burr Hall on Monday night.

The six-party talks concerning the North Korean nuclear program were halted in November 2005, following the country's test of a nuclear bomb in October, but could resume as early as the middle of December.

"We are now in a situation where the nuclear test has served to actually restart the momentum in nuclear negotiations," sociology professor Gilbert Rozman said.

Thus far, the six-party talks have been unproductive. Though the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia agree that North Korea should not have nuclear weapons, solutions have not been reached. Still, the current multilateralism is encouraging, the panel said, when compared to the separate negotiations of the past.

Rozman cites a "strategic ambivalence" on the part of the Bush administration, which portrays Kim Jong Il as dangerously unpredictable.

The other countries in the six-party talks place a "much greater emphasis on the rationality of the North Korean regime, and that they can be dealt with, but that they're very hard bargainers," Rozman said.

The panel agreed that the North Korean leader is not insane.

"I think what North Korea is doing makes a good deal of strategic sense for a regime as imperiled as it is and as concerned about the danger of collapse," Rozman said.

The panel said North Korea would be unlikely to deploy a nuclear weapon against the United States or its allies, given U.S. second-strike capabilities.

"Clearly they have to understand that any missile launch with a nuclear warhead would almost certainly lead to an end of that regime, in one way or another," Christopher Chyba, who is a Wilson School professor, said.

Status, more likely, is what North Korea is seeking. "It's still the case, unfortunately, that significant prestige accrues to being a nuclear weapons state," Chyba said.

According to panelist Frank von Hippel, co-director of the Program of Science and Global Security, the bomb's power was equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT.

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"That's a lot," he said, "but it is actually a lot less than the Nagasaki bomb, which was about 20 kilotons."

In addition to plutonium bombs, "It appears that North Korea is pursuing a uranium path to the bomb," Chyba said, citing evidence from Pakistan, Libya and Germany.

The facilities involved in a uranium path to the bomb are much more difficult to detect, von Hippel said.

At this point in time, though, "It doesn't seem to me that North Korea is anywhere close to producing significant amounts of uranium ... although this whole program is shrouded in uncertainty," Chyba said.

Chyba believes that as things are now, "North Korea is many years away from missile development and warhead development."

"It's in everyone's interest to find a resolution to this crisis," he added.