Will North Korea denuclearise?

US President Donald Trump accepted an invitation this week from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to a meeting to discuss the future of Pyongyang’s nuclear programme.

The surprise development follows months of tension between the two nations, during which the North Koreans have conducted a series of military exercises and fired nuclear missiles over Japan in a show of strength.

The prospect of a successful outcome to talks rests on another recent unprecedented development: North Korea has allegedly signalled its willingness to disband its nuclear weapons programme entirely.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Trump tweeted today: “Kim Jong Un talked about denuclearisation with the South Korean representatives, not just a freeze.”

But is the president being naive?

What has North Korea said?

This week a South Korean delegation visited Pyongyang - the first meeting between North and South Korean officials since Kim took power in 2011. During those talks, a South Korean official told a media briefing that denuclearisation “could be among the agenda items for talks between North Korea and the US”.

South Korea national security adviser Chung Eui-yong added: “North Korea made clear its willingness to denuclearise the Korean Peninsula and the fact there is no reason for it to have a nuclear programme if military threats against the North are resolved and its regime is secure.”

In the North Korean state news agency’s version of events, however, the prospect of denuclearisation was not mentioned.

Has anything like this happened before?

Yes, under two different US presidents.

In 1994, Bill Clinton’s administration signed an “Agreed Framework” with Kim Jong Il, who had been sworn in as leader just three months earlier.

The deal was “supposed to halt nuclearisation” and help replace North Korea’s older nuclear power plants with more proliferation-resistant light-water reactor plants, says The Guardian’s Richard Wolffe. “Then [in 2002] it turned out Pyongyang had a secret nuclear programme.”

In 2005, during George W. Bush’s administration, North Korea agreed to give up its entire nuclear programme, including weapons, in exchange for energy assistance from the US, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea, reports CNN.

The following year, the deal was annulled by the United Nations Security Council after the North conducted a nuclear weapon test.

Finally, in 2008, six-party talks were held in Beijing to address the nuclear issue, but broke down over North Korea’s refusal to allow international inspectors unfettered access to suspected nuclear sites. There has been little progress on denuclearisation since then.

So will they disarm this time?

The fact that North Korea has offered to dismantle its nuclear weapons programme and meet US officials seemingly out of the blue has given experts cause for “guarded optimism”, says The Guardian.

Alexandra Bell, senior policy director at the US Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told the newspaper: “We don’t have a lot of reasons to trust Kim, but we also want to avoid a disastrous conflict. We should look at this offer with guarded optimism and have realistic short-term goals.

“This offer was more than anyone was expecting and could have imagined and I will not deny that it seems a little too good to be true, but it is an offer worth pursuing in a careful and cautious manner.”

However, uncertainty lies in the trade-off that North Korea will expect. Kim may demand so many concessions that negotiations break down, making the US appear as the stubborn participant.

“North Korea’s price for giving up its weapons may be too high for the US to bear, such as the withdrawal of US forces from South Korea or the end of the US-South Korea Alliance,” Frank Aum, a North Korea expert at the US Institute of Peace, told The Guardian.

Kyle Ferrier, director of research at the Korea Economic Institute of America, told NBC News: “It is possible [Kim] is trying to have his cake and eat it too. By saying he is willing to talk about the nuclear programme, Kim looks like he’s entering the negotiations in good faith, while knowing that he’ll ask for an impossible concession in return.”