Engaging the Estranged: Reciprocity and Cooperation on the Korean Peninsula

In: Journal of east Asian studies, Band 3, Heft 2, S. 169-198

Abstract

North Korea has become the focus of international attention once again. In October 2002 it admitted to a visiting U.S. envoy of having a clandestine nuclear program through uranium enrichment, which is a violation of, among other things, the bilateral agreement it signed with the United States eight years ago. In retaliation, the United States canceled shipment of heavy fuel oil to North Korea, that shipment being part of the agreement to compensate for North Korea's abandonment of its nuclear program. Since then, North Korea has astonished the world with a series of highly provocative moves: it restarted the nuclear facilities that it had frozen since 1994; expelled the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); declared immediate withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); and threatened to resume test-firing long-range missiles that it voluntarily stopped in 1998.