#393 North Korea: PowerPlay Or Buying Butter With Guns (2004) By Ron Huisken​​​
 
Working Paper No. 393
 
North Korea has been an angry dictatorship for as long as anyone can remember. It now wants honourable admittance to the post-Cold War society of states and is using the threat to acquire nuclear weapons as its sole argument to secure the agreement of those that matter. This is an unusual way of doing business and everyone’s first instinct is to tell Pyongyang that it has everything back to front. Giving Pyongyang a face-saving exit may seem totally undeserved, but the alternatives are equally unattractive. Looking at what is likely to happen in North Korea after a deal on nuclear weapons has a lot going for it. The effects of inspections and subsequent monitoring, the sustained delivery of development assistance, the re-training of the nuclear workforce, and of normal diplomatic and economic relations with the US, Japan and South Korea are likely to be quite dramatic. That is an outcome worth aspiring to, even at the cost of awarding Pyongyang a status it has yet to deserve. Revamping the current embryonic proposal to make more clear at the outset that Pyongyang will get the trappings of legitimacy and acceptance entails no compromise on the thorough and enduring dismantlement of its nuclear weapon capacities. It does involve making some difficult political concessions on the basis of a reasonable expectation that these concessions will be rewarded through developments that flow from the agreement but are not part of it.
 
Soft Cover
58 pages
In Good Condition