North Korean Nuclear Program

My name is Bruce Pickering and I am the Director of this Asia Society Center which is one of 10 nationally and in Asia and for those of you who don't know Asia Society is a global organization dedicated to strengthening relationships and deepening understanding between and among the people, leaders and institutions of the United States and Asia. We do this through extensive programs in the fields of policy, culture, business and the arts and we are a membership organization so if you like what you see and would like to join we would welcome that. There is membership information at the table out in front and you can check our website at www.asiasociety.org. This is a very timely program and we are excited about it. It would not have been possible without the support of a number of individuals and organizations whom I will mention right now. First and foremost among these, well not first and foremost, but among these are the Korea Foundation, (indiscernible) whose president (indiscernible) is here today and Japan Airlines represented by Mr. Yoshiaki Hata (ph) and Ms. Isling Tanaka (ph) and both of them are here today as well. And then I would also like to take a moment to thank our important co-sponsors. Again I don't think we would have had the size of the audience who would have today if it hadn't been for their kind support and those institutions are the Asia Foundation represented by EVP Barnett Baron, who is here with us today and the Asia Foundation is providing the copies of the agreement hot of the press and you will have those in a few minutes. Business executives for National Security is represented by its Director Peter Ohtaki who is also here today. The institute of East Asian Studies, is represented by T J Pempel he is here today. The consulate general of Japan, Japan represented by Consulate General Yamanaka and Ms. Minori Yamamizo (ph) - and they are not here yet but they will be here today. The Japan Society of Northern California whose new president Dana Lewis is here today, the National Committee on North Korea and I have a card that the Executive Director Ms. Lee is here today as well. The US Center for the Pacific Rim and the Center's Director Barbara Bundy has been a strong supporter of Asia Society over the past and she is here today. The Walter Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center at Stanford University and our moderator for panel number one Mr. Gi-Wook Shin is here today and he is the Director. And finally the World Affairs Council of Northern California who is represented by the Program Director Carla Thorson, she is here today, it's quite a list. As well I would like to thank the Korean Consulate General for its kind assistance in this program, Consul General Sang-Ki Chung and Consul General Kim both of who have been hugely helpful to us. And then finally my last acknowledgement to thank you, to actually 2 final acknowledgements. The first is the generous support of one of Asia Society's co-chairs of the board Mr. Chong-Moon Lee and Mr. Lee's generosity has enabled us to provide scholarships for today's program to students from Stanford University, UC Berkeley, University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University and then the last, I promise, the last thank you on this is actually to out program Director Robert Bullock who put this thing together, it's a stellar cast and it's a tribute to Roberts programming ability. Turning to the days program it's my great pleasure to introduce Consulate General of Korea to San Francisco Mr. Sang-Ki Chung who is going to introduce Ambassador Lee. Before I turn the podium over to the Consulate General I would like to note that he has been an important figure here in San Francisco since his arrival in 2005 and he has been very successful in his mission of strengthening business and cultural relationships between California and Korea. And with that I would like to turn the floor over to Consul General Chung. Thanks Bruce for your kind introductions, good morning ladies and gentlemen, this morning I am very much honored to introduce our Ambassador His Excellency, Lee Tai sik to all of you. Ambassador Lee is a Korean diplomat, after passing the high diplomatic services exam and joining the Ministry in 1973 he served in various locations around the globe including Liberia, the Philippines, Austria, Yugoslavia, and the EU among others. He was the Korean Ambassador to Israel until February 2002 and served as ambassador to the United Kingdom until August 2004, he was appointed as ambassador to Washington in November 2005. Domestically he has also held several senior level positions such as Director-General of The International Trade Bureau, Deputy Foreign Minister and Vice Foreign Minister. He had the unique experience of serving as Deputy Executive Director of The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), which was established after the first North Korean nuclear crisis. Ambassador Lee is a true expert on the North Korean nuclear issue. I think he has led Korean delegations in various security negotiations and the consultations, particularly to deal with the North Korean nuclear issue. He was heavily involved in the policies concerning the six party talks. Ambassador Lee is a man of vision and devotion. He has been a role model of our diplomats even when he was a young officer. Ambassador Lee graduated from Seoul National University and the School of Advanced International studies at the Johns Hopkins. First panel is nuclear is the North Korean Program, how did we get here and what did the North Koreans want? And the moderator for this program is Dr. Gi-Wook Shin it was just my note that as we came in, I said to Dr. Shin, I said, you know, it's taken us a year and a half to put this conference on, but our timing is great, don't you think? And he said, yes, for sure. How did you arrange it? Dr. Shin is the Director of the Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. He is also the Founding Director of Stanford's Korean Studies Program and the Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. When Dr. Shin is done and now and he has introduced the panelists they have made their comments, the bios are in the booklet. So there isn't much need for too much. We are going to have Q&A cards and if you could put your questions on those cards, we will actually try and group them into accordingly, appropriately and then Dr. Shin will then moderate the discussion with the cards in hand. So with that, Dr. Shin, the floor is yours. Okay, thank you very much for a very kind introduction. It's a great honor for our center to participate this important event in the city. As you know we don't come out to city very often, but it is such a great opportunity to see, you know, many familiar faces in the audience. When you are talking about this conference last year frankly no one expected, that we would have such a great timing in talking about North Korea. I mean, still we are trying to digest what happened overnight, but it is such a great pleasure to introduce distinguished panelists to you this morning. There are three people on the panelists. The first one Dr. Sig Hecker he is a well known physicist and he is the one actually who went to see North Korean nuclear facility in Yongbyong few years ago and he also went to South Korea last year with me. He just joined as Co-Director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation as the employee just downstairs, you know, one floor down from our center. The next speaker will be Professor David Kang from Dartmouth College and third one Scott Snyder from Asia Foundation. I have to say that, you know, most of them were staying at our center last year. So it's great to see all of you back to this bay area, it's my great pleasure. So the theme for the panel is North Korea nuclear program, how did we get here? What does North Korea want? I might have to say that we have to slightly change the title into what else does North Korea want to happen. So they will be speaking for like a 10 to 15 minutes and then we will put up our questions so. Thank you Professor Shin. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. The timing is both good and bad. It is good from a standpoint that is good news for all of us. It's bad for those of us who prepared our speech long time ago. Fortunately I don't fall in that category. Always leave it to the end and it paid off this time since I had to redo it. And now in terms of the topic for today and that is how did we get here, what does North Korea want, what else? I will leave the "what else" to my two colleagues and instead in the spirit of what happened in the last few days, what I will try to do since I have a technical background, I will try to deal with what does North Korea have today, you know, what's the fuzz all about this and then what about the deal, how does it affect what North Korea has and what the concerns are? So and I will I will do this is in shorthand form because of limited time that we have to make sure that you have a chance to ask the questions So so let me stress what North Korea has today is what we call the full nuclear fuel cycle and what that means it has the front-end capability of everything from uranium mines to mine the uranium and make fuel for the reactor, that's called the front-end of the cycle. In North Korea's case they have taken the approach of being able to then design a reactor uses natural uranium so you don't need this enrichment that you have heard about. So they have complete front-end capabilities. They have a reactor and actually had in the plants a couple of more reactors that then will burn this uranium to make electricity heat and in this particular case the type of reactor that they chose what it really makes well is plutonium which then can become the fuel actually for additional energy or for nuclear weapons. However, to get the plutonium out you have to do the backend of the fuel cycle and that is to extract the plutonium from the burnt reactor or a spent reactor fuel as we call it. That's a big deal technically and North Korea has developed the capabilities to do so. So when you hear about the reprocessing facility that's the part where you actually extract the plutonium from the spent fuel and then it could become usable for a nuclear weapon. So they have all of those capabilities. Let me put the reactor in perspective as I said it makes electricity or heat and plutonium it doesn't make a lot of electricity. We refer to it as the five megawatt electric reactor. A South Korean reactor typical South Korean reactor is a 1000 mega-watts electric. So in other words what the North Korean reactor makes is 1.5 of one percent of the electricity that one of South Korea's 20 nuclear reactors make. So from an electricity standpoint it's almost revealed and from a heat standpoint it's almost revealed except my first visit to North Korea to Yongbyong was in January of 2004 and let me tell you that heat it produced was not revealed in terms of the building you go into. So it is important but relatively speaking its its really not very much. They did have plans for two bigger reactors instead of this five megawatt they had plans for 50 and plans for 200 and both of them were well along in construction especially the 50 megawatt. Now in terms of nuclear weapons capability this reactor that they currently have been running the five megawatt electric is capable of producing enough plutonium for roughly one bombs worth a year. And if you look back over the years a number of years that reactors actually was operating it's made probably six to eight bombs worth of plutonium. So again electricity not much from a bomb standpoint, you know substantial. And even before the agreed framework, you know, it appears the North Koreans extracted enough plutonium for maybe one or a little more than one bombs worth. But most of the major advances in terms of their plutonium the fuel for nuclear bomb has been since 2003, you know, after the altercation in late 2002. And then of course North Korea October 9th of last year also conducted a nuclear test and although that nuclear test you know, I would call only partially successful and nevertheless they were able to demonstrate to make a nuclear bomb. So now let's talk a bit about the deal itself and you know, what does it actually accomplish even as little as we know about it and I just a few minutes ago got the statement from Scott Snyder and the focus and the statement as far as the deal is concerned is to shutdown and seal for purpose of eventual abandonment the Yongbyong nuclear facilities they say including the reprocessing facility. So that's the first step and so what does it do? Well, first of all what it will do is it will limit the size of the nuclear arsenal and the amount of bomb fuel that North Korea is able to make. Currently as I mentioned they have six to eight bombs worth we translate to 40kgs to 50kgs of plutonium. Their current production capacity is about one bombs worth per year. However, what this deal does is stop finishing the 50 megawatt reactor which would have increased the one bombs per year to 10 bombs per year. My most recent visit last November I had been able to find out that they have had difficulties with the finishing that 50 megawatt reactor and so my assessment was that was still a few years away but what the deal will do and hopefully actually in the details of the deal is to make sure to take that 50 megawatt reactor out of the picture all together. If that happens that's very good news because that would be a you know, step function jump in North Korea's capability. The second thing the deal does it limits the sophistication of the arsenal. Right now it's my assessment as I have just mentioned that they know how to make a bomb. It was most likely less than one kiloton for a comparison the Nagasaki plutonium bomb was 21 kilotons but one kiloton in a big city is still an absolute catastrophe. Without additional nuclear testing I do not believe that North Korea could have the confidence to mount whatever they have in terms of a nuclear weapon on a missile. So they are really limited to vary crew delivery techniques of van, the plane, a boat. Without additional nuclear testing in my opinion, no sophisticated weapon - the deal will not allow additional nuclear testing so no improvement and sophistication of the weapon. Ambassador Lee mentioned the uranium enrichment program which was the source of the disagreement in October 2002, this at least the first that won't necessarily stop any uranium enrichment program that they may have because uranium enrichment has such a small footprint. It would be very difficult to find a new place. However, just having inspectors in Yongbyong having more people in North Korea will necessarily I think make it more difficult and I also my own assessment was that this uranium enrichment program whatever they have is really not an immediate threat. The nuclear weapons of course are not dealt with in the initial phase of this of this latest agreement. However, with the current arsenal I believe that the nuclear weapon threat is contained particularly since the deterrent that we have for North Korea which is if their nuclear weapon is used any place anywhere it will surely need massive retaliation and regime change that deterrent I believe works. However, one has to deal with what I have all alone considered to be the biggest threat of the North Korean Nuclear Program and that's the potential of the export not of the nuclear weapon because quite frankly you don't just take a nuclear weapon out of the country but of the nuclear fuel the plutonium itself. And I have a paper coming out in the March issue of arms control today which deals with what I think is the most likely and the most dangerous potential problem with plutonium export and that is a deal between North Korea and the Iran. Let's say a long alliance of the missile deal that they have had for many years. You can ask well, what does the Iran have? Iran has money and it has oil. What does the Iran want? It wants some material, its been trying for 20 years to enrich uranium overnight if it buys 10kgs to 20kgs of plutonium from North Korea it catapulted into nuclear weapons capability overnight instead of 20 years. What else does Iran possibly want if indeed they are pursuing a nuclear weapons program? All of the capabilities that North Korea has I told you it has front-end capability that they know how to do everything associated with uranium. They know reactor operations and then they have backend capabilities and even though its not advertised much today Iran not only has a uranium enrichment program which they say is for civilian purposes it is also building a reactor bigger than the one we were worried about in Yongbyong. Rather quietly of course everyone knows about it but hardly anyone speaks but that reactor will make plutonium. North Korea knows how to extract plutonium. So the potential of technical collaboration either the plutonium itself nuclear weapons expertise or nuclear fuel cycle expertise or technologies between North Korea and Iran is the deadly sort of deal that is most important to avoid. So I asked the question will this deal help in this respect. In my own sense even though this first step is a small step, it will help, because from the standpoint of North Korea needing energy and money, this deal provides some of that energy which might lessen the need for any Iran deal. Also again just greater visibility, more people in North Korea, I think, will help in a significant way. So let me wrap it up by saying that from my standpoint what the deal does even though it doesn't specifically touch right now on the fate of the nuclear weapons or plutonium, but that's included in the September 19th statement. But what it does right now it halts additional plutonium production, it hasn't declared, it sort of shuts down the facilities and all of that to me I would agree with Ambassador Lee is a pleasant surprise and a step in the right direction, it opens the door and we should walk through that door very deliberately and the details of what happens will be very important and quiet frankly as much as I admire the diplomats, occasionally they do needs some technical advice in how one stages this and, for example, to me shutting down the reprocessing facility before one deals with whatever is left in the reactor is the wrong thing to do. I would leave the reprocessing facility open, reprocess the plutonium under IAEA inspection, because the plutonium is much easy to take care of than 8000 spent fuel rods and the magnesium alloy clouding that corrodes easily that will cause us enormous amount of money to get out of North Korea. Simple things like this where the technical world and the diplomatic world must talk to each other. In addition the other thing that's very important in terms of looking at how to implement this deal, from a verification standpoint our lesson over the years in working with countries that have actually rolled back their nuclear program, that the only one that we know that had nuclear weapons that rolled it back is South Africa. What we have learnt from all those years that unless you have the cooperation of the host country you cannot verify. And the reason for that I already mentioned uranium enrichment, the fingerprint, the footprint's too small. It's too difficult to find all the various places. If you are talking about plutonium, you know, as much as people are scared of plutonium, a few kilograms in a briefcase somewhere, in somebody's cupboard or somebody's cave some place you will never ever find it and so it will take North Korean cooperation with the records of operation of the reactor allowing us to go in, make some measurements on the reactor, have their complete cooperation in order to be able to verify that there really is denuclearization. And so the path to its final resolution should be taken in such a way that it brings North Korea and it has the incentives for them to actually declare, fully declare with their cooperation then we have a chance to verify with that verification then you are on hopefully where we will be here in a few years time to say everything associated with this deal has been successful. And so thank you for listening this morning. I hope I gave you some background and I was able up to tee up my colleagues to tell you how to really solve this problem. Okay, thanks Sig. Scott. As we were preparing for this panel we sort of came to an agreement that Sig would lay out the technical aspects of the program and what David and I had talked about was possibly trying to get into the heads of Chris Hill and Kim Gye-gwan respectively and sort of figure out what their thinking as they were on the plane coming back and of course they are not on the plane yet we don't think so in a technical sense our plans have been foiled, but what I want to do is is to try to at least lay out some issues that I imagine Chris Hill is doing a lot of briefing right now, but I am sure that in the back of his head there are also some issues and things that he is concerned about or challenges yet to be done that he is going to have to face and so I will talk about those and David will talk about maybe the North Korean perspective on this agreement. Clearly the first challenge for Ambassador Hill is that he has got to sell the agreement that he made with the North Koreans. And it is not uncommon for those who have negotiated with North Korea to say that it's actually easier to negotiate with the North Koreans than to sell the agreement that they have made when they come back, and in fact we already see that Ambassador Hill in many respects is just sort of caught in the crossfire. I think John Bolton has already given his preemptive description of what he thinks about the agreement. Ambassador Lee gave slightly a different perspective why didn't this happen several years ago, although it wasn't a criticism. It was more an indication that possibly we could have moved faster. So he has got to deal with that. He also has to deal with the situation where there has been an agreement about some initial steps that will be taken to be implemented, but in order for this process to work it has to keep moving. This process that is laid out in this statement, I think, is very much like trying to begin to ride a bike and so, I think, that he is probably going to be very focused on trying to move forward in terms of reconvening these parties for the bilateral groups trying to keep all the parties engaged and moving forward in an implementation process, because if that starts to slow or break down it actually puts what has been agreed to and is expected to happen at risk. I think a third thing that Ambassador Hill is probably going to be thinking a lot about is the question of whether or not the North Koreans might start to doubt a strategic decision that they have made, that he thinks that they have made that is implicit in the agreement and that I think that he believes might have occurred in the context of the Berlin talks perhaps. And again this is my imagination, I don't know what he actually believes, but, in fact, in order to get to this point and in order to get to Berlin, I think both United States and North Korea made some kinds of strategic decisions about the nature and future of the relationship and then the question is whether or not an implementation they are going to stick to them. And so that involves implementation. Will the North Koreans actually address the issue of enriched uranium, it's already come up. It is our point, how do you get to the point when maybe fuel would leave North Korea. Is this process going to be conducted in way that is truly irreversible? We see the language of this joint statement, it talks about disabling. But it sounds like we don't know yet, exactly and they may not know yet exactly what form that it is going to take. I think another area where Ambassador Hill is probably a little bit concerned is, will North Korea actually move forward in an effective way in the bilateral normalization process with Japan? And the talks in Beijing, this time, I believe that finally the North Koreans and the Japanese met bilaterally one time, but there is a lot of other activity among the other parties and that so there is really a long way to go and he is probably also concerned about the Japanese reaction to this agreement in the context of the impact on the U.S.-Japan relationship to a certain extent. Then, of course, he has to be concerned about how a normalization process with the North Koreans is going to be seen in a political context here, because this agreement and the joint statement suggests that the nuclear - dealing with the nuclear issue is key, is tied to normalization, but it doesn't really say much about other issues, missiles, human rights, other issues that have at various times in the past been tied to the question of whether or not to normalized relations with North Korea. And I think another issue that he is probably thinking about is this question of burden sharing in terms of energy provision that apparently held up some of the discussions in Beijing and slowed things down. What form of burden sharing is going to be necessary in order to fulfill the second stage in particular the 950000 tons of heavy fuel oil that is expected to be delivered at a later stage in the context of North Korea's disabling of the reactor. We don't know yet whether this kind of burden sharing may involve U.S. financial obligations or not that. That hasn't been made clear to my knowledge. And then of course the Japanese also have indicated that and unless the abduction issue is dealt with in some form, it is going to be impossible for them to contribute. Another issue that will be worked out and, I think, in these bilateral groups or not bilateral they are working groups in Beijing; especially the denuclearization working group is going to be issues of sequencing in terms of who exactly does what first. There is some very interesting language in this statement about the period of the initial actions phase and the next phase and its relationship to when North Korea gets some of the energy provision that is mentioned. And I think that the joint statement envisioned simultaneity but there also is a dynamic in which sometimes one side appears to the initiator and the other side appears to be the responder. And so those issues are all issues that could be potential points where something might breakdown and he has to manage that. And I think the final issue that I see that he probably has to spend some time worrying about is the question of as the pressure on North Korea is eased will the partners in this process be willing to continue to move forward and not be complacent about this issue of actually achieving denuclearization on the Korean peninsula and I think that in particular this means are China or South Korea or other, you know, would they in particular be satisfied to know that the immediate crisis that everybody has taken a step back or and therefore sort of eased the pressure on North Korea sufficiently that, maybe the north feels that they don't need to take a next step towards denuclearization. Yes, the UN Security resolutions remain out there and their specific language in those resolutions that indicates that the sanctions would be in effect until North Korea's denuclearization is fully achieved but in terms of what form that takes, how its implemented, I imagine that in Seoul, at least, there is probably more people breathing sighs of relief and thinking okay well, this is sort of under control now than people who are wondering, well how can we make sure that North Korea gets to the end of the process and so that's what I think maybe ambassador Hill has to contemplate as he prepares for his ride back to Washington. Okay, thank you. Okay once again we will be collecting questions after the presentation by speakers, so please write down your question and pass to, I guess, some staff of Asia Society. So last Speaker is David Kang. All right, thank you Gi-Wook. First thanks to Bob Bullock and Bruce for inviting me and organizing this. Its been great to be a part of it. I also am in the unenviable position of trying to get in the North Korean head and say what they are really thinking. So I should start off by saying I have no idea, number one. This is all speculation, but I think that its worthwhile trying to do this because, you know, one of the things I think we often forget is that the North Koreans don't trust America any more than we trust them. You know, so its very easy from a US perspective, even like this morning on the what our NPR they say well, North Korea broke the treaty in 94' et cetera, et cetera right. The North Koreans don't trust anymore than we trust them and much of the actions that have gone on over the last couple of years have only reinforced their mistrust of the United States. So I am going to try and lay out what I see as some of the North Korean concerns and issues that they see coming up and I will try and be as brief as possible. One of the first things I would say is that, you know, in a way it's not a surprise that we are at this stage and we ended it with an agreement like this because this is basically, ever since 94', this is basically the form that any type of nuclear agreement is going to have to take. Something roughly along the lines of North Korea gives up its nuclear weapons program, we provide the United States et cetera normalization of ties, a peace treaty et cetera. I mean that's been the basic nugget of any negotiated agreement. And you can call it different things and I think ambassador Hill is trying very hard not to call it agreed framework two. But that's essentially what its going to be, if you are going to get a negotiated agreement its going to be something like this. So from the North Korean perspective, I think one of the reasons they came back is that everybody, you know all sides really wanted to get at least some type of progress, some type of forward motion, even if its not anywhere near a full time of conclusive, conclusive deal and I think in the North Koreans they saw that this was the kinds of steps they could take. And in fact these are the same things that everybody agreed on two years ago in September 19 and were basically the '94 agreement. So why are we, sort of get to September 19 and then all of a sudden end up 2 years later basically there at square two I guess. Is because of some of the things that, again, from a North Korean perspective raised their fears that the United States wasn't serious and I think their basic concern, their underlying concern is that the US isn't serious about implementing any of their side of the deal. We are very concerned that North Korea is not going to live up to it. Now I will conclude with some discussion about that. But I think that when, for example, when we look at Banco Delta Asia or what I found very interesting was the sort of lack of discussion of the light water reactor in in the current text. Those two, to the United States, these are things that are either clearly separate issues or clearly derived from North Korean bad behavior. You broke the agreed framework therefore you don't get the light water reactor. However, if I am Kim Gye-gwan or Kim Jong-il, right, this is precisely the opposite lesson they take. Light water reactor matters North Korea so much because that's what the United States or the other side didn't do in '94. That was years behind, so they view it they viewed it as proof that the US was serious about implementing it. And I think they were willing to give up on talking about it here but I certainly think that BDA was one of those that they said, Okay, we just in September 2005, we just signed this agreement and then you slapped this thing on us. You are not serious, you have no intention. And we said, we meaning sort of America, whatever, those are separate, that's the treasury department. But, if I am Kim Gye-gwan that's not a very convincing argument. Its shows that, okay, we are not very serious about it, so I think that in many ways that the North Koreans are probably as waiting for the US to back off on this agreement as we are looking for every sign that they are not going to, they are not going to follow up. Probably another longer term, what is, is the US really have any intention of normalizing ties and, and actually come into a modus vivendi with us. Scot laid out some of the real problems that Chris Hill is already running into. There are a lot of people in America who, for justifiable reasons, would find it extremely abhorrent to say to a North Korean country regime, okay live and let live. And, I think, the North Koreans are highly skeptical that we are really going to go down the process of normalizing ties, et cetera of of implementing a peace treaty. Those kinds of things, right. You know you can also see this potentially in sort of the the free trade agreement discussions between the South Korea and the US where Kaesong is a big deal, where South-North ties are a big deal on whether the US will go along with a free trade agreement. You know my guess is that that the North is also fairly concerned, its going to watch US behavior on this type of negotiations as to whether the US is serious or not. You know so I again I am not at all trying to defend North Korean behavior. I just want to make that very completely clear. But if I put myself in, you know, the position of a Pyongyang diplomat there are certainly a number of things that I would be very, very skeptical about US intentions or whether they will actually follow through and I would still have gone down the path of this accord because its basically the same type of an accord that ultimately has to happen. And the North, I am pretty sure knows that without some resolution of a nuclear issue none of this other stuff is going to happen and they probably know that. As Scot said as well, the issues of sequencing and implementation are going to be far more important than the basic outlines because again, what we tend to say on the US side is, okay we will do this agreement but you do have to first and allay our fears. And I think the North Koreans would prefer to see it the other way, like okay, we don't trust you, you allay our fears, and I think we are going to have some serious problems over sequencing the series of moves, the sort of tit for tat process. You know one of the problems of course is the tit for tat process works very well if you want to have relations go down, because you will start yelling at each other and doing bad behaviors. It's very hard to get that tit for tat process to build up trust. You know, so I will conclude this very briefly by the question that, you know, everybody always asks and, you know, just yesterday some of us talked to some reporter and the question everybody wants to know, will Kim Jong-il really give up his nuclear weapons. You know, I have no idea. I have no idea at the end of this, would North Korea truly say all right, there is enough here, we will dismantle totally. Here is all our bombs et cetera, et cetera. But I don't have an answer to that question. I am fairly sure, I do have a partial answer though which is that the only possible way that we are going to find out is an agreement like this and this under coercion I think that there is no way that you would give them up. So we are moving forward on that ambiguous note.