Coordinating Regional Strategies for a WMD-Free Korean Peninsula

A Multilateral Workshop
part of the Building Six-Party Capacity project

February 20, 2004
Honolulu, Hawaii

 

Government officials and foreign policy experts from six nations met for a one-day workshop in Honolulu, Hawaii, on February 20, 2004, to discuss options for dealing with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK’s) weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. Occurring a few days before the second round of six-party talks held in Beijing, the meeting offered an opportunity for policy makers and academics from the United States, the Republic of Korea (ROK), Japan, China, Russia, and Australia to debate ideas in advance of the multilateral discussions. The workshop, Coordinating Regional Strategies for a WMD-Free Korean Peninsula, was organized by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (IFPA), based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., with help from the Center for International Studies, Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS), Yonsei University, located in Seoul. The Hawaii gathering was the third in a series, following a United States-South Korean bilateral meeting in 2002 and a trilateral dialogue in 2003 that included Japanese participation. These discussions are intended to help policy makers from the nations involved in the talks devise practical policies in support of peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula, with a specific focus on establishing a WMD-free peninsula. IFPA and GSIS would like to thank the Carnegie Corporation of New York for its generous financial support that made this conference, and the broader project of which it is a part, possible.

The organizers divided the dialogue into four sessions with the following objectives: 1) to evaluate the current multilateral approach to the North Korean challenge; 2) to examine the WMD issue within a broader global context; 3) to discuss the proper mix of “carrots and sticks” that could elicit more cooperative North Korean behavior; and 4) to debate options over a verification and enforcement regime that would reduce the uncertainty surrounding the North’s WMD program and ideally result in the program's irreversible dismantlement. The timing of the conference was also fortunate in that discussions were enriched by Libya’s surprising decision in December 2003 to forgo all WMD development, as well as by the troubling revelations that A.Q. Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, had illicitly sold nuclear reprocessing technology and weapon designs to Libya, Iran, and North Korea through a black market that extends into Europe, the Persian Gulf, and Southeast Asia. Hence, the workshop benefited from discussions that explored the intersection of regional security issues with broader, global proliferation concerns, and proposed remedies to address this particular nexus. Furthermore, the presence of representatives from Russia, China, and Australia, in conjunction with their counterparts from the United States, Japan, and South Korea, ensured that a wide variety of perspectives was represented in Honolulu.