 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name's George Perkovich. I'm a vice president for studies here at Carnegie Endowment. And it's my pleasure to welcome you today for the final installment of our series of programs entitled Past as Prologue, which we're concluding now in addressing one of the more challenging and persistent issues facing the US, Japan, the Western, and Eastern alliances. And that is how to deal with the Iran proliferation case and specifically looking at how that may be informed by experiences we've had with the DPRK. We started this series led by my colleague Jim Schoff in 2015 during the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Obviously, it was a good time to reflect on a number of the legacies of that terrible conflict. These included, obviously, the impacts of hastily defined borders, unresolved territorial disputes, and the use of nuclear weapons, as well as more constructive developments, obviously, such as the establishment of the United Nations and other post-war institutions. And as we try to put these reflections to productive use and apply it to the important issues of the future, it seemed appropriate, as I mentioned, to think about the agreed framework with the DPRK and how that experience might give us insights into what to do and not to do as we go forward with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. And Japan was obviously important in the DPRK framework as a kind of a key element of the overall regional structure and then ultimately as a state that was going to be vital to implementing the agreement, especially the supply of the light water reactors. It's less obvious at first blush Japan's centrality to the issue with Iran's nuclear program. And yet, Japan and Iran have had a longstanding and uniquely positive relationship that was prior to the Iranian revolution but also persisted after that revolution. And so Japan is an especially important country in Iran's eyes and in practice. And there are also a number of business and commercial relationships to be had between Japan and Iran. So Japan really is an important country, both from the standpoint of the US and the P5 and also the standpoint of Iran going forward. And so there's another reason to have this discussion today and to think about incentives for maintaining compliance. And we're honored to have many distinguished presenters and panelists here today. And Jim will introduce the first panel. But I'd like to make a special mention of thanks to two of our colleagues who came all the way from Tokyo to be part of this discussion. It's Dr. Akiyama and Mr. Tanaka. Dr. Akiyama is the first panel and Mr. Tanaka will be in the second panel. It's a long way to comment, so we really appreciate it. Although I hope you got to see the cherry blossoms or will before tomorrow. With that, I will get out of the way and let Jim take over. Thank you very much, George. And we're going to keep you involved here in the first panel. So I'll be introducing you in just a minute. But good afternoon, everyone. My name is Jim Scho. I'm a senior associate here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and director of our Japan program. And it's been a lot of fun putting together this past as prologue series because it's given me kind of free license to wander farther afield on a variety of foreign policy issues that directly or indirectly impact the US-Japan alliance. We've looked at Japan-Korea relations. We've looked at US-Japan and Southeast Asia over the last 70 years. We've looked at US-Japan technology, science technology diplomacy, and robotics issues. And now we're venturing even further afield into the Middle East with a significant focus on Iran on the issue of nuclear non-proliferation. I wanted to add upfront that this is more than an academic exercise. Our past case that we're looking at, the North Korean case, is not just an example of an attempt to develop a nuclear deal in the 1990s and implement it. It's a growing danger in Northeast Asia today and poses a lot of non-proliferation challenges and security challenges and foreign policy challenges with its great nuclear missile development. Clearly, our efforts to stop North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons have not worked. But we can discuss whether or not we've had workable options short of war to accomplish this. And our present case is one of the most complex and consequential non-proliferation initiatives ever attempted. And it really brings into the spotlight, I think, this question, to what extent nuclear non-proliferation is a political issue or a technical one? And this is something that I was kind of at an article by Akayama Sensei kind of made me think about that issue. And I think that's a theme we may revisit throughout the course of this afternoon. Two of the three most complex verification challenges for the IEA have been North Korea and now Iran in addition to Iraq. And I think the US-Japan alliance is a potential asset. It's not the central means by which these deals are implemented by no means, but it is an asset in this process. And the question I think today, a little bit, is to what extent and how do we leverage this asset? We have two sessions today. Our first, I'll be moderating both. And our first exam is the history of the agreed framework, implementation from multiple angles, incentives, politics, technical issues, assesses the strengths and weaknesses from Japanese and US perspectives, and considers, to some extent, how the lessons might be applicable or not to the Iran situation and looks ahead at present day. And to some extent, we may also look at how the Iran negotiation might potentially impact dealing with North Korea in the future. Our second session after a brief break will be a facilitated discussion about national interests and the main challenges facing implementation related to the Iran deal, followed by an examination of the US and other nations' strategies to sustain a successful agreement. And at the conclusion of the second panel today, we'll have a reception downstairs, so please feel free to join us afterwards for a bit of networking and informal discussion about these issues. But let me begin with the first panel, and I want to introduce our panelists. To my right is Dr. Nobumasa Akiyama, professor at the Graduate School of Law at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, where he focuses on nuclear non-proliferation, disarmament, international politics, and security. He's spent his teaching career at Hitotsubashi, but he has been active in policy circles with professional appointments and a variety of governmental consultative groups and study groups of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Defense, the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of Japan, and was an advisor to the Japanese delegation to the Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conferences. Dr. Robert Bellucci, on our far left, is distinguished professor in the practice of diplomacy at Georgetown University, previously served as president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He began his foreign affairs career at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency back in 1974 and later served the policy planning staff at the State Department and the Bureau of Political and Military Affairs there as well was deputy executive chairman of the UN Special Commission on Decommissioning Overseeing Iraq Disarmament and was one of the chief negotiators with North Korea during the early 1990s leading up to the agreed framework as assistant secretary of state for political military affairs. And of course George Perkovich, our own vice president of studies here at Carnegie and the leader of our nuclear policy program. He works primarily on nuclear strategy and nonproliferation issues and South Korean security. He's been a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Arms Control and International Security in addition to a number of other accomplishments. So we have a great panel to dive into North Korea. Talk a little bit about Iran as well. But let me begin. Our first panel will have a couple of presentations. Our second panel will just be a kind of a talk show format. And I wanna give Akayama sensei a chance to start us off looking at the agreed framework. Thank you very much. Thank you. I would like to thank the economy for inviting me to the Washington at the very good timing of enjoying the cherry blossoms and I asked my driver all the way from the airport to the downtown and I asked him to stop by the Port Mark River and then literally we stopped for a moment because of traffic jam but still have a time. So that's why I had a time to enjoy the cherry blossoms before we enjoy blooming in Tokyo. My talk is actually the homework given by Jimson was the sort of lessons from the agreed framework with the North Korea and implication for Iran. So I took this really precisely the agreed framework in the early part of the negotiation with North Korea. So I mostly focus on the 90s and early 2000s and how this agreed framework was sort of failed and what was the role that Japan played during the course of negotiation and also provide give some sort of small hints or the sort of a framework for the comparison between North Korea and Iran and but my time is very much limited so I may have to go very quickly. So when we discuss the sort of the success or failure of the nuclear deals. So what would be a criteria? I took the two levels, the state level or national level and the regional level and also two objectives, non-proliferation and security. So the non-proliferation, the state level is of course the achieving the denuclearization ideally or containing the nuclear weaponization capabilities at least for the time being. And at the state level, the security concern is from the side of for example, North Korea the survivor of the regime, that would be an important thing and from our perspective, the question is do we really seek the collapse of the regime or regime change or at least transforming the regime into the more cooperative and non-threatening regime? And at the regional level, in the area of non-proliferation, obviously the objective is to prevent the proliferation domino in the region. At the sort of security side, through the nuclear deal we would like to seek the more stable strategic environment and the sort of dynamics among the major regional players. So please sort of think about the situation in the East Asia and the Middle East. These four different objectives, are they really achieved or they are stuck? So then, this is my kind of a very rough sketch of the assessment, why did the agreed framework fail in the early 2000s. I think there is obviously gaps between the North Koreans and the others on the goals of the deal. And I think North Korea failed to have sort of a sense of security. And even though the United States provided the security assurance or guarantee not to collapse the regime in the early sort of stage of negotiation in the 90s, but North Korea was able to trust the US commitment. So I think the North Korea keep on suffering from the confidence or the sense of insecurity. And so then North Korea had a complaint about the delay in the delivery of the fuel or other incentives. And of course it's very much to do with the US domestic politics, the lack of consensus and also the low priority on the North Korean question. So I mean, providing incentive, there is no strong support outside of the government and the capital here in particular are reluctant to provide incentives. So from the other perspective, obviously the largest biggest problem is lack of North Korea's commitment to the implementation of a denuclearization program. But it's something also to do with the arrangement itself. To me, there was a kind of unclear sequence of the denuclearization process, verification and incentive provisions, which should come first and what will be the sort of conditions for the providing incentives. And I think that's probably there's a clear contrast between the North Korean case and Iran case. And I think JCPOA provides much better sequence between the delivery of the promise in the agreement and then verification and incentives. And the secondly, there are differences in the perceived perceptions among the major stakeholders, in particular the United States, Japan and China. And thirdly, this is also important, but there are so many loopholes in the implementation sanctions. One is the North Korea kept on the exporting their arms and engaged in the trade with the Middle Eastern countries. The second, we have been keep on the questioning about the thoroughness of the Chinese implementation on the other sanctions. So I think I'm gonna skip this, but this is kind of how we see the threats from the North Korean differences among the major players affected. Kind of the difference in approaches and the differences in the level of commitments. On Japan, Japan's attitude toward the agreed framework in the six-party talk is mostly in fact dominated by the issue other than the nuclear proliferation, non-proliferation. Japan's threat perception in the 90s against North Korea was mostly on the possible insurgency like attacks by the North Korean troops. And also the human rights violation against Japanese citizens which is the abduction issues. And then, so our nuclear threat perception was not so clear until the North Korea successfully conducted the Teppodon missile launch test in 1998. So because of the domestic politics which was mostly dominated by the abduction issue and also normalization talks, the Japanese commitments to the six-party talk is also very much overshadowed by such a political priorities. But Japan's strategy toward the North Korea in particular in the early 2000s is two falls. One is try to achieve the stability through normalization with North Korea and resolution abduction issues. While secondly, supporting US security agenda at the global scale. So somebody made a reference to the potential deal between Japan's support of US on the Iraq war and then US implicit consent on Japan's pursuit on the solution or resolution of the abduction issue. But anyway, Japan tried to pursue its own strategy for the stabilization of the region through the normalization talks. But it didn't go well because of some problems on the North Korean side on the failure to meet our expectations. And maybe we expected too much at the higher level. But anyway, there is a gap on expectations that the North Korea delivered in terms of the solution of the abduction issue. So this abduction issue prevailed throughout the process of the six-party talk. So that's unfortunate probably at the element of Japan's commitment to the six-party talk. But at least the objective of non-proliferation was widely shared at the policy makers level. But actually public was not so much concerned about it. So here, then my talk is about the limit on the comparison between North Korea and Iran. So in order for the nuclear talk to be successful, I think we have to think about several elements. But, and then if you compare two cases, then we see some major differences. One, with regard to the framework of dialogue, in case of North Korea, the major stakeholders included in the talks, framework of talks. So that's why it was difficult to make a sort of agreement because of the diversity of the priorities. In case of Iran, the major regional stakeholders outside of the talk regime. So the major powers are able to agree, but then the outstanding question remains how to engage the regional powers into the framework more a long-standing stabilization of the region. And then if you, and also if you compare the level of the engagement into international markets or international economy, the level of the Iranian commitment to international market potentially much higher than North Korea. North Korea case, its economy is rather out of Turkey or at most the dependency on the single exporter, which is China. So if we are successfully able to provide the sanctions and as well as the positive incentives, then that would be more successful in the case of Iran than North Korea. And the political system. The Iran has a supreme leader, but still I think under supreme leader, the political systems more plural than the North Korea. So that means the political polity of the Iran is more vulnerable to the public opinion, which actually expected the sort of economic recovery after removing the sanctions. So that is a strong incentive for the government to pursue the solution of the nuclear issue. And then, sadly, and also if you compare the level of commitment or association with the international regime, in case of North Korea, they are always threatening to leave the regime and they did, but in case of Iran, they kept on saying that they are staying in the regime and they are keeping the commitment or the commitment of the regime. So their intention to leave from the regime is very small. So that's also made some differences in the solution as well. Finally, the key strategic objectives. In case of North Korea, they, as I said, they are worrying about the survival of its regime against the US pressure. So they are most likely not to give up the nuclear option until the very end of the old, the problem solved. But in case of Iran, I think they have a sense that the United States would not really threaten the survival regime. So their priority is not really to ensure the survival, but more about seeking the power maximization in the given strategic environment. So then with these analysis, what the US-Japan alliance can do or what we learn for the further solution of the other nuclear deals, in particular for the reference to the ongoing escalation of the North Korean nuclear crisis. One, between the allies, I think the reassurance is a key thing. So the two countries need a more, much slower and close communication on the security concerns in both sides and the need to share a common vision on the modality of the regional security. So how to shape the relationship among the major stakeholders in the region that would be an important question. So in following the 2000 negotiations in 2000, I think the Chinese concern on the North Korea is not about the North Korean nuclear capability itself, but more about the North Korean case may tempt the Japanese and the South Koreans to go nuclear. So that kind of a regional security arrangement or security concerns must be addressed, but between the allies, I think we have to share the same objectives or same vision of what the regional security will be. And then also for that, we need to reaffirm mutual commitment, a commitment of both sides, not only the US commitment to the extent it allows, but also what Japan need to do in order to support, I think US strategic objectives. And on the side of diplomacy, I think the coordination and unified message are two key things. So the United States, Japan need to coordinate their behavior in a multilateral forum such as IAEA and United Security Council in which Japan sit as a non-permanent member for this year and next year. And also working together for the stringent export controls. So in order to make the sanction effective, I think export control is a key, but key further is to improve the implementation by other states, not only by Japan and United States, but the other countries. So we have to provide some supports to the Asian countries or other states who are involved in the trade. And finally, ensuring the sanction scheme to work, that means to remind other major stakeholders to keep the commitment of implementing the sanction scheme. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. You've given us a great head start now on this discussion and I'd like to turn to Bob Bellucci to reflect a little bit about the agreed framework. He was very closely involved in its coming about and looking after some of its implementation here from Bob on those reflections. Thank you, James. We were just in another session before coming here in which one of us said that the North Korea deal looks much harder than the Iran deal. I'm not sure about that continuum of harder, but I think the North Korea deal was much simpler than the Iran deal. I don't know if it was harder or easier, but it doesn't, if you look at it, have the complexity, the length, the detail that the Iran deal has. When we started the negotiations in the spring of, late spring of 1993, we had, by my recollection now, very simple goals. I was told as the lead negotiator to get the North Koreans to agree to come back into the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. They had announced their intention to leave the treaty and had given the formal notice required under the language of the treaty. And the second was get them to accept full-scope safeguards which are pursuant to the NPT and specifically a provision in the full-scope safeguards agreement in CERC, as they say 153, for special inspections. That phrase may, if you're old enough, remember 23 years ago, it may resonate. The IAEA said we want to have special inspections. We want to go look at a particular site. So when we first met the North Koreans in New York at the U.S. mission, that's what was on my mind. Two things, get them back in the NPT and get them to accept special inspections. What was the special inspections about? The North Koreans had, that's a bit too fine a point on it, lied to the IAEA about how much plutonium they had separated, whether it was just gram qualities or more. And the IAEA, when they did their inspection, was able to figure out that there were more campaigns as reprocessing campaigns are called. And so there was stuff to be found there. And the real truth of what the North Koreans could have done could be discerned by going to the site, which the United States told the IAEA they should ask to go see. So that was how the crisis began. But that's less important than the first point I want to make to you. Very limited objective, get them back in the NPT, get them to accept full scope safeguards, which includes special inspections. Even though, as they asked Blick, so you've been around since 1957, the IAEA, how many special inspections have you done? Oh, it's done. So you're the first. And they said, no, I don't think so. So this was going to be hard. As we got to talk to the North Koreans about this stuff, it was also clear that we didn't want the North Koreans to reprocess at all. In other words, we didn't want to separate plutonium from their spend fuel from this little reactor that a five megawatt reactor, a five megawatt electric, it was operating. And so stop reprocessing too. They, meaning Washington here concluded I should add that to my little list of things for North Korean performance. And of course, no enrichment, but there was no talk about enrichment. But if they accepted the North-South declaration on denuclearization, this is a deal negotiated between Pyongyang and Seoul, then there'd be no reprocessing or enrichment, there'd be no fissile material on the peninsula. So that was rolled into. It wasn't given a lot of stuff to give the North Koreans to get this. But it had a pretty thin briefing book. It said things like we could make North Korea part of the Asian economic miracle. I had no idea what that meant. Neither did they. I could also tell them that if the South Koreans agreed, they, the North Koreans, could visit American bases in South Korea and confirm with an inspection that there were no nuclear weapons there. They also looked at me quizzically, who says we wanna do that? Well, we just figured you might, and so we offered them that to you too. So there wasn't a lot going on here, but avoiding a crisis was something. And we were able to get through the New York stage of the talks, to get to the Geneva stage of the talks in the next month. And there comes the big breakthrough, which there's much disagreement over how this happened. But the short of it is, the North Koreans said they would give up their gas graphite reactors, all of them. And all of them meant one operating five megawatt reactor, one 50 megawatt reactor under construction, and one 200 megawatt reactor under construction, all gas graphite reactors, that's they moderated by graphite, wonderful plutonium production reactors for weapons, none of them necessarily connected to a grid of any kind. So these were really plutonium production reactors that would produce, our intelligence community estimated roughly 150 kilograms of plutonium each year, enough for about 30 nuclear weapons. So by the end of the decade, when these were all operating, that would be what we were looking at. So the idea was do something about that too. All right, but the North Koreans helped, they said they'd give up all this stuff. If we helped them get two modern light water reactors of the kind we built in the United States, they built in South Korea, they built all over the world. So off we went then, the negotiations went on for another year as to how that would happen. And there is a little complexity in the agreed framework about the staging, and there are three stages if you look at the framework, where in the first stage they freeze their nuclear activity, they can the spent fuel that's plutonium in it, we open liaison offices. There are things both sides do, we start removing sanctions. Second phase, they start really dismantling stuff. We start delivering real nuclear equipment for these reactors. Third phase, everything is dismantled, they have two operating 1,000 megawatt reactors. So that was kind of the deal. The wonderfulness of the deal was the best I could tell lost on Washington. Washington has not filled at least the decision makers in my field with people who spend a lot of time with nuclear energy. So when I call them very excited to tell them that North Koreans are gonna give up their gas graphite reactors, I got a so what? Well, there are two big so what. One big so what is that you can't actually get them to give up reprocessing if they've got gas graphite reactors because reprocessing of that spent fuel is integral to that fuel cycle. This is aluminum clad, you can't leave it in the water forever, you have to reprocess. Them giving it up gave us a basis for which to continue to insist that there be no reprocessing on the peninsula. So if you knew a little bit, it was a real breakthrough. And then of course the reactors were plutonium production reactors in ways that light water reactors are not. Light water reactors do produce plutonium and we can talk about that if you want. But it's a lot safer and more proliferation resistant. So the deal with the North Koreans was a little complicated. Not nearly as complicated I don't think as the Iran deal. It had the North Koreans doing things we wanted them to do. It compared to not doing a deal and looking at maybe 30 weapons a year production for the North Koreans can bear that with no production of nuclear weapons. This looked pretty good. Now, there are a couple of little asterisks here. One asterisk is that right in the middle of this when I'm gonna go off to the hill to explain the wonderfulness of the deal, the IC intelligence community comes out with a judgment I hadn't yet gone public with that North Korea more likely than not has produced one or two nuclear weapons. Well, since the whole deal was designed to stop them producing nuclear weapons for the intelligence community to announce they've already got them. Sort of took a little of the wind out of ourselves. So I needed to persuade the intelligence community to say something else that was true, which is they actually didn't know whether North Korea had nuclear weapons or not. And if they would say that, that was helpful. So that's what they said before the Congress. And in fact, at that point, we didn't know. Which comes to a second point I wanna make to you and that is if we look up at some of the slides you will notice there's a very painful slide my colleague put up and it says reasons why the agreed framework failed. I don't think the agreed framework failed. I think the policy failed. In other words, I think the framework was fine. The North Koreans cheated on it. And I think it's a fair question when did they start cheating? How did they when they did? I actually don't know the answer to that. I don't know, for example, when I was sitting opposite Congress like you or those wonderful lunches and dinners in Geneva, whether they were cheating then, I don't. I know when roughly we caught them which was in the late 90s. But I don't know when they actually were doing it. And then if you ask why they were doing it, depending on when they started, you might have one answer which puts a lot of responsibility on us and another answer was responsibility on the North. If they started late, then my theory of the negotiation which I'm now gonna share with you might still be true. My theory of the negotiation was that they were prepared to genuinely give up their nuclear weapons program which was a plutonium based program at the time. And maybe not even pursue an enrichment program if they got a relationship with the United States that made the US launching a policy of regime change entirely inappropriate. In other words, they were looking for a political settlement. They did not get a political settlement. They got frozen out right after we did the deal. And I went on to do other things. Other people did other things. Yes, we did establish Keto, the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization but we didn't really tend to the US North Korean relationship upon which I would have said the thrust of the deal was based. In other words, how is it that the North then could agree to give up nuclear weapons when now everybody seems to say it's impossible to conceive that they would give up their nuclear weapons program. Not for me. I mean, it requires in fact that they have a relationship with us and in relationship with anybody else won't do. It has to be with us. No, please don't ask, as I witnessed happen last week, the Chinese to offer security assurances to the North Koreans. That's not where I think we ought to go. So let me say one or two other things here. Actually about Japan, which I'm supposed to say something about. Japanese, you understand that this deal was bilateral. There was not six parties. It was the United States met with the North Koreans afterwards every single time we met with the North Koreans in Geneva. Afterwards, we met with a small delegation from the Republic of Korea and a small delegation from Japan that were then in residence in Geneva. And I debrief them on what had happened during the day. I would say very often those sessions of debriefing were very difficult with the representatives from the Republic of Korea, who were suspicious that we Americans were selling them out. And if you remember, that was a theme for the president of South Korea at the time, which made things difficult for us. The only person who really enjoyed the way the South Koreans were torturing those of us who were doing negotiations with the North Koreans, who would not hesitate to pull my string when we got into a meeting about how our allies were commenting on all this. So I understood that because we were negotiating over something which is vital to South Korea's security. So it is not at all inappropriate. I didn't think it was inappropriate that they should be deeply interested in this. Similarly with Japan, but the Japanese, by my recollection, would put it this way, much more relaxed about the negotiations than the South Koreans. The one point where they were not relaxed came when the North Koreans asked for an assurance if what they were really getting out of this whole deal to give up their nuclear weapons program was light-water reactors. They wanted an assurance from the United States of America that if, for reasons not their fault, those reactors were not delivered by whatever international consortium we might create, the United States of America would commit to building those reactors. So I brought that back to Washington where they laughed heartily and that we want us to make the president, and I said, yes, I need that. I need the president to write something. Well, so it turns out, as you may know, the United States Congress appropriates money, not the president of the United States. So the president, he was advised, could write something like this, but it was a many contingent actually for execution on the Congress actually voting the money. Still, the willingness of the president to do this depended upon us having, if you will, a financial plan for how this would be paid for. And as it turned out, everybody wanted to build these reactors in North Korea. The Russians did, the Germans did, everybody. Nobody wanted to pay for them. So the South Koreans said they would, I think the phrase used was, pay for the lion's share, but they wanted some help from Tokyo. We said, because we're just really nice people, we'll pay for the heavy fuel oil. We almost couldn't do it. So then I was off to Tokyo to get the Japanese to fill in whatever's left after the lion provides his share. And that was very, very uncomfortable. And the Japanese, senior Japanese diplomat who was present for that, has actually said at a forum, much like this over at SICE, that I was beyond rude in pressing Japan to come up with this commitment. And he was absolutely right. I was panicked because if I couldn't get the Japanese to pay their part, I couldn't get the South Koreans to pay their part. And then I couldn't get the president to sign the letter, which I needed to give the conflict to. So, eventually, rudeness paid off. And I got a deal that putting those things together and off we went. But that little bit of diplomacy, if that's what it was, stands out as a little bit unusual. So I'm gonna wrap up and say that it's never, the modality for these talks has never been particularly important in my mind, provided consultations are closed and continuing. In other words, when you have the six-party talks, there are 100 people in the room. Not much gets done. It gets done on the side. So if you have bilateral talks between the US and North Korea, as long as the consultations with our allies actually occur, and of course, when consults with China as well, I think that will work. I think second, that the deals, the Iran deal and the North Korean deal are political deals. They got a lot of technical bells and whistles on them, for sure, but they're political. And if the governments don't take proper care to mine the politics, which I don't think we did in the mid-90s after the agreed framework was negotiated, and I pray that there's an implementation team that's gonna stay on the case with respect to Iran, there will be trouble, because always both sides expect, even though there's a declaratory position on the Iran deal that they're not looking for a broader political settlement, they are looking for political performance, and certainly on the US side, we are. We need to be careful of that. Thank you. Thank you very much, Bob. Appreciate that. It's a very interesting and useful story. It fills in a lot for us. I asked George if he'd be willing to be a discussant to kind of add some of his thoughts on this particular, on the agreed framework, and then maybe bridge us a little bit into some of the issues we're dealing with today. Thanks, Jim. I think the two presentations we just heard were really good, so let me just be brief and say that I think there's a lot of value in thinking and talking about the agreed framework in relation to the Iran nuclear. I don't think we'd be having this discussion if it was just a retrospective on the agreed framework. We'll be talking about the DPRK challenge that we face today. But there is this thing to compare it to, which is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and it is worthwhile because throughout the run-up, throughout the negotiation of the Iran deal and then afterwards, a lot of people brought up the DPRK experience and usually negatively. This will never work. You are fools, et cetera. So I think having this discussion remains a useful thing. I had written a paper last year that's out on the table that kind of tried to talk about similarities and differences between the agreed framework and what was looking to be an agreement with Iran. And so I don't want to go through all those other than to say, and you heard it in a sense and Dr. Akiyama has a very good slide, I think it summarizes a lot of the differences, but also in Bob's presentation, there are a lot of differences in the deals themselves and the text and the length and the detail and so on. There are a lot of differences between the two countries, between the DPRK and Iran and to me that's the most important thing and we can elaborate on it, but their sense of identity, their sense of confidence, their sense of where they stand in their region, where they stand in the world, the natures of their polities that in Iran kind of people's expectations and demands really matter. Iran has elections, Suzanne Maloney's here who's an expert on these things, but they have elections at different levels but the presidential elections always end in a surprise, which is kind of interesting when you think about the elections that the DPRK has, for example, or China or Russia or other places, even though Iran's like a terrible dictatorship in U.S. discourse, they, politics matter there and public opinion matters and that had an influence on, I think their willingness to negotiate and also has an influence on how this plays through. I think the U.S. is different now than it was in 1994, but also very similar in ways that I want to elaborate on because this is a big problem in U.S. discourse and maybe somewhat in Tokyo as well, we tend to focus on the bad guy, the people that had the nuclear program that was the problem, whether it was the DPRK or Iran, and we don't focus that much on the reliability of the U.S. as the lead negotiator and on its capacity, but more importantly, its willingness over time to fulfill its obligations and these are relatively long-term commitments. Anything that's a major nuclear problem will have some long-term implications. Bob talked about the agreed framework. I mean, what the North Koreans had to dismantle could be dismantled relatively quickly, but then there was gonna be ongoing verification and monitoring, but the construction of reactors, which was part of the deal, no matter what the vendor tells you, it's gonna probably double it. And so that's inevitably a longer-term process and with the Iran deal, I mean, its terms itself, the meaty ones go between 10 and 15 years, but then a lot of the verification is 20 and 25 years and some of Iran's commitments are indefinite and then there are parts that we have to deliver that are over that long period of time and that to me is that needs to be understood and then assessed more honestly in the US than we tend to do, which is, again, the reliability of the US system in delivering what is supposed to be promised and so we've already alluded to with the agreed framework, the fuel oil. What a struggle that was to get Congress to appropriate funds for the fuel oil and I remember Bob used to run around and not quite frantically, but desperately trying to do this and it was quite unbecoming, actually, of at that time the world's sole superpower that one had to do it this way. Then there was a relatively undefined process of normalization, but if that had been defined and you'd actually started to deliver on it, the S-storms in Washington over what that would have entailed and what that would have meant would have been enormous and you can go on in terms of questioning whether and how long we would have implemented these terms and along the way what the other party is supposed to be interpreting about kind of whether they should keep complying or whether they should start, Tedrick. Well, I think the same thing goes on in Iranian minds and for very good reason and it has been forefront there. Will the US deliver? And so that's one of the reasons Iran insisted on getting sanctions relief up front. They wanted to have a payoff, obviously, which they're not quite getting in the way they thought they were, but they also wanted to test the US's commitment and there are lots of reasons to question whether we will be able to sustain that kind of commitment through, I'm sure we will through the presidential campaign, whether we will, after the result of the campaign, I don't know and we don't know what the new Congress is gonna look like and like I say, I hope I'll be retired, I might be dead by the time the JCPOA kind of expires or doesn't expire, it comes to its culmination, but who can predict what the American body politic is gonna be like, but there's still deliverables in there and so if you're the counterpart, this is a big issue and it's something we don't pay enough attention to. I see it on other issues, whether it's cyber norms and you go to other countries and they say, well, we would need it in a treaty and you say why and they say because we don't think the US's commitments are worth anything, we watch what happens in Congress and we want it in a treaty and I laugh and say, why do you want it in a treaty because we just tear up the treaty too and they say, yeah, but it's harder to do with a treaty and then they point to, well, but you can abrogate them or anything else and then you have to apologize and say, well, there are no more treaties because no one can get 67 votes to ratify a treaty on anything so you're gonna have to take an executive agreement and this becomes very difficult and we've seen it on climate change recently, other things and so the vignettes that Bob was talking about just a short slice in time on the DPRK deal, will we having these stories about implementation of the Iran agreement as well and then that relates to alliance relations too so our allies are wondering about our constancy as well as wondering about Iran and trying to figure out what it means for them in five years and 10 years and we were talking earlier and Tanaka-san was talking about Japanese banks because there's a problem now with the Iran deal which is even though sanctions are supposed to be relieved, a lot of actors, private entities and other around the world aren't seeking business in Iran because they're worried about either how the thing will be interpreted or whether there'll be new sanctions imposed by Congress and no one wants to get in trouble and the cost of compliance is too high so they just say forget it, we'll stay out of the Iranian market. From Iran's point of view, this is not a violation of the agreement, it feels like a betrayal. Well, the capacity of your banks and your other actors to make this judgment depends somewhat on the sense of constancy and kind of reliability of the political process but if you're advising one of those banks, yeah go now and don't worry about the presidential election or what might happen next January, nothing will change. You can't make that but has effects on the behaviors. Thank you George. Well, I'm gonna facilitate a little discussion up here and maybe around 315, open it up to public question but I wanna start off with this issue of, maybe this goes to Bob a little bit but when I started researching for this event, the impression I had was that we took a tougher line, a firmer line in terms of what we were willing to allow vis-a-vis reprocessing or other kinds of elements of a North Korean nuclear capability with North Korea than we did with Iran whereas in the case of Iran we're now kind of talking about just widening this gap or opening up a longer time horizon by which Iran could potentially pursue a weaponized program or at least we'd have greater visibility into this process but we were out of complete verifiable disarmament in the context of Korea but listening to your discussion, it sounds like in the beginning at least it wasn't necessary. The North Koreans were kind of willing to offer it that it was really in the context of the follow-on implementation and the political side so I guess I wanted to, is that fair to say that we almost didn't have to be or you didn't have the debates about how firm or how principled the agreement had to be or was there an element of that in terms of? I think it was a simpler time and this was the first time we'd actually done something like this and they had never done anything like this and I think at base then was the key question that's at base now when people talk about our policy on North Korea and we just experienced that in the other room if I ask for a show of hands here how many people think the North Koreans will actually under any circumstances give up their nuclear weapons in some sort of omnibus deal? How many think they would? One, two, three people. Well, okay, I rest my case. At that point there was a lot of skepticism surrounding the intelligence community. The person, the guy who headed the intelligence the I see that particularly. But I believe then that we could do a deal and there was some talk by the way that we could do this deal provided the deal was based on the assumption that the regime would collapse before too long. And I kept saying that wait a minute we're not doing the deal on that basis and even I can say the reason I can't Senator McCain from my great respect said I hate this deal but I can support it if you told me that that was the basis for the deal that it was gonna be in place until the regime collapse. I said that's not the basis for the deal. That's not how we did it. He said then I hate it and I won't support it. So I think we could be in the same situation now it's just that the predictions of the demise of North Korea are constant and remember the soft landing, hard landing but the North Koreans and then plan on landing they were just gonna keep flying. So I think the deal then was really based upon for both of us the idea that they would give up their nuclear weapons program. It is possible it wasn't for them. In other words, I confessed to you before I don't know when they started their negotiations with the Pakistanis with that Johnny Appleseed guy HQ Khan HQ Khan but if we knew for sure that was the only basis on which they did the deal then would say well okay they never plan to give it up but I don't know that. So for me, this is still a deal that went to fundamentally our objectives which were pretty simple and then we made them a little more complicated by insisting that there be no reprocessing and we say no enrichment although you can't find the word enrichment in the agreed framework because we refer to the North-South declaration on denuclearization which prohibits enrichment with great malice of forethought we did not write it into the deal. Just we figured that was gonna open up another three years of discussion if we did that. Anyway. No thank you. And Akiyama-sensei let me direct this a little bit to you but anyone can comment on it. I mean, missiles for example were not, we had separate negotiations with the North Koreans on their missile capability or their program and that was not specifically linked to the agreed framework. There are other aspects of the deal I guess I wanted to ask you to think back to that time and from Tokyo's perspective was Tokyo looking at this as kind of unsatisfactory? It didn't go far enough because it didn't capture all these different pieces or was there general satisfaction with the content, the accomplishment? It was just this idea afterwards of the fact that then Japan got recruited into being a part of Kido and eventually putting forward about half a billion dollars I think ultimately is what they were in for. I think the South Koreans put in about a billion or so toward the program. But how do you recollect the view from Tokyo at the time especially in this context of what was in and what was outside of the deal? Yes, obviously I'm out of government so I didn't have a kind of insider information so my observation is from outside but the actually Tokyo's condition for the putting money into the Kido was to address the issue of abduction by the other framework of the deal. So and I think that binds me of the prioritization within the Japanese government on dealing with North Korea. So the threats, nuclear threats posed by North Korea at that time was not really imminent. There was no proof of the credible weaponization capability in North Korea and there is no sort of a sense of urgency I think in the side of Japan. But an abduction issue, I think that was a commitment by the government at that time to deal with. So I think when the Japanese government at that time and also I would like to remind that the Japanese government, LDP, was very fragile politically at that time. So I think they need to sort of mobilize various issues to boost the sport. And then of course abduction issue is so much of a consensus among the public. So I think, so it's domestic political context that were prevented Japanese government from sort of dealing with the nuclear non-prol refreshments of the top priority. So that's one thing. Then may I ask actually one question to Dr. Kaluchi. So when you, in your analysis, what would be the real key problem for North Korea not sort of complying with the sort of not implementing the agreed framework? Either the failure of delivery of heavy oil or fuel oil, or the failure of providing the security guarantee? So if someone wished to correct me in both answers, but we didn't fail to deliver the heavy fuel. We failed to deliver it on the schedule that we said we would deliver it on, the schedule that was provided. And we just didn't do it because as George points out, I was running around with my hand trying to get money from various places in our budget to pay for this heavy fuel oil. Hard work and so we didn't meet the schedule. But I don't think the deal would have failed because we weren't delivering heavy fuel oil quickly enough. On the other issue about security assurances, if you look at the agreed framework, it says we will offer essentially negative security assurances. And what we had in mind was something like the NPT negative security assurance. Maybe moderated it a little bit. After all, if you go back in time, we had just lived with Ukraine and we had in mind something like that. But we never got there. They never said we're the security assurance. So I wasn't gonna run up and say, hey, you know, you guys, we still owe you a security assurance. So we never did that. And I don't remember it as an issue. I think we would have tried to stay away from the Ukraine language and stick to the NPT language would be my guess. I actually- Not that the Ukraine language has worked that well for the Ukrainians, which I'm saying the policy is correct, but if you're drawing implications from this, even that language- I got you, I got you. But it is not us that should be whacked for the Ukraine language, right? It would be the Russians. So I thought you were gonna say, you know, were they unhappy about the delivery of the LWR? Cause that was also going more slowly. Probably true. But I can't imagine that the fundamental North Korean decision to material, from my perspective, materially breach, materially violate the framework was because of either of those. I think it was because they never intended to give up the weapons program A or B, because they were, they did intend to, but they expected much more politically from us that they never got. I like to believe in B because hope springs eternal. And if we take that to today, where we are with North Korea, with all the water that's flowed under the bridge and the skepticism that has built up, the advancement of the program, but if I can ask all of you to think a little bit, if we were to try to enter into a discussion with the North Koreans about denuclearization or somehow alleviating the risk or the threat from the program. In the Iranian case, it arguably they had not gotten as far as North Korea is now. But in the most recent IEA declaration about past activities, one could argue that they were relatively forgiving or at least did not demand detailed accounting of, or one criticism I've read about the program is that they have not accounted for all activity up to date. That they're primarily focused on looking forward on again, as I mentioned, creating this wider gap and trying to relieve the pressure on this issue. If we were to take a similar approach with North Korea and say, you know what? We're gonna be more forgiving on everything that's taken place to date, but we're gonna really eliminate the program now and the means by which it could develop more nuclear weapons, et cetera. I'm not necessarily advocating that, but is there an opportunity there or are we just so far gone with the North Korean program or where the regime is today that there's real no opportunity to do that? My sense is that part of your scenario, Jim, is what the agreed framework did. In other words, in 92 and between 92 and 94, there was this tension. So the IAEA and Ampliferation Purists were saying, they have to allow the inspections and do all these things to fully account for what they had done in the past and part of the spirit anyway of the agreed framework is, yeah, it'll be great to get to that, but the really vital thing is first, let's stop it from going forward. And so in a sense, the logic that you were talking about already was tried with the North Koreans once. With Iran, it's a bit more complicated in so far as there are those who would argue past is the past and let's not let that trip up implementation of the deal and so on. But there still are over the years of head moments where the IAEA has to offer its conclusion about Iran's program and whether it's purely peaceful in order to provide some of the deliverables to Iran. And if the IAEA can't get the answers to those questions, it will have a much more difficult time making its conclusion. So that story hasn't been fundamentally. So imagine this with me. The reality right now is this. I'm making this up, but reality is as follows. North Korea has 12 fabricated nuclear weapons, 12. It has a stockpile of fissile material that is composed of 30 kilograms of plutonium and 50 kilograms of highly restrained, okay, right? 12, 30, 50. Let's say that's reality. We don't know that though. The North Koreans know that. Could you do a deal in which the North Koreans say we will end our nuclear weapons program? So there'll be no reprocessing plants. There'll be no plutonium production reactors, reactors unconnected to a grid. There'll be no uranium enrichment facilities. None, not only not producing highly restrained, but they have no need for that right now. So no enrichment facilities. They commit to no fissile material, so in the future we separate plutonium, not in the future produce highly restrained. And they turn in their nuclear weapons and their fissile material, and they give us six nuclear weapons and a bunch of plutonium and highly restrained, but not all of it. Now, we don't know that they only gave us a portion of their stocks, but we certainly can monitor the programmatic. Is that a deal you would take? Well, since I don't know they're lying, yeah, would I ever be able to verify down to single digit nuclear weapons hidden someplace in North Korea? Not a chance. What about the fissile material? Not a chance. We're talking about something that would fit in your hope chest. So there's your deal. To me, makes perfect sense. And then, well, please, you wanna react to this? Cause I have a final question for you before I open it up. It's quick, the kind of footnote. I think Dr. Gallegi's talk reminds me of the thoroughness and completeness of the verification, which is almost mission impossible. So then, if the perfect verification is impossible, then should we give up the objective of sort of a threat reduction? Probably no. And I think we have to cover up the lack of the thoroughness by some sort of political measures to build the confidence. And I think if we are able to buy 10 years, and I think 10 years for the confidence building and reduce the threat by the political means. But for that, maybe we may have to make a compromise on the outside in terms of the goal which we have to achieve. So that would be 100% denuclearization. But it's some elements, but still with a sort of security assurance that we have to provide. In return, we have to get more sort of a thorough acceptance of, for example, the safeguards arrangement with IAEA, including arrangement of additional protocol implementation and so forth. Well, this fits into the last question I wanted to ask you because you had talked about in the context of the agreed framework in the 1990s that the perception from Tokyo was that the perceived threat from North Korean nuclear weapons was relatively low, at least on a scale of other issues between the two countries. That's much higher now today. And between the missiles and the nuclear weapons, et cetera, is the threshold from Tokyo now different than the threshold in Washington? Are we in a potential situation? We have to be careful of in the alliance where maybe Washington may become willing to accept something that would be now unacceptable from a just a purely security threat perspective. Thank you. I think that my answer is contrary to what I said I've said just a moment ago. The thing is, at this moment, I think the threat perception on the nuclear capability in North Korea is much higher in the past. And that is kind of a common perception within a security community. But I think the problem is a gap of the perception between the public and the security community. And public perception is most still dominated by the issue of abduction. So I think that would make, so the policy makers are more willing to work on and even probably much harder line from the past or even the United States. But I think the political environment may not allow to do it for the government to pursue this crime. No, thank you. Well, let me give people in the audience a chance to ask our panel some questions about North Korea and North Korea's relation with Iran and the two countries. And we'll start here with this one. We have a microphone that'll come to you. Just let us know for the sake of the video, who you are, where you're from Stephanie Cook with Nuclear Intelligence Weekly. I had two sort of slightly separate questions or comments. And one is, it seems to me I'm really interested with what Bob said about North Korea at some point sort of crossed over a line and either it was always intending to or something happened inside the regime and it crossed over. And Iran as far as we know may have not gone that far. And if you get a deal and it works before that point occurs, I mean, have you kept them on the sort of safe side of this equation? And if you don't, as obviously happened in the case of North Korea, has it gone too far? I mean, are they now and should they be sitting around a disarmament table rather than a non-proliferation in a non-proliferation context and negotiation? It's just, I just wanted to ask you that because I think once a weapons program takes hold, it's like a virus and it's the military side of the government has basically won over the nuclear establishment or is in control of the nuclear establishment. It's very hard to go back from that point. The second question I wanted to ask is especially the view from Japan about the statement by Donald Trump that he thinks we should let South Korea and Japan go nuclear and that we shouldn't pay for the military shield and if there's any relationship between that and US pressure, you know, more public statements about Japan's reprocessing program. Should we take the first one first? I may not be right on point for your first question, but I would say that Iran had a well-developed nuclear weapons development program. All the pieces that we know have to go into a program for the, to get the fissile material to get a triggering package to do the work, to develop that triggering package to get it to participate in delivery systems. I mean, they had a program to do all that and the best of our knowledge, they didn't get the fissile material and they may or may not have done enough of the other stuff. Matter of fact, at one point, the IC, as you undoubtedly know, concluded that they had stopped doing the other stuff, but I don't know whether they concluded they stopped because they concluded they were done or they were stopping because they wanted the impact or whatever. But it's a real nuclear weapons program and it seems now to be in cryogenic arrest for some period of time. The North Korean, I mean, I don't know where the Iranian program is, but if it is where in the public literature says it is, then we have stopped them short of. I think we had stopped the North Koreans short of because I don't think they actually had. I think the IC was wrong by saying it was more likely than not they had won or possibly two nuclear weapons. I think that was wrong in 1994. Obviously though, after we discovered that it was part of an axis of evil, they went ahead with their program and produced fissile material and nuclear weapons. So different circumstances, different timing and if we had to do a deal now, you'd have to be dealing with fabricated nuclear weapons, which is why I put that funny scenario on the table just to try to persuade some of you that you shouldn't walk away from this one because you can't figure out how to verify it. I mean, you adjust your standards. That's a great line from General Krulak when he was testifying and the Marines started to accept draft ease in Vietnam and they asked to come down to Marine Corps, are you lowering your standards to accept draft ease? And Krulak said, the United States Marine Corps will never lower its standards. However, we no longer meet them. Now, I'm of the same view here. I don't want to lower our standards, but I think you're gonna just have to change things around a little bit and take account of reality. George, do you have any? No. Before we get to the Trump part of the question and the Japan piece, I have to say my own piece that I think Donald Trump fails to understand the fact that how much Japan already contributes to the alliance over there and that it would actually probably cost the United States more to bring them back from Japan than to leave them deployed there. Not to mention the disadvantages of having nuclear proliferation in the region, but Akayama Sensei, do you want to talk about how this is being viewed over in Tokyo? Can I interrupt you for a second? I want you to know, James, that I would pay my own money to listen to you explain that to Trump. I think that would be it. That could be a new reality TV show. There's Shark Tank and now there's some kind of a version there of important think tank, that'll be it. All right, thank you. I sort of expected that I would get this kind of question. Of course, we are very much embarrassed to hear that the potential president of the United States sort of encouraged us to think about nuclear option. Two reasons. One, the mainstream security community people understood, understand that the nuclear option is not the best option for Japan to defend ourselves. The secondly, the US Japan alliance is beyond the defense of Japan itself, but more about kind of playing a role as a public goods for the stability of the East Asia and beyond. So our sort of gut feeling about his statement is the United States really giving up the world leadership position. Because if that policy really happens, I think naturally that lead into the United States in the position of losing the position against China, against Russia, and then that undermines what he tried to pursue in a strong United States. But then what about the implication on Japan's choice on the fuel cycle? I think there is no really strong connection between two. And also, but one thing I could say is if the history of US Japan relationship over Japan's fuel cycle program is from Japanese perspective, the history of getting the freedom of policy choice from the United States. If you look at the details of negotiation in the 70s and 80s, the negotiation between Japan and United States kind of harsh. It's not like something between the allies, but more about kind of the, not like North Korea and the United States, but this is similar tension I think between two countries. So Japan really hopes that the United States respect Japan's own decision. And if United States put the silver explicit pressure on Japan, which it would make much harder for the Japanese side to decide on the nuclear fuel cycle. So I think this issue must be addressing in a very quiet fashion. I have some other questions here. I'll go to this gentleman and then over there. The question is- Can you let us know who you are, sir? I represent advanced hospitality. Nothing to do with the nuclear weapons or this thing, but I'm a student of history. And question is especially Robert Delucci is here who has perspective of history. Isn't it because of their own parent security reasons that they built bombs? It happened in Israel's case. Happened in Iran recently. Doing that. It happened in India a couple of years back in six. Happened in Pakistan's case. Comfortable. First, that's what prompted it. It happened in South Africa. At the program, it was in Brazil many years back. Which a couple of years back. Isn't it because of that? And the question is to Robert because he has more perspective of that. Historical perspective of people. Older, older. Yeah, older, yeah. Let's give it to the old guy. I heard you say let's give it to the old guy. I heard you say that. No, no. No, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I hear that from my kids all the time. So as you probably know, they're in academia, there's a huge, well, there's quite a lot of literature about why countries acquire nuclear weapons and they have, they build models and they talk about other reasons. The dominant explanation is the one you put forward. That these decisions are driven by a perception that security will be enhanced. The country's security will be enhanced by the acquisition of nuclear weapons. The India case, particularly the first test in 94, very hard to make that a security argument. Particularly because they didn't do anything after the test. This guy forgets more on a daily basis about India than I will ever know on the nuclear issue. But there, so there are other factors that go to prestige, internal issues, bureaucratic issues. But I think fundamentally you're right. That for most of these countries is a security issue. Not so much Brazil and Argentina, by the way. I don't think, but certainly Pakistan is looking at a asymmetric conventional force balance. North Korea, as the North Koreans told me in the first week of negotiations, we need these nuclear weapons because we saw what you could do in Iraq, regime change. This was before Iraq too. This was just Iraq one, but they were stunned by what we had done. And certainly true for Israel, who was looking at the Soviet Union at the time. But having said that, one of the questions that popped into my mind is, when you say what you said, I want to say yeah, and what does that mean? Yes, most often it is security driven, but it doesn't mean there's no replacement for that. It doesn't mean that there aren't other ways of meeting a state's security needs. That's what we thought we were doing in the case of North Korea. And in other cases, it wasn't security. I would say that certainly with South Korea, we had an alliance and we were able to use the alliance to lever the South Koreans away from a nuclear weapons program. Similarly with Taiwan, there wasn't a formal alliance. It was good enough to persuade them that they didn't want to do that. So the US extended deterrent, very important to countries making a calculation about whether they get nuclear weapons or not. In some cases, we won't extend the deterrent. Pakistan asked us explicitly, would you extend the deterrent? And we said no, right? So it differs from case to case. I just would discourage you from thinking that once you have settled on the reason for our countries wanting to acquire nuclear weapons, then you have an irresistible force. I don't think so. This is Peng Hui Zhang from People Daily. I have two questions actually. The first one is, United States and China worked closely to get a nuclear deal with Iran. And on the North Korea issue, do you think that the two nations will work together to take more actions to pull back North Korea to negotiation table? Like to restarted six party talks. And my second question is, which is sovereign nations and non-state actors? Which one can cause more threat to international nuclear security? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I think I'm gonna respond to the first question on how the United States and China work together for bringing North Korea back into the negotiation. I think the key, in my view, is to what extent China is able to implement the sanctions scheme. And in particular, in the past, the North Korea has been relying on any supplied important items, including oil from China. And I don't think it's wise to stop the supply of China from supply of oil from China because it may lead into the collapse of the regime. But still, some supplies from China prolong the sort of life of the regime. So, but as long as this supply continues, then they are able to manage the situation. But so, I think if possible at all, we may want to further strengthen kind of a crippling sanction, which was posed against the Iran and tightening the supply into the other party leaders and the military branches of the North Korea, if possible. But I think it would be very difficult in the case of Iran. But in any case, if China is serious about bringing the North Korea back into the negotiation, I think the key, China is a key player in my view. Ed Sheppin, yeah, go ahead, please. On the which is a greater threat, non-state actors or state actors, my answer is state actors because for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is the material that terrorists would need in order to make nuclear weapons is produced by states and in the possession of states as far as we know. And all likely, that's what would be feasible only. So it'll be states that will either make mistakes or not have the right policies or not implement those policies that would enable the terrorists to get a nuclear explosive in the first place. And then there are all the other things that state proliferation does as well. I have a question in the back. Hi, my name is Michael Bakula. I'm a research intern at the East West Center. And my question is about how does Kim Jong-un's succession in North Korea play into how North Korea sees its nuclear weapons? The example that comes to mind is that they claim to have had nuclear weapons before Kim Jong-il died. So therefore, from their perspective, this is a legacy of Kim Jong-il and thus giving up nuclear weapons would be tantamount to reneging on his legacy. So when you say the succession, you mean to Kim Jong-un, not necessarily thinking of the next? I wish that was all we had to worry about. I mean, I understand the question, I think, but I wouldn't be surprised not withstanding the worship that exists and the DPRK for the Kim dynasty, that if they decided it was in their interest, if the youngest now, Kim Jong-un, decided it was in his interest, personally in the regime's interest, it would find a way to reconcile that with the policy of his father. And by the way, he was behind, we thought, every bit of the negotiations in 1994, much more so than Kim Jong-un, that the real hand back there was Kim Jong-il. And yeah, and I would tend to agree. I mean, if you really wanted to, Kim Jong-un could go back to Kim Jong-un and kind of use some of his statements where he was focused on a denuclearized North Korean peninsula and there are ways to rationalize that, I think, if he wanted to. Okay, I have time for just a couple more questions, but I'll take, yeah, we'll take a couple together. This is for Robert Gallucci. Can I just know who you are? I'm Samira Daniels. I am very curious as to what maybe one or two main reason, I, you... Okay, so, and then, I'm sorry. Well, I'm sorry, we're gonna collect the last two. Get Peter up here. And then Peter Sharpe and MITRE Corporation. Primarily for Bob Gallucci. You were talking as if the country's concern were unitary actors. And I don't know about North Korea, but I know about the United States and I have my fair amount of information about Iran. They're not at all unitary actors. You could describe the deal struck with Iran as a deal struck between a government under siege in Washington and another government under siege in Tehran. In each case, being beaten up by people who didn't want to see an agreement at all. And in each case, beaten up by people who saw the agreement as the precursor of a wider political agreement that they would detest. And I imagine that at the time the agreed framework was negotiated, there were suspicions in Pyongyang that the United States didn't really mean what it was saying, that you meant what you were saying, but that you didn't really have the backing US political system. So don't we need to evaluate the possibilities of reaching agreements and the possibilities that the agreements will stick in terms of a multiplicity of actors in each of the country's concern? Naoko Aoki, University of Maryland. I have a question for Professor Galuchi. You said earlier that North Korea may have been willing to give up its nuclear programs had there been a political settlement. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Or do you mean something outside of the literal deal? Thank you. Okay. Okay, so I've got three questions. What was I thinking? When I proposed that little scenario where the North Koreans held on to a few nuclear weapons and some fissile material in a box. I was, what I was trying to do was ask you all to think about the real world, because if you make a deal with North Korea and it's comprehensive, what is that? CVID, whatever, it's comprehensive. We're gonna get everything. And they say we're gonna get everything. I'm just being realistic, how do you know? Are you really gonna find out? I mean, right now, do you think they've built nuclear weapons? I do. Do you think they have fissile material they haven't actually put in weapons? I do. Do you think if we make a deal and they commit to giving everything, they'll give everything? I don't. So, when I think about that, there's good news here. Good news is you can't verify to that level. So you don't say you are. They get to have this little insurance, right? We say we've got a comprehensive deal, and we do. So all I'm trying to do is take the reality of the situation and point out some of the benefits of it, which is you can do a deal. The second question, Peter's question, was the Unitary Actors. I did a PhD, which the proposition was bureaucratic politics in the Vietnam War. So I'm all into that, right? Over the top in that. I think it's interesting when you put it, put the bureaucratic politics model on top of nuclear deals. All I can think of is our country. I mean, because I know our country much better than those countries. And we can't, and maybe the situation has changed, but when I was last in government, which was a long time ago, we couldn't have done a bureaucratic map of North Korea. I mean, just, I mean, well, we'd say there was military, we'd say there were some bureaucrats, there was a party, but I mean, no texture. It was not like talking about France or something else. So Iran, we probably got more texture, but I'm not sure how good we are on Iran. But with us, I'm very sympathetic to anyone negotiating with us and wondering about what the executive branch can accomplish, given the nature of American politics these days. I think you've got a very good point. And the person who's gonna go and do the negotiation had better have some talking points on that, or he's gonna be staring for a while. So it's hard. It came up specifically in the case of, which I talked about, in the case of the assurance that came from the president. I didn't have to tell them that the president was happy to sign this because he actually couldn't deliver on it. They knew that. They knew that it depended on the Congress, but okay, we'll take the president's signature anyway. It's not worth nothing. Thank you very much. So I think other countries are aware and we ought to be, but the only thing I would do as a safety tip to you, Peter, is say, this is far more demanding on the intelligence community than what the intelligence community very often produces. That kind of political texture is often not there. They might be wonderful on technical issues and not so good on political issues. And the last question was, I can't read my writing, political, what was the last question? Begin. Yes, okay, so I didn't mean much to, by that other than, very soon after we did the deal in 1994, we were supposed to go and open liaison offices. We had the North Koreans here looking around the property. They got lost in Victoria's Secret. There were all kinds of things happening, right? We said that we were gonna take the East German, which was now just German, and that made them unhappy because we wouldn't be paying a lot of money for that. There was a little question. And South Koreans were less than perfectly happy about us doing this before they had their elections. And so, but that was one manifestation of a political settlement. The opening of liaison offices and we had blocked off foreign service officers to go and step, it never happened. That's one thing that just never happened. They thought cultural exchange was any offering. And immediately, we got this proposal for this synchronized dancing group of young girls to come to the United States of America. And they brought it to me because I was still doing North Korea. I hadn't gone to Bosnia yet. And I said, are you crazy? I mean, they'll bring these girls. They'll be in the Kennedy Center stage. They'll all be 12 years old and they'll move as one. And we're gonna ask, how did that happen? You did a deal with this country that takes young girls and puts them in this straight, I mean, all I could see was, since there was no human rights component to the deal, there was nothing like that. We were in for a world of hurt here because this is not a nice country. And it's not a nice regime. And I worried about everything falling apart. We had no kind of political basis or engagement with them. I think that they thought that there would be a political relationship with the United States that would make it impossible for the United States to launch regime change. Now, there'd be something like normal. They kept talking about we could do investment. They kept saying in North Korea, they kept saying that, you know, you don't have to remove your troops. You know, troops are okay. So they had an image of a relationship with us, which nobody that I could find in Washington had as well. So I think they were grossly disappointed. It's not that we didn't abide. It's not like a material breach. It's not like what they did. I'm not equating this, but I think they expected more than they got. Patience, yes, indeed. George, any final thoughts? Okay, I just wanted to ask you a quick question on this issue of kind of unitary actors or the bureaucratic model. In the alliance context, when Japan is managing this with the United States, for example, you have the North American Bureau, which is working with the relationship and working with the Ministry of Defense, et cetera, but you have the Asian Bureau that's working on North Korea and the abduction issue and these issues. Now we have a different context vis-a-vis Iran and a whole new set of bureaucratic actors. How is that kind of managed within? Is there tension within the interagency system on the Japan side in that context of alliance management or not too bad? Sure. Like other democratic countries, Japan always suffers from the kind of bureaucratic politics. And for example, in the case of the dealings with Iran, there has been always a conflict of interest between the bureaus or agencies which promote the relationship with Iran in the context of energy security, in the context of business, and those who are trying to strengthen the alliance and then try to further tighten the pressure on Iran. For example, in the case of the Azaragan oil field in Iran, with which Japan held the rights for the exploration, there was a kind of a battle between United States and Japan but within the Japanese government. The METI was trying to retain the possibility of the exploration rights in Azaragan oil field but eventually they followed the decision by the foreign ministry and maybe at a much higher political level to respect the U.S. Japan alliance. But then now, after the JCPO was in place, then when the sanctions lifted, the sum of the sectors rushing into Iran. And so it's always difficulty in Japanese political apparatus to balance the interest of alliance and its own interests in particular economy. Thank you. And we're gonna have an opportunity to get even more deeply involved in the Iranian issue in our next session. We're gonna take a break right now until four o'clock, right? If I'm correct, four o'clock. And, but now please join me in thanking Akema Sensei, Bob Dulucci, George Parkevich for our presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you guys. Thank you guys. I hope you feel better. Yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you very much.