WASHINGTON – While the musicians of New York Philharmonic were packing their tuxedos to return home from their much-publicized performance in North Korea last month, Hoosier Keith Luse was loading his luggage for a less-glitzy journey.
Instead of an ornate orchestra hall, Luse was heading to a nuclear weapons plant with rusting pipes, cracked concrete, radioactive material piled in plastic bags and a skeptical staff.
Since the plutonium reprocessing facility was built two decades ago, Luse said, the workers’ “lives have been dedicated to developing weapons to be used in the next war with the United States, in their minds.”
But now teams of Americans are there to oversee the dismantling of it, and Luse was on a mission to see firsthand how the project is being carried out so he could report to his boss, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.
Dismantling the nuclear facility in Yongbyon is part of an agreement between North Korea and five other countries. The government in Pyongyang promised to abandon all its nuclear weapons and programs in exchange for financial aid, lifting trade bans and removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.
It was Luse’s fifth trip as Lugar’s eyes and ears in a country where few Westerners are free to visit. Any Americans permitted into the state-run society are assigned a “minder” who stays close by and keeps close tabs on their movements and conversations.
It’s not that official reports from the Bush administration’s diplomats aren’t accurate, said Lugar, the senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee and one of the country’s foremost advocates for programs that help countries dismantle their nuclear weapons programs and reassign their nuclear scientists to peaceful projects. But someone who does not have an official role in the negotiations does not have to function within the limits of that role, he said.
Luse, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, has worked for Lugar off and on for 30 years.
“They call it track two diplomacy,” said scientist Sigfried Hecker, who was with Luse on the trip. “It’s a way of keeping the dialogue and the connections going while the governments are typically at odds and not talking to each other.”
Hecker, a nuclear expert and professor at Stanford University, formerly headed the Los Alamos National Laboratory and has visited North Korea five times as an independent observer.
North Korea – one of the countries President Bush labeled as part of the “axis of evil” – has been sealed off from most of the rest of the world for more than 50 years.
“A state like North Korea is almost impossible for Americans to imagine,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies who worked in North Korea when he was an Energy Department employee in the 1990s.
“It’s the last absolute dictatorship in the world,” he said, and is a country with widespread poverty and scant infrastructure such as paved roads and electricity.
Except for the capital, Pyongyang, “it is a largely agrarian, primitive country. Most people live like they did 10,000 years ago,” Wolfsthal said.
Even so, he said, North Koreans have enormous pride in their country and are deeply invested in a kind of single-mindedness that allows for mass dances or choral demonstrations with 100,000 people moving in precise synchronization.
“To Americans who have freedom of choice, it seems really creepy,” Wolfsthal said.
It’s that kind of society that Luse has entered five times since 2002 on trips to monitor food-aid programs or the nuclear program on behalf of Lugar.
Last autumn, North Korea agreed to disable Yongbyon and provide a list of all its nuclear activities by Dec. 31. In exchange, the other countries in the talks – the U.S., China, Japan, South Korea and Russia – promised to provide 900,000 tons of heavy fuel oil. In addition, the U.S. said it would remove some trade barriers and take North Korea off its list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Although the dismantling has begun, North Korea did not supply the list of nuclear activities (including which countries it might have provided with nuclear information or equipment) by the year-end deadline. Only part of the fuel was delivered.
North Korea says the U.S. and other countries haven’t lived up to their end of the deal; the U.S. says the same of North Korea.
Even though the official talks are stalled, Lugar said, he’s looking ahead. At some point, North Korea’s leaders will want to make sure the country is safe from the danger of nuclear material going astray, and they will be in search of jobs for the thousands of scientists and engineers who worked at nuclear weapons plants, he said.
That’s where Luse comes in.
As a non-official representative of the U.S. government, Luse can discuss how the nuclear anti-proliferation program Lugar helped create could be used in North Korea, even before all the formal negotiating is complete.
“Keith and Sig have been able to bring into the conversations Steps 3 and 4” of the nuclear dismantlement process, Lugar said of Luse and Hecker. The Bush administration’s chief negotiator “can’t really suggest that informally because he is the formal negotiator.”
Since 1992, the Nunn-Lugar program has helped countries put their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons stockpiles in safer places or eliminate them. In addition, it has helped provide jobs for the scientists who worked on those programs so they are not tempted to go to work for rogue governments or terrorists who want to develop weapons of mass destruction.
In his conversations with the North Koreans he has met with, Luse has introduced the idea of bringing the NunnLugar program to Pyongyang.
“Unless they are able to guarantee a satisfactory economic transition for a large group of individuals, the North Korean government is posed with a domestic political challenge – unhappy workers,” Luse said. “These workers represent some of the best minds in the country. They have been working on a program that, to North Korea, represents the cornerstone of its international image, its power.”
So when he visits North Korea, he looks for opportunities to bring up the Nunn-Lugar program.
Over the years he’s been meeting with North Koreans – sometimes the same people – Luse has seen a slight opening in the highly controlled society.
One of North Korea’s top nuclear scientists was allowed to have a lengthy conversation with Hecker and Luse in February, for instance. Government officials allowed the U.S. visitors to take photos for the first time.
But that doesn’t mean the U.S. and North Korea trust each other, Wolfsthal said.
“There’s a total trust deficit. So anything we do to build confidence in North Korea is useful,” he said, and Luse’s travels help with that.
