CIAO DATE: 02/02

Arms control in reluctant installments: Iraq and North Korea

Christopher Carle
United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR)

1999 - 2000

The Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP)

Introduction

Iraq and North Korea pose two of the most vexing problems for arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament since the early 1990s. Neither situation shows obvious signs of early and complete resolution. Instead, both remain perplexing, and their regional and broader international ramifications point to important challenges for arms control, international security and global order.

Arms control strategies for dealing with uncooperative regimes are not radically new in themselves: over much of the second half of the twentieth Century, bilateral arms control was actively -and overall, constructively- pursued between the USA and the USSR when their mutual regard was hardly of the greatest trustworthiness. Implementing arms control agreements among bona fide treaty-abiding parties can be hard enough. Trust and confidence are scarce commodities which need nurturing even among states with historically good mutual dispositions, and sometimes even among allies. Iraq and North Korea illustrate difficulties of an altogether greater magnitude: What is new and characteristic of Iraq and North Korea is that these are cases in which arms control and disarmament are attempted in conditions of axiomatic distrust, lack of confidence, and mutual suspicions of ulterior motives.

Bona fide arms control rests on an expectation of benefits derived from freely accepted constraints, in exchange for others abiding by identical or proportional restrictions. There is not, in principle, any need for "carrots" or "sticks". The carrot of enhanced security should be inherent in any well conceived arms control or disarmament agreement. Neither Iraq nor North Korea correspond to this optimal pattern. Instead, arms control arrangements pertaining to them are of a remedial nature and are designed to deal with countries which have deliberately chosen to breach prior obligations (undertaken most notably in adhering to the NPT). Compliance is at the heart of arms control and international security, both with reference to existing treaties , and with regard to the prospects for concluding further arrangements in the future. If compliance is perceived as unreliable and unenforceable, then the future of arms control and disarmament will be compromised and global security severely imperilled as a result. The temptation to shun arms control has grown stronger in recent years, and a brand of muscular arms racing security-demagoguery could conceivably gain further ground, relegating to never-never-land any realistic hopes for cooperative global security and prospects for furthering the principles which the United Nations Charter stands for. Dissuasive and powerful yet humane ways of dealing with recalcitrant citizens are among the hallmarks of civilised societies. If international society is ever to approximate civilised behaviour, the same ought to apply to ways of dealing with states which flout or threaten to renege on their own arms control commitments. The track record in Iraq and North Korea illustrates how fraught that task can be.

An odd comparison

Comparing the incomparable may seem far-fetched (as it initially did to this author . . . ) and the uniqueness of recent arms control experiences in Iraq and North Korea may well appear to rule out such an exercise. But uniqueness can also be the fetish of specialists, whether practitioners or pundits, whose narrow perspective can lead to artificially fragmented analysis. International reality in a globalising world is rather characterised by a multiplicity of interlinkages calling for synthesis, lateral thinking (and even for far-fetched comparisons). Obviously, Iraq is Iraq; North Korea is North Korea. The Gulf isn't North East Asia, and the Agreed Framework is not resolution 687.

But different ways of dealing with recalcitrant states do have consequences for each other, and for the overall progress and prospects of arms control and disarmament. The role of the IAEA is one clear illustration: The special inspections in Iraq and the discovery of the scale and variety of its nuclear programme in late 1991 not only proved determining in the ensuing drive to strengthen safeguards arrangements across the board, but also reinforced suspicions and concerns about North Korea's nuclear activities. The widespread perception of the great extent to which Iraq had succeeded in circumventing IAEA safeguards was instrumental in prompting the Agency to do its utmost to reassert its standards of rigorous thoroughness in matters concerning the DPRK.

North Korea and Iraq illustrate the challenges of applying existing non-proliferation and arms control machinery to particularly tricky cases. They indicate that seeking to restore compliance may sometimes require adaptations to existing tools and procedures rather than sticking to one-size-fits-all arrangements. These cases remain thankfully few for the time being, but there is no shortage of possibilities for not-too dissimilar headaches arising elsewhere in the future. How the existing machinery and its operators (Hans Blix or Robert Gallucci, to name but two of those involved in various capacities and at different times in both the Iraqi and North Korean imbroglios) cope with such challenges holds wider significance than isolated case-studies or blinkered policy-making might indicate. The common purposes of arms control and disarmament form one prism through which comparison is amply justified if only to illustrate how problems of uncooperative arms control have been approached to date, and the consequences and lessons of such courses of action for other dilemmas of disarmament policy.

Ad-hoc responses and institutions

Both UNSCOM and the US-DPRK Agreed Framework were conceived as case-specific ad-hoc responses to very particular circumstances. Neither was supposed to be a trend-setting precedent. Both were boldly creative real-life experiments in dealing with unprecedented non-proliferation and disarmament problems for which prior practice offered few or no guidelines. In both cases of breach of non-proliferation commitments, existing mechanisms had to be supplemented with the creation of novel structures: UNSCOM and KEDO.

The tasks involved in the implementation of the relevant UN Security Council resolutions after Desert Storm and of the Agreed Framework of October 1994 required tools and procedures which were not readily available. The tasks in question, however, were radically different from each other and the same applies to UNSCOM and KEDO: the one, an emanation of the security council of a global international organisation and entrusted with locating and destroying prohibited weapons and their supporting installations, and the other a consortium funded by key regional powers and a few external ones with the mission of providing for North Korea's energy requirements in exchange for forgoing a nuclear programme. UNSCOM was designed to ensure that a threat was effectively dismantled, and that it would not re-emerge. Its focus was specifically on military capabilities. KEDO is a plurilateral organisation for threat reduction through non-military functional cooperation in the field of energy development.

Despite the element of institutional innovation, care was taken in both cases to avoid duplication and to rely on existing institutions where possible and appropriate. Relevant competence was pre-existent in the nuclear field, hence the role of the IAEA both in the implementation of UNSC resolution 687, and in the monitoring of the freeze on the North Korean nuclear facilities covered by the Agreed Framework.

Timing

Although attempts to implement arms control measures in Iraq and North Korea have dragged on for years, this similarity was not at all part of the original intent. It is indeed striking, with hindsight, that Resolution 687 was clearly crafted in a manner which envisaged a rapid implementation process. Iraq was supposed to provide a full and complete declaration of its proscribed weapons holdings within two weeks of the adoption of the resolution. UNSCOM was to be set up within 45 days. With Iraq roundly defeated in Desert Storm and high hopes for a nascent world order, scarcely anyone in 1991 would have suspected that nearly a decade later the situation would be as unsatisfactory as it is today. Indeed, the expectation was of a task that ought to be wrapped up in a matter of months.

By contrast, although the Agreed Framework is sometimes criticised for slow and fitful implementation, it must at least be acknowledged, in fairness to its authors, that no promises of overnight success were made. In fact, a long drawn out process was written into the October 1994 text from the outset. The target date of 2003 set for the provision to the DPRK of a "light water reactor project with a total generating capacity of approximately 2 000 MW(e)" clearly attests to that. Likewise, the Agreed Framework prescribes that the DPRK must eventually come into full compliance with its IAEA safeguards agreement (INFCIRC 403), but this was not expected to happen in short order. Instead, the timing of this portion of the agreement was earmarked for a point "when a significant portion of the LWR project is completed, but before the delivery of key nuclear components( . . . )".

By way of moderating this contrast, in spite of the chronology built into the letter of the Agreed Framework, the prevailing spirit of the mid-1990s was coloured by widespread perceptions that the North Korean regime was on its last legs. Those who, at the time, were fond of collapse-scenarios, probably expected that the Agreed Framework would be de facto overtaken by events and that radical change in Pyongyang would reshuffle the agenda ahead of the fulfillment of KEDO's tasks . . . today, conventional wisdom is just about the reverse.

A binding obligation and a negotiated agreement

There is a clear qualitative difference between UNSC resolutions adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and binding on Iraq, and on the other hand, an agreement which was the outcome of negotiations between the USA and the DPRK. The obligations upon Iraq (and which it is worth recalling that Iraq has formally accepted) are considerably more stringent than those to which North Korea has consented. Iraq's disarmament obligations include not just nuclear weapons, but also chemical and biological ones and missiles with ranges of 150km and above.

No comparable strictures are envisaged on the DPRK. What the Agreed Framework stipulates, much more modestly, is a commitment to freeze and eventually dismantle its graphite-moderated nuclear reactors and their related facilities as well as its reprocessing plant (euphemistically known as "radiochemical labs"). North Korea's ballistic missiles, for example, are entirely absent from the Agreed Framework, although in subsequent practice, some element of linkage has resulted from the US Congressional requirement of "progress" on the missile issue as a condition for continued American funding contributions to KEDO. The crux of the contrast is that Iraq was defeated in war while North Korea was not.

Access

The unprecedentedly intrusive mandate given to UNSCOM hardly needs to be stressed. Quite unlike this anytime-anywhere approach, the Agreed Framework confines itself to establishing the conditions under which normal IAEA inspections, of the kind carried out in any NPT member state can resume. In the meantime, it indicates that the IAEA is to monitor the freeze on the facilities covered by the document: a natural uranium reactor (graphite-moderated) , a reprocessing plant and a 50MW reactor under construction. Ad hoc and routine IAEA inspections resumed on the two other declared installations after a contract for the provision to North Korea of two light water reactors was signed in December 1995.

The snag is that the IAEA still has no access to two other sites, containing nuclear waste whose analysis could enable the Agency to determine just how much plutonium has been produced by the DPRK. Past production thus remains out of bounds, and with it, a conclusive assessment on North Korea's nuclear weapons potential. Hence the fact is that IAEA inspections are in no position to ascertain that North Korea is either in compliance or in violation of the NPT. All they can do for the time being is to indicate the observance of Pyongyang's obligations under the Agreed Framework, which is very different.

Both Iraq and North Korea clearly confirm (if there remained any need to do so) how essential on-site inspections can be in situations in which ground-truths need to be ascertained. The less comfortable lesson from Iraq is that even the types of short-notice or no-notice, anytime-anywhere inspections conducted by UNSCOM may not be sufficient to establish confidence in satisfactory compliance.

Patterns of non-cooperation

One of the main common features between the two cases is the obdurate unwillingness of the two states at the centre of the disputes to reveal the full extent of the information sought. The tense, exasperating, dangerous and occasionally vaudevillesque succession of concealment and deceit to which UNSCOM inspectors were confronted in Iraq has been amply described elsewhere (including in a number of contrasting insider-accounts).

In both cases, sources of information, their accuracy and their use have been delicate issues, though it is in UNSCOM's experience that the relationship between intelligence (national technical means) and an international undertaking under the authority of the UN Security Council has been more sensitive and contentious. The deliberate opacity cultivated in Baghdad and Pyongyang has occasionally given great importance to the revelations made by defectors from either country (most tellingly in the case of Iraq, with the information provided by Hussein Kamel).

The comparative lack of access to North Korea has put a premium on satellite and other remotely-collected intelligence, as in the case of the excavated site in Kumchangri, ultimately visited by an American team in May 1999, and once again one year later. The degree and intensity of non-cooperation, however, have been considerably more manifest in Iraq, owing to the comprehensive on-site prerogatives which were characteristic of UNSCOM's activities. The direct confrontations which opposed various UNSCOM teams with their Iraqi interlocutors, and the level of comprehensiveness and detail of the material and documentary evidence at stake, have no semblance of an equivalent in North Korea.

Achievements so far

The achievements to date of UNSCOM and of the gradual implementation of the Agreed Framework are also of a very different nature from each other. In sheer material terms of amounts of military equipment located and destroyed by UNSCOM or under its supervision, the Iraqi experience is in a league all of its own (with the exception of CFE). UNSCOM has often been observed -but perhaps not often enough- to have destroyed more of Iraq's proscribed weapons and their associated facilities than all of the international coalition's combat operations put together. This single fact remains the most eloquent rebuttal to all the various strands of criticism which have been levelled at UNSCOM.

Measured by the same yardstick, the Agreed Framework has achieved far less. A freeze on certain nuclear activities and the canning of used fuel-rods from the five-megawatt reactor cannot begin to compare with the amount of tangible results scored by UNSCOM. But the UNSCOM yardstick is not appropriate, since the Agreed Framework was never intended to yield results comparable to UNSC resolution 687. The objective was much more focused and more limited in North Korea. Halting North Korean plutonium production, unquestionably the primary goal of the Agreed Framework, has been attained -for now. If the 1994 accord were to collapse, however, North Korea could discontinue the freeze, restart the five-megawatt reactor and/or perform reprocessing operations on its existing stockpile of spent reactor fuel. This lends a different potency to North Korean brinkmanship than to Iraqi non-compliance.

Moreover, the narrower nuclear focus of the Agreed Framework has also entailed that North Korea has been able to continue work on ballistic missiles assiduously, be it in terms of research, development and domestic deployments, or in terms of foreign transfers of missile and related equipment and technology. What also remains unverifiable are possible North Korean activities in the chemical and biological weapons areas, as well as in aspects of nuclear weapons development other than plutonium production. In fact, it is broadly understood that had North Korea tested another Taepo Dong missile after August 1998, the Agreed Framework would most likely have collapsed. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the October 1994 agreement is thus that it is still alive, although it is fragile, and vulnerable to US Congressional reluctance and to understandable Japanese exasperation. UNSCOM, for all its greater material achievements, is now defunct, and the fate and actual performance of UNMOVIC can only be a matter for speculation as of this writing.

This contrast owes much to the cracks which have appeared between members of the UN Security Council, as opposed to the unity of purpose which -despite occasional difficulties- continues to characterise the actions of the major partners in KEDO. Fault lines in the UNSC about the DPRK also arose, albeit from the outset. They have been an irritant in the Iraqi case, whereas opposition from China and Russia have altogether prevented the Security Council from taking the leading role in North Korea since 1993. Moreover, has been noted above, the DPRK retains many more WMD programmes (and at least, programme options) than Iraq does. The case for arguing that the disarmament job is close to completion is immensely stronger in Iraq than in North Korea. Moreover, Iraq holds economic and financial cards which are totally absent in Pyongyang's hand. The prospect of the suspension or lifting of sanctions and a resumption of corporate business as usual with Iraq holds potent and immediate appeal, most obviously in the oil sector, but also with other industries such as construction not far behind. The DPRK seems a less enticing prospect. As one specialist has pithily pointed out: "would YOU invest in North Korea?".

Carrots, sticks and the use of force

The arms control approaches adopted with respect to Iraq and North Korea differ categorically in the stringent character of the former and the use of positive inducements in the latter. There is no clear and generally valid lesson to be derived from either case. The efficacy of coercive diplomacy, sanctions or inducements, or the threat or use of force in order to obtain the desired modifications in the conduct of a target-state, present dilemmas as old as statecraft itself, which do not lend themselves to any generally applicable recipes.

The US-DPRK Agreed Framework entails the award of billions of dollars' worth of nuclear power-generating equipment, heavy fuel oil, and food aid through international channels to North Korea from the very states (primarily South Korea and Japan) whose security is most directly at stake. To be sure, this sounded peculiarly paradoxical in 1993-94, at the very time when various versions of counterproliferation doctrines were developed and promulgated in the United States. To be sure also, these may well seem as unduly handsome payoffs for threatening to withdraw from the NPT and the IAEA, whereas the vast majority of treaty abiding states got -and expected- no kickback in return.

The contrasts between these aspects of the experiments in Iraq and North Korea were not the result of the application of different pre-conceived arms control doctrines, but rather the product of contrasting circumstances. Iraq, a defeated (but not occupied) state having been chastised by war for an act of open aggression and invasion, was seen as vulnerable to sanctions and compensation measures -and as deserving them. Things were radically different in North Korea. Not only was the DPRK not a defeated state, but quite in reverse, the option of using military force against it was (and remains) perceived by regional states and external powers alike as a catastrophic scenario for the Korean peninsula itself first and foremost, as well as for other countries in North-East Asia and possibly beyond. Having come close to war in the summer of 1994, the brink has been studiously avoided ever since. Air power is used repeatedly by the United States and the United Kingdom against Iraq. Following the "Desert Fox" operation of December 1998, according to General Franks (US Central Command), "aircraft supporting Operation Southern Watch have responded to some 650 Iraqi violations or provocations on 80 different occasions, while aircraft supporting Operation Northern Watch have responded to more than 110 violations or provocations on some 40 occasions". North Korea is a very different story . . .

The contrast between the use of positive incentives in North Korea and the "punitive"character of policy towards Iraq has become an article of conventional wisdom. It is well to remember, however, that despite widespread perceptions to the contrary, arrangements for dealing with Iraq were never devoid of positive incentives: Those were, and remain, all the benefits that would accrue to Iraq from the ending of sanctions in return for clear and sustained Iraqi cooperation.

Domestic and regional contexts

Beyond conventionally security-oriented considerations, the brunt of the price for both enduring crises continues to be borne by ordinary people in Iraq and North Korea who ask for nothing more than a decent livelihood for themselves and their families. Never before in history have governments exacted such appalling hardship on their own citizenry for the sake of retaining the actual possession of weapons of mass destruction or the ability to develop them in the future. In itself, this amounts to a soberingly depressing statement on the willingness of some governments in the 20th and 21st centuries to relinquish non-conventional weaponry in favour of other more cooperative means of pursuing national objectives.

It is symptomatic of the degree of perplexity concerning issues of arms control in North Korea and Iraq that wishful thinking surfaces time and time again. The deus ex machina of a change of political regime in either country is sometimes held forth as the only light at the end of the tunnel. Whether any change of regime would necessarily entail a complete reversal of prior lack or sloth of cooperation on the arms control and disarmament front, however, is not as certain as it often appears to assumed. Meanwhile, existing realities have to be dealt with.

At various stages, it has been more or less fashionable to envisage as probable the fall of either regime, although with some measure of more or less explicit reservations: For both North Korea and Iraq, the regime-collapse scenario is often seen as a curse in disguise, albeit for geopolitically opposite reasons. In Iraq, collapse is warned against by those who see it as ushering in a fragmentation of the country and a power vacuum in a strategically crucial spot into which many potentially contagious tensions and ambitions could erupt. On the Korean peninsula, (despite the recurring argument that reunification would be all the costlier if it were provoked by Pyongyang's precipitous internal collapse) the nervousness of nearby countries is less caused by fears of a power vacuum than by mixed feelings about the emergence, in time, of a unified peninsula as a populous and powerful regional actor -which may not wish to have US forces on its territory.

Iraq, North Korea, and broader consequences for arms control

In a world addicted to technological progress and to electoral promises of a quick fix for every problem, it may well seem surprising, especially to non-specialists, that despite the time and effort invested on Iraq and North Korea, a conclusive answer to both problems remains so elusive. Alternatively, disaffected cynics who take a dim view of governments and of all brands of officialdom, would see this as just one more proof of the inability of "politicians" ever to "deliver". One way or another, on a very general level of public perceptions (inasmuch, that is, as anyone shows any interest whatsoever), the credibility of arms control and disarmament as a field of policy endeavour is clearly not enhanced by such persisting difficulties. The plain fact of the matter is, however, that nobody, including the most ardent critics, has come up with any feasible and preferable alternatives to UNSCOM, UNMOVIC, the Agreed Framework or KEDO.

Moreover, similar effects can be detected in policy-making circles. There, the obstinate inconclusiveness and recurring setbacks in the Middle East and East Asia are taken by some to indicate that arms control in itself is a naive "illusion", and a "dangerous" one to boot. Iraq and North Korea have thus become emblematic of the "rogue state" syndrome (as it was formerly known), and are invoked as proof that military capabilities are the only key to security, whereas arms control leads only to vulnerabilities. This is in effect the National Rifle Association approach to non-proliferation, arms control and disarmament writ large: In the domestic sphere, it is argued that since criminals will always have access to weapons, it follows that law-abiding citizens should own and bear guns of their own. Likewise, on an international scale, it is argued that since no non-proliferation, arms control or disarmament measures will ever be adequately reliable constraints on "countries of concern", it follows that respectable members of the international community should rely for their own security on the fullest possible military panoplies (and not, of course, on any treaties or agreements). Active territorial defences against ballistic missiles are essentially justified in this way. As for the re-armament and arms-racing dynamics that such moves can set off, they are rebutted with the eternal schoolyard favourite: "they started it!"

At a time when arms control is under serious challenge, developments (or lack of positive ones) in Iraq and North Korea take on consequences out of all proportions with even their undoubtedly great intrinsic importance. Indirectly, they can impact on relations among major nuclear powers, and on the dynamics of armament and proliferation on a global scale.

Missiles

More specifically, Iraq and North Korea have -at different times- served as potent illustrations of the inadequacy of existing controls on ballistic missiles. With its use of SSMs in the war with Iran, its numerous missile programmes in the following years, and their renewed use during Desert Storm, Iraq has done much to put missile proliferation on the strategic map. UNSCOM's effectiveness in dealing with Iraq's missiles, technology and installations is the exception that proves the rule: short of such drastic and exceptional circumstances, missiles are largely left unaddressed by current arms control machinery. The INF Treaty is a special case (although it may be worth discussing what inspiration might be drawn from it in other regional contexts or multilaterally). The MTCR has proved its unquestionable worth as an export control tool but, equally clearly, it is insufficient in and of itself for arms control and disarmament purposes.

North Korea has taken up where Iraq left off. North Korea's missile programmes originated in the 1970s with the familiar pattern of reverse-engineering and subsequent improvements on Scud-based technologies, and were initially little-noticed except by specialists. They gathered pace towards medium and longer-range missiles from the late 1980s. It is also during that period and the early 1990s that DPRK missile and missile-related exports drew much greater attention. Concerns surrounding these developments crystallised in 1998, not only with the Taepo Dong-1 test of 18th August through Japanese airspace, but also with tests in Iran and Pakistan of missiles bearing striking similarities to the North Korean No Dong-1. The DPRK continues to maintain that there is nothing to prevent it from developing, testing, deploying or exporting ballistic missiles and missile technology. The issue has been raised by the ROK as well as by Japan (which tried to persuade China to intercede with Pyongyang), earlier on by Israel (whose attempts to bring the DPRK to desist from missile exports to the Middle East were stopped by Washington in August 1993), and especially the United States, which after five rounds of talks managed in September 1999 to obtain Pyongyang's pledge to suspend its test-flights of ballistic missiles under development.

In 1994, as the Agreed Framework was negotiated, nuclear matters were a clear priority. With hindsight, one its American architects, R. Gallucci, was quoted musing with regret that the ballistic missiles left out of the Geneva agreement were now "coming back to haunt us". In fact, the logic of the Agreed Framework has long been in the background of missile discussions with the DPRK, and on many occasions North Korea has indicated that it would be willing to forgo missile exports in exchange for suitably hefty doses of cash. More explicitly, an argument has also been made in favour of "an agreed framework on missiles". Missile-related developments gathered pace and confusion in the weeks following the inter-Korean summit of 13-15th June 2000 in Pyongyang. First came the US agreement to South Korea's long-standing insistence that it be allowed to develop ballistic missiles up to the 300km range limit defined by the MTCR. Later in July, the suggestion conveyed to Vladimir Putin by Kim Jong Il on "rockets" (whether missiles, space launch vehicles or both, remains unclear) irresistibly brought to mind the 1994 arrangement.

If any sense is to be made of the proposal (if indeed it is such rather than the "joking matter" it was later said to have been by the DPRK leader) it hinges on applying to missiles and/or space boosters the same logic as the Agreed Framework and KEDO apply to nuclear technology. Not the least oddity about this proposal was that it was made to President Putin on his visit to Pyongyang on 19 July, barely a week after the US and North Korea held their fifth round of missile talks in Kuala Lumpur, where in the course of discussions of North Korean missile exports and indigenous capabilities no suggestion of any such arrangement was made. "(W)e are not prepared to pay cash compensation to North Korea( . . . ) North Korea should not be receiving cash compensation for stopping what it shouldn't be doing in the first place" was the US view after the Kuala Lumpur missile discussions. In spite of this, initial reactions from Washington to the Kim Jong Il proposal have not been dismissive. Obviously, the very idea raises many more questions than it answers -assuming it was meant in earnest by North Korean leader. The most that can be said for now is that the very fact that such an idea is taken seriously attests to how very much at a loss the existing arms control array is to even begin to deal with the missile issue in North Korea. Presumably, one should then brace oneself for another Spin-off Agreed Framework on chemical or biological weapons . . . ?

From UNSCOM to UNMOVIC

After the abrupt ending of UNSCOM inspections in December 1998, and in view of the Amorim Panel's report of March 1999 (which concluded that although most of Iraq's proscribed weapons and programmes had been dismantled by UNSCOM there remained a need for strengthened monitoring and verification) difficult negotiations led to UN Security Council resolution 1284, adopted on 17 December 1999. The resolution is the birth certificate of UNMOVIC (the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission).

While the filiation is clear, there are notable differences of emphasis between resolutions 687 and 1284. The wording of UNSC 1284 emphasises monitoring and verification, whereas UNSCOM was primarily concerned with the identification, elimination and physical destruction of prohibited capabilities. Compared with resolution 687, its successor is born of a context in which the primary concern and bone of contention was more the lifting/suspending of sanctions than arms control and disarmament.

UNMOVIC, nonetheless, does retain UNSCOM's prerogatives in terms of inspections, specifically short-notice and no-notice inspections. Moreover, UNSC 1284 refers explicitly to resolution 687, thereby providing that UNMOVIC can -and indeed must- undertake further disarmament activities as required. It is the nature and scale of such "key remaining disarmament tasks" which UNMOVIC inspectors will have to try and determine when -or if- they are allowed to begin their work in Iraq.

A final contrast: Iraq, North Korea . . . and South Africa

Politics, not arms control technicalities are the key to any sort of endgame in Iraq and North Korea alike. The contrasting case of South Africa is eloquent on this point. In its cooperation with the IAEA (to which it gave unrestricted access to all locations connected or not with its former nuclear weapons programme), South Africa exhibited the sort of openness which is so sorely lacking in the two cases examined in this paper. South Africa's experience after 1993 (when President De Klerk announced that South Africa had built and dismantled a small nuclear arsenal) was aided by the fact that careful internal records had been kept throughout the duration of the weapons programme.

The contrast is clear with the painstaking attempts to preserve and piece together fragmentary information about past Iraqi and North Korean activities. South Africa only declined to identify its foreign partners and suppliers, but the production history of South Africa's uranium enrichment facilities was reconstructed successfully and with no discrepancies by the IAEA. South Africa came out, and came clean, because it saw its own broader interests in doing so. Objectively, the same ought to apply to Iraq and North Korea by now, but subjectively, neither appears quite convinced . . .

Endgames and margins of uncertainty

The exit route from the prolonged Iraqi and North Korean crises remains highly uncertain, and the only seemingly predictable aspect of both is that further ups-and-downs should probably be expected, with renewed hope recurringly dashed by withheld cooperation, defiance or outright provocation. For all the understandable hopes raised by the June 2000 inter-Korean summit, the ensuing reinvigoration of bilateral contacts and the parallel restoration of North Korea's relations with various countries, this new climate has not -at least not yet- resulted in any demonstrable results in terms of arms control. In particular, the ambitious inter-Korean agreement on the denuclearisation of the peninsula (including such far-reaching provisions as renouncing uranium enrichment and plutonium production, as well as mutual nuclear inspections) is no closer to being acted upon now than when it was concluded in late 1991 and ratified in early 1992.

A fundamental parallel between both situations is that even in hypothetically optimal circumstances, absolute certainty in matters of arms control and disarmament will be unattainable.

The beginning of work towards verifying the completeness and accuracy of the initial North Korean nuclear inventory declaration by the IAEA is at best some years away, when critical components for the first light water reactor are ready for delivery. At that stage, the IAEA will need access to all nuclear sites in North Korea. Even if this political cooperation is secured, however, reconstituting the history of past nuclear activities, especially the reprocessing of nuclear wastes will be increasingly difficult as time wears on. In fact, it is already well known that complete certainty on this score will not be technically possible.

In Iraq, a return of UN inspectors and the best possible fulfillment of UNMOVIC's mandate cannot yield absolute certainty that every last iota of a residue of prohibited weapons and programmes has been located and destroyed. In a country the size of Iraq, there can always remain some possibility that somewhere, somehow, something has slipped through the net of inspections, however intrusive.

The crux of the issue in both cases is what can be considered as an acceptable margin of uncertainty. It has been made clear by the Executive Chairman of UNMOVIC that it is for the Security Council, and it alone, to decide what level of uncertainty can and should be tolerated on the basis of evidence brought to its attention by the Commission. At some future stage of the Agreed Framework's implementation -assuming it proceeds satisfactorily- the same issue will need to be decided on. This will require technical criteria and assessments, but most of all, it will depend on a track-record of reliable cooperation.

A given margin of uncertainty can appear prohibitive in an adversarial context and benign -or at least palatable- in a setting characterised by good faith backed up by actual deeds.