Description
The North Korean government surprised the world by announcing its withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) on March 12, 1993. North Korea had been a member of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime for many years. It joined the IAEA in 1975 and the NPT in 1985. As the only NPT state party that eventually withdrew from the treaty later in 2003, their first attempt to leave the nonproliferation regime in 1993-1994 is an interesting case for nuclear history and international relations literature. This crisis ended with the Agreed Framework between Washington and Pyongyang in December 1994, and since then a number of academic and policy-relevant works have examined the issue to better understand the causes, process, and outcome of this crisis. However, comprehensive historical works based on extensive multi-archival research have been limited, and little attention has been paid to the role of the IAEA. This research traces the nuclear diplomacy between the four main actors - ROK, DPRK, US, and IAEA - from the early 1990s to 1994 in order to shed new light on why this crisis began and how it ended. This paper analyzes declassified documents from the ROK National/Diplomatic Archives and the IAEA Archives, as well as other available sources from the United States and North Korea.
