Former President Jimmy Carter probably never understood the Korean Peninsula. While he was president he decided to withdrawal all of USFK against the good advice of – no exaggeration – every single member of his cabinet and key official in the administration. Obviously he was eventually persuaded not to, but not before it prompted, predictably, a (second) short-lived South Korean nuclear program (that died with Pak Chung-hee in 1979).

Now he is claiming that the 1994 Agreed Framework was working well – “until 2002 when the United States in effect abandoned that agreement.” From Bloomberg: Carter Says Claim That North Korea Cheated `Completely False’:

The Bush administration claim that North Korea cheated or reneged on a 1994 agreement with the U.S. to freeze its nuclear program is “completely false and ridiculous,” former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said.

Carter, a Democrat who helped broker the agreement with the North Koreans on behalf of then-President Bill Clinton, said the pact was “observed pretty well by both sides” for eight years.

“It lasted until 2002 when the United States in effect abandoned that agreement and branded North Korea as an axis of evil,” Carter, 82, said in an interview to be broadcast this weekend on “Conversations with Judy Woodruff” on Bloomberg Television. Carter also said the U.S. further undermined the agreement by condemning summit meetings that took place in 2000 between North Korea and South Korea.

[. . .]

It’s wrong to say that North Korea cheated on the 1994 agreement, Carter said. Under Clinton, North Korea agreed to bring back international atomic inspectors, freeze its nuclear program and put its spent fuel rods in cold storage, he said.

The 2002 events Carter refers to are related to this:

During a meeting in P’yŏngyang on October 4, 2002, North Korean Deputy Foreign Minster Kang Seok-Ju [1] admitted to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly [2] that North Korea has secretly continued a nuclear-weapons development program, in addition to possessing “more powerful things,” perhaps alluding to chemical or biological weapons. (McGeary, 2002 & Sanger, 2002 October 16)

Uranium enrichment is implicitly prohibited by the 1994 Agreed Framework (PDF). Article III, section 2 of the 1994 Agreed Framework states, “The DPRK will consistently take steps to implement the North-South Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” The 1992 Joint Declaration (DOC) states in Article 1, “The South and the North shall not test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons,” and in Article 3, “The South and the North shall not possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment facilities.” The processing was clearly, if implicitly, forbidden by the agreement.

Carter accepted the 1994 Agreed Framework on behalf of the United States while meeting Kim Il-sung in Pyongyang on 16 June 1994. Probably his overruled desire to withdrawal U.S. troops from Korea earned him some respect in North Korea and made him an acceptable representative to deal with. Kim Il-sung died on 8 July (at age 82, the same age Carter is now), and the deal was officially accepted in Geneva on 21 October of the same year.

Carter is defending the deal he accepted, but North Korea had authored all the primary elements of the package deal and delivered it to Ken Quinones in October 1993. For documentation on these dates, refer to this chronology (PDF). The same document covers events until December 1997 and is useful in understanding why implementation took so long after the agreement was made; primarily North Korean antics.

The U.S. position was and is that Pakistan aided North Korea with equipment and technology for enriching uranium for a secret nuclear weapons program. What Jimmy Carter is essentially saying is that either the Bush administration or James Kelly, or both, lied about Kang Suk-ju’s admission of a uranium program on 4 October 2002. The problem with Carter’s position is that in 2005 Pakistan, while claiming no governmental knowledge or responsibility, fully admitted that its top nuclear scientist did indeed supply North Korea with both the technology and some equipment needed to enrich uranium:

Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, confirmed for the first time that a Pakistani nuclear scientist had provided North Korea with centrifuge machines that could be used to make fuel for an atomic bomb. . .

[. . .]

. . . Musharraf said the former head of his country’s nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had sent “centrifuges — parts and complete” to North Korea. The Pakistani leader did not divulge the number of centrifuges that had arrived in North Korea, saying, “I do not exactly remember the number.”

Musharraf also said Khan might have sent North Korea uranium hexafluoride, which can be enriched in centrifuges and then processed into fuel for civilian nuclear reactors or atomic warheads.

[. . .]

Musharraf reiterated his long-held position that he and other members of Pakistan’s powerful military did not know that Khan was shipping nuclear hardware abroad.

Abdul Qadeer Khan (aka ‘AQ Khan’) also sold similar technology and equipment to Iran.

Carter was also critical of the U.S. response to the June 2000 North-South Summit between Kim Jong-il and Kim Dae-jung. That would be the summit that Kim Dae-jung bought by arranging for something on the order of the equivalent of half a billion US$ to be transferred to North Korea, which incidentally also bought him a Nobel Peace Prize.

Did the U.S. and Pakistan lie about the uranium program, and North Korea told the truth? Did diplomacy or $500 million make the 2000 North-South Summit happen? Carter’s positions go beyond pre-election engineering for the Democrats and into the realm of being apologist, something he should not want to be remembered for. Aside from simply wanting the deal he sort of brokered to have been a solid foundation for engagement, I cannot speculate on his current disconnect from reality.