The President Unveils His Package of Solutions to the North Korean Nuclear Issue

Lee In-bae

Senior Research Fellow, Korean Peninsula Future Forum

1. The President Unveils His Package of Solutions to the North Korean Nuclear Issue

At a time when President Lee Jae-myung’s approval rating was declining, the president continued his diplomatic engagements, even giving up the Chuseok holiday. Following a visit to France in early September, he embarked on his second trip to the Americas, visiting New York and Mexico. In July, he had traveled to San Francisco, Brazil, and Argentina.

At the outset of the trip, President Lee sought to draw public attention by releasing a series of interviews with the Associated Press (AP) and The New York Times (NYT), and he subsequently took the podium at the United Nations General Assembly for the second time since taking office. The media often refer to such an address as a “keynote speech,” but the official UN designation is the “General Debate.” President Lee also held a 30-minute one-on-one meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump that evening.

Through this series of diplomatic engagements, President Lee publicly laid out, both internationally and domestically, the broad direction of the approach he is considering toward the North Korean nuclear issue. At the Korea-U.S. summit in August last year, he had declared cooperation on “establishing peace on the Korean Peninsula and pursuing denuclearization,” only to face harsh criticism from North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency, which accused him of exposing “the true face of a hypocrite afflicted with delusions of denuclearization.” Since then, the administration had exercised restraint in sending messages to North Korea and focused instead on restoring dialogue through coordination with the Trump administration. The president’s latest remarks represent the position that emerged from that process.

2. Repackaging a Fundamentally Flawed Solution

In a single phrase, the president’s solution to the North Korean nuclear issue, as revealed during his visit to New York, can be summarized as follows: provide tangible benefits now in return for constraints on North Korea’s future nuclear capabilities.

The most striking remark in his foreign media interviews was his assertion that “there is considerable value in UNSC economic sanctions on North Korea that have had little effect for a halt to North Korea’s development of additional nuclear weapons and ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles].” The president appears to have concluded that, after securing significant military and economic benefits from deploying troops to Ukraine and restoring relations with China following Xi Jinping’s visit to North Korea, Pyongyang can no longer be pressured into submission through international sanctions.

President Lee went further and warned that once North Korea judged that it possessed enough nuclear weapons and missiles to ensure its survival, it could be tempted to smuggle them abroad to earn foreign currency, adding that “that would be the truly dangerous moment.” At first glance, this may sound like a sophisticated analysis, but it is precisely the kind of argument that appeals to nonproliferation advocates in Washington D.C. Many U.S. nonproliferation experts are concerned not with North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons per se, but rather with preventing the spread of these weapons and related technologies. Such a perspective may serve U.S. interests in maintaining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime, but it does little to address the direct security threat that North Korea’s nuclear arsenal poses to South Korea.

Ultimately, the president’s proposal places the emphasis on “managing the status quo” by halting the quantitative expansion of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities in the name of realism. The blueprint is to ease sanctions, give North Korea room to breathe, coax it along, and eventually move toward denuclearization. To this end, the president has also floated an ambitious, multi-stage roadmap: first, U.S. North Korea talks; second, four-party talks aimed at establishing a peace regime; and eventually, multilateral talks in Northeast Asia, including a revival of the Six-Party Talks.

The sense of deja vu , however, is overwhelming. Since the North Korean nuclear crisis began in the 1990s, the two Koreas have established the South-North Joint Nuclear Control Commission; the United States and North Korea concluded the 1994 Agreed Framework; the Four-Party Talks held six plenary sessions before ending without meaningful agreement; and subsequent efforts produced the September 19 Joint Statement in 2005 and the February 13 Agreement in 2007. Various negotiating formats were tried and numerous agreements signed, culminating in the Six-Party Talks, which ultimately failed to cross the threshold of effective verification and inspection of North Korea’s nuclear program. Yet in 2026, what remains over our heads is North Korea’s operational nuclear warheads. It is as though an old prescription already proven ineffective has merely been given a new label and is once again being presented as a cure.

3. The Poisoned Chalice of Recognizing North Korea’s Nuclear Status: South Korea Risks Being Sidelined

“According to our estimates, North Korea may now have the capacity to produce or may already be producing an additional 10 to 20 nuclear weapons every year.” This was how President Lee publicly acknowledged North Korea’s capacity for mass production of nuclear weapons. His intention may have been to warn that the North Korean nuclear threat will grow exponentially with time. Viewed from another angle, however, it is a dangerous self-inflicted move for the president of South Korea to begin by effectively acknowledging North Korea’s status as a nuclear-armed state.

Only two days after the foreign ministers of South Korea, the United States, and Japan reaffirmed the principle of “complete denuclearization,” North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui poured cold water on that position by declaring an “absolute and unchanging will to possess nuclear weapons, even after a hundred or a thousand years.” North Korea has already enshrined in Article 56 of its constitution that, “as a nuclear-armed state,” it will safeguard the country’s right to survival and development.

Some respond: “Will North Korea’s nuclear weapons disappear simply because we deny its existence?

We must face reality.” At first glance, this sounds like a reasonable form of realism. Yet military security and diplomacy operate on fundamentally different levels. The first principle of military security is preparation based on the worst-case scenario. It is therefore entirely appropriate, from a military perspective, to treat North Korea’s actual nuclear threat as a constant and build South Korea’s defenses and deterrence accordingly.

Diplomacy, however, is the opposite. The moment North Korea is formally recognized as a nuclear-armed state within the framework of the NPT, the international sanctions and monitoring regime painstakingly constructed over decades risks losing its rationale and unraveling.

More importantly, South Korea would be narrowing its own room for maneuver. Once North Korea’s nuclear status is recognized, inter-Korean dialogue on military and security issues would effectively come to an end. Pyongyang would simply shut the door and say, “This is a matter to be settled between nuclear powers. Non-nuclear South Korea should stay out of it.” South Korea could then find itself excluded from negotiations over a security threat directly tied to its own survival a deeply humiliating and self-contradictory diplomatic outcome. This is precisely why North Korea’s nuclear status must never be formally legitimized at the diplomatic table.

Nevertheless, the president appears prepared to accept North Korea’s existing nuclear arsenal as a fait accompli in the name of freezing its nuclear program, while arguing that preventing the outward proliferation of nuclear materials and technology should take priority. This amounts to ignoring the fire at our own doorstep while concentrating on preventing fires in distant neighborhoods. It is a dangerous proposition that would effectively grant North Korea, with our own hands, the recognition of its nuclear status that Pyongyang has demanded for decades.

4. ICBMs Threaten the United States; SRBMs Threaten South Korea

Another cause for concern is that the president explicitly identified ICBMs as one of the capabilities North Korea would be required to give up. His proposal, in effect, is to exchange “a halt to the development of North Korea’s still-unproven future nuclear capabilities and ICBMs capable of striking the U.S. mainland” for “the lifting of economic sanctions that are currently exerting real pressure on North Korea.”

The ICBMs the Lee’s government seeks to constrain missiles with ranges exceeding 10,000 kilometers, from the Hwasong-14 through the Hwasong-19 have yet to fully demonstrate critical technologies such as launches on normal trajectories and atmospheric reentry. Lifting economic sanctions, one of the few forms of leverage currently imposing tangible pressure on North Korea, in return for halting the development of an unfinished weapons system would create a serious strategic imbalance.

The more troubling point is that this proposal came from none other than the president of the Republic of Korea. During his first term, President Trump dismissed North Korea’s short-range missile provocations as “routine tests that others conduct as well.” For the United States across the Pacific, ICBMs capable of crossing the ocean may be the principal source of concern. For South Korea, however, the hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) and multiple rocket launchers capable of striking Seoul and the entire Korean Peninsula are an existential threat aimed directly at the lives of 50 million South Koreans. This year alone, all 13 missile provocations carried out by North Korea involved short-range systems capable of reaching South Korean territory.

Yet the president’s negotiating proposal contains no safeguards whatsoever against the short-range nuclear delivery systems that are directly linked to the lives of the South Korean people. The proposal can therefore be seen as reflecting U.S. security concerns while failing to address South Korea’s own, and it is difficult to avoid criticism that a core element of national security has been conceded in order to facilitate the resumption of U.S.- North Korea dialogue.

5. Can a Halt Be Verified?

The president argued that “if denuclearization is set as the immediate goal, we will end up with nothing,” and insisted that the focus should instead be on a “stop,” rather than the elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

North Korea’s nuclear program can be divided chronologically into three categories. First, “past nuclear assets” refer to the nuclear weapons and nuclear materials that North Korea already possesses. Second, “current nuclear assets” refer to nuclear weapons and weapons-grade nuclear materials that North Korea is currently producing through its operating facilities. Finally, “future nuclear capabilities” refer to the potential expansion of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal into larger and more powerful systems particularly ICBMs as well as weapons-grade nuclear materials to be produced in the future.

The “stop” described by the president therefore essentially means foregoing future nuclear capabilities by halting the production of weapons-grade nuclear material and suspending additional nuclear tests and further technological advances in ICBMs. But one unavoidable question remains: how, exactly, can such a halt be verified?

To confirm that the other side has actually stopped, there must first be a comprehensive “declaration” and “inspection” process establishing an accurate baseline: the number of nuclear weapons North Korea currently possesses, its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and plutonium, and the current level of its missile technology. Only when the starting point is known can one prove that the needle has stopped moving.

Yet this was precisely the critical fault line on which negotiations repeatedly broke down and returned to square one over three decades of diplomacy surrounding the North Korean nuclear issue. North Korea has never permitted a thorough inspection of its past nuclear activities, and whenever the international community sought to probe deeper, Pyongyang overturned the negotiating process through withdrawal from the NPT or military provocations.

Lifting sanctions prior to inspections, relying merely on a provisional commitment to a freeze, runs counter to the principles of negotiation. Changing the terminology from “freeze” to “stop” does not eliminate the need for verification. Lifting sanctions without transparent inspections would mean voluntarily abandoning one of the key safeguards of a peaceful resolution.

Using uncertain future nuclear capabilities as a bargaining chip to obtain tangible concessions while maintaining existing past and present nuclear threats is a classic form of “salami tactics.” Providing rewards in advance for such negotiating behavior would constitute a serious strategic error.

6. Is It Really Worth Going 'All-In' on the U.S.-NK Summit?

During his visit to New York, President Lee managed to secure a 30-minute meeting with President Trump. It was an impromptu meeting held in a separate space near the reception venue following the General Debate. President Lee diligently laid out the issues he had brought with him, but the Trump side offered little in the way of a strategic response or substantive answer, and the meeting appears to have ended largely with polite listening.

Given that there had not even been detailed coordination of the agenda beforehand, such a superficial exchange was entirely predictable. Instead, what resonated most clearly was President Trump’s characteristic self-congratulation: “I have maintained an extraordinarily good relationship with Kim Jong Un.” On the question of a U.S. North Korea summit, the atmosphere was no different from that seen only a few days earlier at the Korea-U.S. foreign ministers’ meeting, where the U.S. side drew a clear line by stating that “there has been absolutely no progress with regard to U.S. North Korea dialogue.”

President Trump’s attention lies elsewhere. Regardless of the outcome of the November midterm elections, by the end of the year the spotlight in U.S. politics will inevitably begin shifting toward the competition among potential candidates for the next presidential election. With the shadow of an early lame-duck period beginning to loom, what Trump needs may not be a carefully designed denuclearization roadmap capable of fundamentally safeguarding U.S. security, but rather a “spectacular show” that dramatically reasserts his political presence. Persistent speculation about a surprise meeting with Kim Jong Un after the midterm elections is closely connected to Trump’s own political calculations.

Why, then, should Seoul take the lead in advancing Pyongyang’s demands and lowering the bar for negotiations with a counterpart who views a U.S. North Korea summit primarily as a means of political gain? The reckless belief that merely opening the door to a U.S. North Korea summit will usher in lasting peace is a perilous gamble that could drive South Korea to the edge of the precipice.

Note: The views expressed herein may differ from those of the Hansun Foundation

(※ It's a translation based on machine translation)