With a U.S.-China summit scheduled for mid-May 2026, calls are growing once again to shift the framework for addressing North Korea’s nuclear program away from denuclearization and toward arms reduction. An April 29 JoongAng Ilbo interview quoted scholar Victor Cha arguing that U.S. North Korea policy has failed and that South Korea needs a nuclear arms reduction agreement rather than a kill chain strategy. A May 2 Pressian article made a similar case, contending that North Korea is now a nuclear-armed state and that any negotiations must start from that recognition.
Will the U.S.-China summit actually create the opening that so many observers are hoping for — a resumption of U.S.-North Korea contact and a pivot toward arms reduction as the central track for resolving the nuclear issue? Every time I see articles like these, I glance over at a yellowed newspaper clipping pinned beside my desk: a November 2022 column by Yang Sang-hoon in the Chosun Ilbo, headlined “U.S.-North Korea nuclear arms reduction talks are coming — like the Itaewon disaster.”
Why I kept that column
I have kept that column close for years for two reasons. First, it proposed arms reduction as a realistic alternative at a time when even using the word was politically fraught — to avoid the implication of recognizing North Korea as a nuclear state. Second, it captured, with unusual precision, both the full history of how we arrived at this moment and the trajectory that lies ahead.
When South Korean President Lee Jae-myung stated in his January 2026 New Year press conference that “recognizing North Korea de facto as a nuclear state, freezing its weapons, and then pursuing arms reduction — with full denuclearization as a long-term vision — is a more realistic path,” I felt the quiet recognition that the moment had finally arrived. The logic is clear: denuclearization as a stated principle, gradual arms reduction as the practical reality.
Rather than summarizing Yang’s column, I want to reproduce its argument in full, because reading it from beginning to end offers as clear a view of the past, present, and future of the North Korean nuclear issue as anything I know.
“This is now a topic most South Koreans have stopped paying attention to, but I have a picture in my mind of how the North Korean nuclear situation will ultimately unfold. At some point — perhaps not so far off — the United States and North Korea will sit down at what could be called a ‘nuclear arms reduction’ table. The basic premise North Korea has long insisted upon for such talks is, of course, formal recognition of its nuclear status. North Korea would reduce its warhead count and scale back or destroy its ICBMs targeting the United States; in exchange, changes to the nature of the U.S.-South Korea alliance and a major reduction of U.S. Forces Korea would come onto the table.
Some may say this is too pessimistic a scenario. But the 30-year history of the North Korean nuclear issue has, from South Korea’s perspective, unfolded exactly according to the most pessimistic script — the one everyone dismissed with ‘surely not.’ Surely North Korea wouldn’t actually test a nuclear weapon — but it did. Surely those were satellite rockets, not ICBMs, and surely Pyongyang would never manage to build one — but it did both. Surely it would test once and stop — it tested six times. Surely it wouldn’t develop a hydrogen bomb — but it did. Surely it couldn’t enrich uranium — but it did. Surely China and Russia would never tolerate North Korea actually possessing nuclear weapons — but they have. Throughout all of this, we were told the regime would collapse — it did not. We said North Korea’s nuclear weapons targeted the United States — North Korea itself has since declared South Korea the primary target. We called the nuclear program a diplomatic bargaining chip — North Korea developed tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use. It is rational to predict that the North Korean nuclear issue will continue to move in the worst possible direction for South Korea. That, after all, is precisely why North Korea worked so hard to build these weapons.
It did not receive wide coverage in the South Korean press, but on Oct. 27, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Bonnie Jenkins told a conference that ‘if North Korea wants dialogue, arms reduction could be an option.’ The State Department spokesman denied this emphatically the next day — and again a few days later. But the fact remains that nuclear arms reduction talks with North Korea are already in the thinking of the State Department’s top arms control official. Jenkins may have a personal disposition toward this approach, but she is not alone. Council on Foreign Relations President and other senior experts have already been arguing that the United States should offer North Korea arms reduction talks in exchange for sanctions relief.
Last May, a classified discussion on North Korea’s nuclear program was held at U.S. Strategic Command, convened by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — the body that oversees all U.S. intelligence agencies. It was the first such forum devoted exclusively to the North Korean nuclear question. A senior U.S. military official reportedly stated that the probability of North Korea voluntarily giving up its nuclear weapons in the near term was ‘zero percent.’ A former ODNI analyst in attendance said that if any country was likely to use nuclear weapons in the near future, North Korea was the most probable candidate. The atmosphere of the discussion, by all accounts, was that denuclearization is now off the table and that deterring North Korea from actually using its weapons has become the operative goal.
From the U.S. perspective, nuclear arms reduction talks with North Korea are one available option for achieving that deterrence. Washington cannot indefinitely tolerate a situation in which North Korea’s arsenal grows beyond 100 or 200 warheads. The decision to sacrifice South Korea’s interests and make concessions to Pyongyang may only be a matter of time. The moment when nuclear arms reduction talks become a formal agenda item will likely come after North Korea has successfully tested both a tactical nuclear device and the atmospheric reentry of an ICBM warhead targeting the United States. American experts do not believe those milestones are far away. Time is running short.
South Korea is not a country that would be shaken to its foundations by a U.S.-North Korea nuclear arms reduction agreement. But it is unquestionably a serious cause for concern — and our society does not seem to be treating it as such. When an elephant walks into a room, people panic at first. But as time passes and a sense of inevitability sets in, human psychology tends toward simply pretending the elephant isn’t there. What sustains that daily pretense is ‘surely not’ — ‘Surely Kim Jong Un won’t actually launch a nuclear weapon’ and ‘Surely he wouldn’t do something that would get himself killed too.’
The North Korean nuclear issue is not primarily about whether Kim Jong Un will fire a weapon. It is about a fundamental change in the basic conditions of life on the Korean Peninsula. Russia has rained missiles and shells on Ukrainian territory and reduced cities to rubble, yet Ukraine cannot fire a single shell onto Russian soil — because the United States will not allow it. Russia has nuclear weapons. After a U.S.-North Korea nuclear arms reduction deal, North Korea’s provocations against the South could follow the same logic. As former U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said, nuclear weapons can function as a ‘hunting license’ against other countries. South Korea is where North Korea’s hunting would take place. That hunt will unfold while our society keeps saying ‘surely not.’
When people come to believe that a very low-probability event will not occur, they stop treating it as a real possibility. Everyone knew that too many people were gathering for Halloween festivities. A crowd crush at a soccer stadium in Indonesia had just happened. But if anyone had warned that something like that could happen in Itaewon, most people would have quietly dismissed it with ‘surely not.’ U.S.-North Korea nuclear arms reduction talks will arrive in exactly the same way.”
Lessons from 30 years of complacency
As Yang diagnosed, South Korea’s response to North Korea’s nuclear program over the past three decades has been defined by wishful dismissal and deliberate avoidance. What was needed was meticulous preparation rather than wishful thinking, and confident engagement rather than looking away. In practice, we delivered neither.
So where does the current government — which took office in June 2025 — stand? Government officials may take issue with this assessment, but the pattern does not look markedly different from those of its predecessors. The broad outlines of North Korea policy, including unconditional preemptive measures, and the accompanying rhetoric are plausible enough. But concrete action on the nuclear issue itself is hard to find. The president personally raised the difficult concept of “arms reduction” in January, and then nothing followed.
The Lee Jae-myung administration’s three-stage North Korean nuclear roadmap — freeze, reduction, denuclearization — is, in my view, a realistic alternative. North Korea rejects it for now, but over time it could attract interest from Pyongyang and the international community. It also creates space for South Korea to raise its own strategic voice, including on the right to peaceful use of nuclear technology. From the standpoint of principled denuclearization, it invites criticism. But given that North Korea refuses to abandon its weapons and is advancing its nuclear capabilities by the day, it may be the best available policy option.
The problem is that the relevant government ministries and affiliated academic institutions are not focusing on this agenda with the urgency it demands. Instead, they are consumed with distractions: melodramatic gestures toward the North, debates over whether unification is desirable, arguments over whether to call North Korea “Chosun,” and assertions of conventional military superiority over the North — a comparison that becomes almost meaningless the moment nuclear weapons are excluded from the calculation.
North Korea conducts near-daily test launches of new tactical nuclear weapons designed to target South Korea, and the response here is silence. The adversary keeps raising the level of threat; South Korea keeps singing songs of peaceful complacency. News of active nuclear diplomacy with the United States and other neighboring powers is equally hard to find. The most prominent recent headline was a brief report that South Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator met with the U.S. assistant secretary of state for arms control and nonproliferation on the sidelines of a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference — a sideshow, not a strategic conversation. What has actually made headlines is the friction between Seoul and Washington over U.S. intelligence-sharing restrictions, triggered by Unification Minister Chong Dong-young’s public disclosure of North Korean nuclear facility locations.
Against this backdrop, a high-profile U.S.-China summit is imminent. It will reveal whether the relevant government agencies have been doing the preparatory work — domestically and internationally — to fulfill the pacemaker role the president described. The concern is that the approach has effectively been: “What can we really do? Let’s trust Trump to handle it.” That is not a strategy.
If the president signaled a shift toward arms reduction in January, South Korea should by now have reached short-, medium-, and long-term strategic agreements with Washington and have Plans A, B, and C in motion. The alternative — drifting along and then scrambling after being blindsided by a fait accompli from Washington and Pyongyang — is not a policy. I hope my worry proves unfounded.
A path forward
South Korea must change course. The nuclear threat demands a more determined mindset and a more rigorous strategy. Wishful dismissal, deliberate avoidance, half-measures, unfounded confidence, and distraction are not a path forward. Under clear principles, with long-term patience and clear-eyed judgment, South Korea must act proactively and with confidence.
My own long-standing prescription for resolving the North Korean nuclear issue rests on four elements: first, a parallel strategy of arms reduction talks driven by external pressure — with full denuclearization as the long-term goal — alongside internal liberalization in North Korea as the internal driver; second, proactive and multi-channel consultation with the United States and neighboring powers; third, a formal public apology to the South Korean people; and fourth, trilateral arms reduction talks among North Korea, South Korea, and the United States, with the option to expand. The core principles are these: do not rely on the other side’s goodwill; take a comprehensive approach; and cooperate proactively and in an integrated manner.
The call for a public apology is not a matter of timing. The current government must make that decision as soon as possible. Not a single former president, not a single senior official, has ever apologized to the South Korean people for allowing the North Korean nuclear issue to reach this point. We demand apologies for disasters — even decades later. The same standard applies here.
For any individual or government, genuine new beginnings require genuine accountability first. The president should, even now, offer a sincere apology to the people on behalf of all past administrations for the failure of North Korea nuclear policy and the resulting security catastrophe. Only then can the government lead the nation and the international community forward with full commitment. There is no time for distraction. U.S.-North Korea nuclear arms reduction talks must not arrive the way the Itaewon disaster did — without warning, and too late.
May 12, 2026 at 07:06PM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)