Engaging the DPRK enrichment and small LWR program: What would it take?

The unveiling of the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea's (hereafter DPRK's) enrichment and pilot light water reactor program in November 2010 offers another moment for engagement with Pyongyang, another point of leverage over how its nuclear weapons program evolves, and a new opportunity to determine whether it can be influenced to recommit to the global nuclear non proliferation and disarmament regime. We believe that it may be possible to slow and even reverse the DPRK's nuclear breakout by collaboration that assists it to develop small light water reactors (LWRs) that are safe, reliable, and above all, safeguarded, and that integrates its enrichment capacity into a regional enrichment consortium, possibly as part of a Northeast Asian Nuclear Weapon Free Zone. An engagement of this type on nuclear energy issues cannot occur in a vacuum. LWR engagement should be accompanied by engagement on a host of other policy, economic, and humanitarian issues, but most importantly, it must be accompanied by engagement on a wide range of other energy sector issues, ranging from electricity transmission and distribution grid redevelopment, conventional power and fuels supply, and development of energy markets to energy efficiency, renewable energy, with capacity-building across a broad spectrum of energy topics to make implementation possible.