This article analyzes the conditions under which arms control and confidence building can be accomplished between North and South Korea, and the major issues that will emerge in their negotiation. It places special emphasis on the implications of North Korea's withdrawal from the NPT. Given that the ''last glacier of the Cold War'' still remains, in order for a Korean arms control process to get under way there should be some degree of political confidence-building measures before North and South attempt to negotiate military confidence-building and arms-control measures. Favorable political conditions will have to be present for the Koreas to achieve substantive results in arms control negotiation. So long as they are engaged in a deadly struggle for political legitimacy, they cannot share common interests or values. The international environment is prompting North and South Korea to carry out such negotiation but North Korea's reluctance to make a genuine political reconciliation with the South is becoming the major obstacle. Faithful implementation of February 1992 Reconciliation Agreement and denuclearization declaration will pave the way to peace. Facilitating the nonproliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, essential to peace in Korea, will require both international and Korean processes because it is bound to affect not only the peninsula but Northeast Asia and the world. In the short run, linkage of American and Japanese diplomatic normalization to North Korea's return to the NPT and acceptance of IAEA's special inspections, along with China's skillful persuasion of Pyongyang to do so, will be the most effective means of discouraging North Korea's nuclear ambitions. In the long run the NPT regime must be extended beyond 1995 and even strengthened. To correct military asymmetries in conventional forces, the two sides must undertake transparency measures as the beginning of confidence building before making constraints and reductions in force deployment and structure. Progress will be slow because the North still sees arms control as an end for forcing the US to withdraw troops, whereas the South sees it as a means of reconciliation. The most realistic prospect for arms control in Korea will consist of a gradual political reconciliation, multilateral and bilateral non-proliferation of nuclear and ballistic weapons, bilateral confidence-building and arms-control measures, and international support and guarantees. Above all, collective diplomacy needs to succeed in forcing Pyongyang to abandon the nuclear imperative and choose the economic imperative as its means of survival and security, before the UN Security Council resorts to coercive diplomacy with serious consequences.
