“Last time I met with North Koreans was a year ago in Kuala Lumpur in a track-1.5 meeting. I asked my interlocutor, Amb. Han, what he thought the nuclear weapons that could reach the U.S. would do for North Korea. He said it changes everything,” Gallucci said, recalling the meeting.

  “I said it only changes one thing. When you have that capability, you will be on our target list. Other than that, I don’t think it changes anything,” he quoted himself as telling the North Korean side at that time.

“They think they are in a different posture, a stronger posture. My own view is that deterrence works, they are not suicidal, and we have overwhelming capability to defend and deter,”

Gallucci noted.

The U.S. has successfully overcome its vulnerability to potential nuclear attacks from Russia and China for many decades and “there’s no reason to assume that the leadership in Pyongyang is any more enthusiastic about suicide than the leaderships in Moscow or Beijing,” he said, adding that “the situation is manageable without the use of force” by the U.S.

Gallucci said the bar should be lowered for resuming talks with North Korea, adding sanctions alone won’t lead to any solution of the North Korean nuclear issue.

“Were we better off with the (Agreed Framework) deal than we would have been without the deal? ... the answer is clearly yes,”

he said. Without the U.S.-North Korea deal, North Korea would have made about 100 nuclear weapons before 2000 as the U.S. intelligence community has predicted. Instead, North Korea had zero nuclear weapons when former President George W. Bush came into office in 2000, he pointed out.

The 71-year-old former diplomat also argued sanctions alone would not interdict North Korea’s ballistic and nuclear capabilities, drive the country back to the negotiating table or bring down the North Korean regime from the inside, with China unwilling to implement the sanctions to the point of bringing the regime down.

Instead, a multi-stage deal should be pursued to find a way out of the crisis, he said.

“If we make a deal with North Korea again, it has to be a stage deal. It must conclude with a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.

There’s no other way,” he said.

“We don’t expect to start there. North Koreans are deadly serious in their commitment to keep nuclear weapons forever and we should be serious that the end game will be a nuclear free Korean Peninsula,” Gallucci said, adding that “the negotiation is a matter of figuring out how you stage a solution that meets the objectives of both sides.”

Still, North Korea’s dismal human rights record is likely to be “a major obstacle” to any talks with North Korea this time around, since when making the 1994 deal the U.S. put that issue aside because nuclear weapons were a hard enough issue to deal with, he said. (Yonhap)