§9201 Findings; purposes

Summary

Congress finds that North Korea has repeatedly broken promises to get rid of its nuclear programs and has violated many United Nations Security Council resolutions that call for it to stop developing, testing, and producing weapons of mass destruction. Because of past transfers of sensitive nuclear and missile technology, North Korea is seen as a serious risk for spreading such weapons. The country has been tied to money laundering and other illegal acts, including prohibited arms sales, drug trafficking, counterfeiting U.S. currency, major cyberattacks, and stealing U.S. intellectual property. North Korea withdrew from the Korean War armistice signed at Panmunjom on July 27, 1953, and carried out violent provocations such as sinking the Cheonan (killing 46 on March 26, 2010), shelling Yeonpyeong Island (killing 4 civilians on November 23, 2010), the “DarkSeoul” cyberattacks on March 20, 2013, and planting land mines that maimed 2 South Korean soldiers on August 4, 2015. It runs brutal political prison camps holding as many as 200,000 people in terrible conditions and puts weapons and luxury goods ahead of its people, defying UN resolutions 1695 (2006), 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), and 2094 (2013). Parties that do business with North Korea without strong financial safeguards help its illicit activities. North Korea has also carried out destructive cyberattacks against Sony Pictures and other U.S. persons and is judged to pose an imminent threat to U.S. and allied security, the global economy, U.S. forces, the global financial system, nonproliferation efforts, and the people of North Korea. It has sponsored international terrorism, including assassination attempts on defectors and shipments of weapons to terrorists and state sponsors of terrorism. The chapter’s purposes are to use nonmilitary tools to address this crisis, to give the United States diplomatic leverage to secure needed changes in North Korea’s behavior, to ease the suffering of the North Korean people, and to reaffirm the goals in section 7802 of this title.