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The United States and Japan should be prepared to deal with a North Korea that has and may even still be developing nuclear weapons more than 10 years from now, even as Korea moves toward national reunification, an Asia report released Friday from an influential American think tank said.

Titled "The U.S.-Japan Alliance: Getting Asia Right through 2020," the report issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) was skeptical of Tuesday's North Korean denuclearization agreement and urged Washington and Tokyo to be "prepared for all scenarios."

"This is a good thing," Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state and one of the lead co-authors of the report, said of the nuclear agreement.

"Whether it's a good deal or not, however, remains to be seen."

He and other authors of the report are pessimistic about "the ability or willingness of the DPRK to come entirely clean," Armitage said, referring to North Korea by the acronym of its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"We have to, we think, sit down with Japan and prepare for the possibility that North Korea will remain in possession of a certain number of nuclear weapons, even as the (Korean) Peninsula comes slowly together for some sort of unification," he said.

South and North Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan, members of the so-called six-party process, struck a deal in Beijing on Tuesday in which Pyongyang would shut down its primary nuclear facilities in return for energy assistance.

North Korea is required to eventually dismantle all of its nuclear weapons and programs, for which it would be given diplomatic normalizations and wide-ranging aid.

The agreement immediately came under fire, with critics charging that the U.S. has rewarded a regime that flirts with nuclear weapons and sent a wrong message to other nuclear-ambitious countries like Iran.

"I think there is a very real risk that we see this as a very first step, and North Korea sees this as the last step," said Kurt Campbell, who helped compile the report.

"It will be really over the course of next year or two that we see how this plays out."

The CSIS report envisions Korea's reunification by 2020 but possibly through a highly risky process.

One scenario involves the North's instability, which could create problems in controlling the country's weapons of mass destruction and burden South Korea so heavily as to disrupt its democratic institutions and economic prosperity, it said.

"Of course, our calculus must also include the possibility that North Korea will continue to build nuclear weapons to 2020 and beyond," it said, and the nuclear issue may be resolved only upon Korean reunification, as was the case of Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"The United States and Japan must be prepared for all of these scenarios, each requiring unprecedented agility in terms of diplomacy and deterrence."

The report recommends that Washington and Tokyo maintain a close working relationship with South Korea to make sure that under any scenario, there would be a coordinated response.

It cites the unresolved history in Northeast Asia as one of the obstacles to regional integration and urges Tokyo to deal objectively with the issues.

"We are confident that Japan, as a democracy, has the strength to deal with its past and to shape a cooperative future with its neighbors," it said.

"That future, however, must be a two-way street with regard to dealing objectively with the past."

The report emphasizes the importance of successfully concluding the ongoing South Korea-U.S. free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations, for political as well as economic reasons.

"Failure to conclude the FTA and have it approved by Congress, which seems to be increasingly likely, may be worse than if the FTA negotiation had not begun," said the report.

"It will also affect, we fear, the perception of the value of a broader U.S.-(South Korea) alliance."

Washington, Feb. 16 (Yonhap News)