Leap of Nuclear Faith

Wall Street Journal
Friday, June 27, 2008

North Korea delivered its long-overdue nuclear declaration yesterday, and President Bush immediately announced his intention to remove it from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring nations. We called this "faith-based nonproliferation" when it was first announced in February 2007, and that's still what it looks like today.

Yesterday's accounting is far from the "complete declaration of all nuclear programs" that Pyongyang pledged to supply. There's no mention of nuclear weapons, notwithstanding the device it exploded in October 2006. Also missing is an accounting of its uranium program – despite new evidence of uranium traces found on 18,000 pages of North Korean documents, as reported by the Washington Post last weekend. Nor is there any mention of the North's proliferation, including the nuclear facility in Syria destroyed by Israel last year.

This doesn't sound like nuclear "disarmament," and it's a long way from the Libyan model, whereby Moammar Gadhafi was required to relinquish every aspect of his nuclear program before receiving a clean diplomatic slate.

Mr. Bush nonetheless justifies this deal as the only way to control the North's stash of plutonium, which could be sold or spread around the world. But even here the U.S. is saying it isn't sure of a complete accounting. News reports say the North is admitting to 37 kilograms, enough for about a half dozen weapons. U.S. intelligence believes it could have as much as 50 kilograms.

The U.S. says that with access to the records and reactor at Yongbyon, it should be able to track down any remaining plutonium clues. Our intelligence sources say this will depend on intrusive verification, including snap, on-demand inspections anywhere in North Korea. When we asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about snap inspections last week, she said they would be intrusive enough. We'll wait for those details before joining the believers, and for that matter until the North grants a snap inspection request.

The larger strategic bet is that Kim Jong Il will now finally come in from the Cold War, a la Mikhail Gorbachev. We'd like to believe this too, except that Kim has shown no inclination to open up anything beyond inviting his own elite to hear the New York Philharmonic. He can't reform without collapsing his prison of a regime.

It's more likely that he'll stick to his past pattern: Pocket the U.S. concessions and then threaten proliferation or some other provocation unless we make more concessions. At the very least, he'll now run out the clock until after the U.S. election on the expectation that he can win more concessions from President Obama. Mr. Bush downplayed the terror delisting yesterday, noting that North Korea will still be subject to numerous other sanctions. True enough, but political pressure will build to ease those too, as well as for the World Bank and other international bodies to start sending cash to the North.

This dance of detente is also embarrassing to our Japanese allies, and may even topple Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda. Tokyo wants Pyongyang to come clean about the Japanese citizens it kidnapped in the 1970s and '80s. Mr. Bush said yesterday that "The United States will never forget the abduction[s]," but who can blame the Japanese if they believe the U.S. has sold them out for the sake of this diplomatic "progress."

Most troubling is the message all of this sends to Iran, or other rogue states. The lesson is that when you build a weapon, your political leverage increases. Play enough brinksmanship, and you can even receive diplomatic absolution without admitting to having the kind of nuclear device you exploded less than two years earlier. We understand that diplomacy often includes winks and nods, but it shouldn't require denial.