Posted on: Thursday, April 29, 2004

EDITORIAL
North Korea nukes: a situation worsens

The only possible good news in all of this is the hope that the CIA, in estimating that North Korea now has eight nuclear weapons, might be just as mistaken as it was in Iraq.

That's unlikely, however, given that international inspectors were for years stationed — until late 2002 — at the reactor that housed the spent plutonium fuel rods that the North Koreans themselves say they used to make their new weapons.

North Korea isn't officially a nuclear power, not having conducted a test blast. But it doesn't need to be a full-fledged member to be a grave danger. The cash-strapped hermit kingdom can peddle weapons to other rogue nations or to terrorist groups.

What is perplexing is why the current administration, so clearly assertive in its foreign policy elsewhere, has settled into indecision as North Korea steadily and more or less openly moved toward nuclear power status.

The Bush administration could have bought itself months and perhaps years more time to deal with the situation if it hadn't walked away from a deal engineered by the Clinton administration in 1994. Bush appointees were calling that agreement a dead letter even before they took office in 2001.

But that agreement, if nothing else, was reliably keeping North Korean plutonium under international surveillance. When the White House learned that North Korea was cheating on the agreement by working on a separate uranium-enrichment process (supplied by our Pakistani allies), it quickly halted work on its end of the agreement. North Korea in turn expelled the observers, removed the plutonium to an unknown location and, to all appearances, began building weapons. The CIA believes North Korea obtained enough plutonium before 1994 to possibly build two weapons.

The uranium process is nowhere near to producing enough fissionable material to make weapons. Had the United States chosen to keep the 1994 agreement alive, North Korea's nuclear capability, while worrisome, would now be no greater than it was in 1994.

Clinton won the 1994 agreement by threatening to attack the North Korean facility at Yongbyon, taking the nation to the brink of war.

As dangerous as Clinton's brinksmanship with North Korea might have been, the wait-and-see game in which the North has, according to the latest news, developed a strong plutonium program is even more dangerous to security in the region.

If the CIA is right, North Korea is or soon will be a frightening nuclear power despite the president's tough but empty words.