EDITORIAL
Coaxing that genie back into the bottle

Perhaps it's just the glow of optimism natural at the new year, but there's a hint of thaw in the air in some unexpected places.

Libya appears to be nearing the end of a years-long effort to come in from the cold. Having agreed to payments to the families of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing victims, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has now pledged to give up his unconventional weapons programs.

Libya, it turns out, was much closer to building nuclear weapons than American intelligence had suspected. Gadhafi finally came clean on his clandestine programs after a shipment of sophisticated centrifuge equipment was intercepted en route to Libya.

While claiming its nuclear programs are entirely for peaceful energy purposes, Iran has also retreated substantially in agreeing to allow intrusive international inspections of its facilities.

And even North Korea continues to insist that it is willing to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions in exchange for extensive aid, an end to sanctions and an American pledge of nonaggression.

In the latest hopeful sign, North Korea has invited a group of U.S. citizens, including a nuclear expert, to visit later this month. But the invitation was immediately downplayed by U.S. officials who said it wasn't coordinated with the Bush administration and only hinted at the possibility of a visit to the Yongbyon nuclear complex.

Before they were expelled in December 2002, international inspectors had verified that 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods were not being reprocessed into weapons-grade material. Pyongyang now claims to have reprocessed all of this material, which if true would give it sufficient material to make perhaps a half-dozen nuclear weapons. It is thought North Korea had enough material a decade ago to make one or two weapons. And recently, North Korea has threatened to test such a weapon to demonstrate its membership in the nuclear "club."

These grim possibilities make welcome even the least signs of warming.

It's difficult to know whether these hints of nuclear thaw, to the degree that they may be genuine, indicate that sanctions work — that Libya, Iran and North Korea are in varying degrees tired of estrangement from the world at large — or whether the sight of Saddam Hussein emerging, dazed and rumpled, from his spider hole may have made a lasting personal impression on Gadhafi, the mullahs and Kim Jong Il.

We must resist the temptation to give up on preventing nuclear proliferation. It's enough to remember that South Africa, in 1990, recognized that its national interests were better served by dismantling and renouncing its nuclear weapons.

We must work hard for the day that Iran, Libya and North Korea also see the light.