A Small and Odious Club

Iraq isn’t the only rogue state where monitoring suspected secret weapons facilities is a matter of compelling international concern. A team of U.S. specialists is now in North Korea, seeking permission to inspect an underground complex that intelligence analysts think may be involved in developing nuclear weapons. If that proves to be true, or even if Pyongyang refuses to permit access to the site, it will become impossible to continue with the agreement made in 1994 by South Korea, Japan and the United States to pay for building two light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea.

That deal, known as the Agreed Framework, required North Korea to freeze its program to extract plutonium from the fuel rods of its two existing nuclear reactors. Plutonium is much harder to produce from the light-water reactors that are being built to replace the Soviet-supplied units. Some evidence suggests that North Korea may have been able to secrete enough plutonium from these older reactors to make one or two nuclear devices.

North Korea often acts as if it inhabits a different planet, and its response to the U.S. inspection request was typically bizarre. The price of admission, it announced, would be cash “reparations,” with $500 million mentioned as a reasonable sum. What Pyongyang can expect instead, should it refuse to cooper-ate, is both the suspension of the $4.6-billion reactor program and the loss of hundreds of thousands of tons of heavy fuel oil the United States has been providing to meet North Korea’s energy needs while the reactors are being built.

Just as Iraq has behaved irrationally in forgoing $120 billion in oil revenues so that it can keep its illicit weapons programs alive, so is wretchedly poor and starving North Korea working against its national interests by inviting enormously costly consequences should it be caught cheating on the Agreed Framework. Pyongyang seems almost to be daring the United States and its partners in the energy consortium to suspend the 1994 deal. This simply makes no sense. That con-sideration, unhappily, has seldom been a deterrent to reckless behavior by North Korea in the past.