Korea Pact: Less Than Meets the Eye : Kim Il Sung is still stalling on the all-important requirement of nuclear plant inspection

In the last few months officials from North and South Korea have met on more amicable terms than at any other time since their country was divided at the beginning of the Cold War in 1945. But this modest if welcome improvement in the political atmosphere has yet to translate into normal relations or a formal peace to replace the military armistice that ended the Korean War 39 years ago.

Tantalizing gestures from the north have yet to be matched by tangible deeds. Nothing has yet happened to encourage the hope that the United States might soon be able to withdraw some or all of the 40,000 troops it stations in South Korea.

This week the two Koreas put into effect accords pledging that they would not go to war against each other and that their peninsula would be free of nuclear arms. How good are these agreements? The historical lesson in regard to both non-aggression and non-nuclear pacts is that they are only as good as the enforcement mechanisms behind them. North Korea continues to invite plenty of doubts about its intentions.

President Kim Il Sung’s regime is still stalling on the all-important requirement that it open its nuclear plants to International Atomic Energy Agency inspection. U.S. intelligence monitoring indicates that North Korea is going all out to develop nuclear weapons. What’s needed is full-scale and unhindered on-site inspection to find just what the nuclear program involves. In its absence, Pyongyang’s solemn promise not to produce, acquire or deploy nuclear arms isn’t credible.

The real test of whether Pyongyang is in fact ready to forsake totalitarianism will come only when this most closed of societies opens its border to visits between war-divided families and to unfettered postal and telecommunications links with the south. When--if--that happens, South Korea, the United States and most of all the 23 million North Koreans, whose impoverishment has steadily deepened under Stalinist economic mismanagement, can begin to think genuine change is possible.