All Too Near to Nuclear

How far away is North Korea from building its own nuclear weapons? The answer provided by CIA Director Robert M. Gates at a House committee hearing this week--”we think a few months to as much as a couple of years”--signals the rapidly approaching moment when power balances in the northwest Pacific could be seriously disrupted.

North Korea’s achievement is a chilling object lesson in what dictatorships can accomplish. Kim Il Sung’s regime, with its absolute control over scarce national resources, has brought a country that has otherwise been left in the backwash of Asian economic development to near-membership in the still rather exclusive nuclear club. Saddam Hussein in Iraq, as the world learned to its shock after last year’s Persian Gulf War, came perilously close to the same accomplishment.

North Korea has agreed with South Korea to ban all nuclear weapons and weapons facilities from their politically divided peninsula. It has also agreed to allow international inspections to verify that it is not covertly seeking a nuclear weapons capability. But the world’s last surviving Stalinist regime seems to be doing all it can to undercut that pledge.

Pyongyang now indicates that in April it will ratify the nuclear safeguards accord it has signed with the International Atomic Energy Agency, a step that could shortly open its nuclear facilities to inspection.

But meanwhile, in its bilateral nuclear talks with South Korea, North Korea is throwing up roadblocks to inspections. And, Gates reports, North Korea has been working feverishly to hide many facilities underground, beyond the vision of reconnaissance satellites or on-site inspectors.

Gates raises a further chilling possibility: that cash-starved North Korea could sell its nuclear know-how--perhaps even weapons--to a country like Libya, which has long been in the market for such technology. The contingent threat posed by Pyongyang’s nuclear program thus has to be seen as not just regional but global in its implications.

The immediate need is to keep up the pressure on North Korea to open all of its nuclear facilities to full international monitoring. The United States should not have to plead for allies in this effort. The danger it has taken the lead in exposing is a danger to the whole world.