Resolve the Nuclear Issue First : At long last, North Korea will let atomic agency inspectors visit

By the end of this month, the International Atomic Energy Agency hopes to have a team of inspectors in North Korea, trying to determine whether that staggeringly backward country has been working to produce its own nuclear weapons.

For the IAEA it has been a long wait--six years, in fact, since the Pyongyang regime signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and agreed to open its nuclear facilities to inspection.

While North Korea has stalled, U.S. intelligence satellites have spotted what seems to be a reprocessing facility to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Robert Gates, director of central intelligence, has told Congress he thinks that North Korea may be close to making a nuclear weapon.

Even if the IAEA inspectors are allowed the full access that Pyongyang has promised, they won’t necessarily be able to determine conclusively what North Korea has been doing. Iraq’s nuclear facilities for years were subject to on-site international inspections, but the scope of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program was revealed only after IAEA inspectors, using information from defectors, began looking where they hadn’t looked before.

American officials months ago pinpointed Yongbyon, about 60 miles north of Pyongyang, as a huge nuclear center. It’s possible that by now much of the equipment housed there has been moved secretly to other, undetected facilities.

It’s also possible that North Korea could have decided that producing nuclear weapons is beyond its capabilities. What it may be trying to do now is hide the evidence of a program it has all along denied having.

The strongest support for that view comes from the country’s abysmal poverty. While its communist leaders have kept North Korea the most closed society on Earth, the glimpses that outsiders are able to get reveal a land miserably underdeveloped and mismanaged. The bizarre amalgam of Marxist dogma and quixotic “self-reliance” preached by Kim Il Sung, absolute ruler of North Korea since it was founded in 1948, has produced chronic hardship.

North Korea has defaulted on its foreign debts; its diplomats have been caught smuggling narcotics to earn foreign exchange; its 23 million people face worsening food shortages. North Korea’s only hope lies in economic aid from outside, especially from Japan. But Tokyo says it won’t help until the nuclear issue--a threat to Japan as well as South Korea and U.S. forces in Northwest Asia--is resolved.

Has Kim Il Sung at last decided that playing the nuclear game is no longer worthwhile? The IAEA inspection might not provide a definitive answer. But out of it could come clues that will help North Korea’s neighbors decide whether they ought to be worrying more, or worrying less, about what that unpredictable country is up to.