Sometimes Later Is Far Too Late : Fast action is needed in light of growing fear that North Korea is building nuclear weapons

North Korea’s refusal to allow impartial international inspection of its nuclear facilities, after agreeing last year that it would do so, feeds concerns that the most secretive, isolated and repressive of the surviving communist countries is rushing to build its own nuclear weapons. As a result the U.N. Security Council may soon be asked to take action, probably economic sanctions, to try to compel North Korea to meet its obligations as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United States could be expected to lead in pushing for a forceful U.N. move. But the effort deserves the broadest support, not least from North Korea’s immediate neighbors, China and Russia.

This week the International Atomic Energy Agency gave the Pyongyang regime one month to open to inspection two sites that are believed to be secret nuclear installations, saying it is “essential and urgent” that IAEA experts be allowed to judge for themselves what is going on. The IAEA has no enforcement powers. But it can refer the issue to the Security Council, which does have powers to act, not least if it perceives a threat to peace. That perception ought to be clear and immediate. Nuclear weapons in the hands of a regime with a record of sordid behavior as long as North Korea’s could be seen as unquestionably imperiling regional peace.

It has been just a year since then-CIA Director Robert M. Gates told a congressional committee that North Korea could be anywhere from a few months to several years away from being able to make its own nuclear weapons. This week R. James Woolsey, Gates’ successor, indicated that the low end of that estimate may be more accurate. There is a “real possibility,” Woolsey said, that North Korea has fabricated enough material for at least one nuclear weapon. North Korea is also producing--and exporting to such states as Iran and Syria--long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

North Korea’s suspected nuclear weapons program presents one of those developing challenges where it makes far more sense for resolute international economic and diplomatic intervention to occur sooner rather than later, because delay could well give North Korea the time to build an arsenal that by itself could be used as blackmail to forestall any punitive measures. The IAEA is seeking nothing from Pyongyang that it hasn’t sought from other signers of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. If it doesn’t get what it wants, the United Nations should move quickly to call North Korea to account.