Pyongyang’s Nuclear Threat

Washington is moving quickly to muster support for a U.N. Security Council resolution that would threaten North Korea with sanctions unless it opens its nuclear facilities to international inspection. The matter has become urgent.

Pyongyang says it is withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the agreement entered into by 153 states since 1968 to control the spread of nuclear weapons. Its action can only be taken as ominous confirmation that it is engaged in a secret nuclear arms program that on-site inspections would expose beyond any chance of denial. Under the treaty’s terms withdrawal will occur in 90 days but during that period North Korea is still required to open its nuclear sites to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. At this point it clearly has no intention of doing so.

The seriousness of this challenge can’t be minimized. It undermines both the cause of global non-proliferation and Northeast Asian security.

If North Korea’s action is not forcefully responded to, it could very well inspire other signatories that are pursuing their own covert weapons programs--Iraq and Iran most prominently--to renounce the treaty and close their nuclear facilities to international inspection. If North Korea is able to develop nuclear weapons--and former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger and the Central Intelligence Agency think that either has happened or could very soon--there is a good chance that South Korea and even Japan would feel compelled to become nuclear powers in their own right.

Japan has held up efforts to normalize relations with North Korea largely over the nuclear inspection issue. Some Japanese officials already point nervously to Pyongyang’s work on a new missile that could reach many of Japan’s population centers. North Korea, impoverished by its doddering Stalinist regime, desperately needs the aid and investment Japan could provide. That it seems ready now to forgo this aid, even as it risks loss of its close political ties with China, suggests how great a wager it has made on rolling the nuclear dice.

Tough Security Council action to try to compel Pyongyang to reverse its policy is clearly needed, for an unmistakable threat to international order and stability now exists.