Elation Grounded in Skepticism : Is Pyongyang ready to play ball?

President Clinton spoke with some caution Wednesday as he announced plans to resume high-level talks with North Korea, and he would have been remiss not to. The history of the American-North Korean dialogue, which includes two rounds of intense if frustrating meetings last year, does not encourage any abundance of confidence in Pyongyang’s commitment to resolving the nuclear crisis it has invited.

This time, to be sure, North Korea may really be ready to swap its suspected nuclear weapons program for international aid for its rickety economy and greater political respectability, including even Washington’s diplomatic recognition. Alternatively, it may only once again be stalling, as it has so often in the past, while it proceeds apace with its nuclear development.

That possibility isn’t necessarily lessened by Clinton’s assurance that Pyongyang has agreed to the three conditions set by the United States: that recently removed spent fuel from its experimental reactor won’t be reprocessed to extract plutonium for weapons, that the reactor won’t be refueled and that international inspectors will be allowed to keep watch at the reactor site. North Korea can agree to these things and still continue secret work on its nuclear program. As U.S. intelligence officials have noted, North Korea has other suspected nuclear facilities to which inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency have been refused access. What’s going on at those sites is anyone’s guess.

From the beginning of this crisis, speculation about what the world’s most isolated and insular regime might be up to has divided along two main lines. One is that Pyongyang’s nuclear program is above all a bargaining chip, to be exchanged at the appropriate moment for the aid it so desperately needs and the recognition it so desperately craves. The other line holds that North Korea’s nuclear weapons plans are scarily real, that Kim Il Sung is determined to build bombs not just for himself but, for the right price, to share with such other menacing states as Iran and Libya.

The message that former President Jimmy Carter brought back from his trip to Pyongyang last week was that Kim was ready to be conciliatory. Official diplomatic soundings confirmed an interest in renewed talks. Sometime soon, then, the United States will have a chance to assess Pyongyang’s inclinations firsthand. “The world will be the winner if we can resolve this,” Clinton said Wednesday.

Then the President added the essential reference to reality: “But we haven’t done it yet.”