Will Pyongyang Spurn the Deal? : U.S. needs to respond to North Korea’s latest challenge with resolve

Republicans in Congress are skeptical about the nuclear deal the United States struck with North Korea last October but have been wary about trying to kill it because they don’t know what to offer in its place. Pyongyang may be ready to help them resolve this dilemma by scuttling the whole accord.

Basically, the accord would provide the Stalinist regime with two modern light-water reactors as an inducement not to pursue a nuclear weapons program. North Korea now says that if Washington demands that the reactors come from South Korea, it’s prepared to abandon the agreement. U.S. insistence that the reactors be of South Korean origin has been understood from the beginning, a basic and valid reason being that Seoul has agreed to bear most of the $4-billion cost of the deal.

The Clinton Administration’s response to Pyongyang’s effort to change the four-month-old understanding must be unequivocal: Either North Korea will accept South Korean reactors or the deal will truly be off.

North Korea is questioning the safety of the South Korean reactors. Its real concerns of course lie elsewhere. First, it fears it would be supremely embarrassed if it accepted first-class technology from a hated rival that it has for decades portrayed as poor, backward and ignorant. Second, it is loath to expose all of the country’s manifold weaknesses to the gaze of the South Korean technicians who would be involved in installing and starting up the reactors.

Is North Korea serious about walking away from the nuclear agreement if it can’t get its way? Maybe. While little is known about the inner politics of the world’s most closed society, it is possible that military and other hard- liners are determined to continue with the nuclear weapons program at whatever cost. If that’s the case, better to find out now rather than years down the road, when a heavy investment has been made and the reactor project is already well under way.

The United States has played fair on this controversial deal from the onset. The manipulation, threats and tantrums have all come from Pyongyang. The only possible U.S. response to this latest challenge from North Korea is firmness and resolve.