Let’s say you were Kim Jong Il, and your goal were to stay in power. Suppose, further, that you wished to continue clandestine proliferation activities, knowing that possession of atomic weapons shielded you from attack, and that the sale of ballistic missiles and nuclear technologies to your allies Iran and Syria helped undermine the power and leverage of your enemy, the United States.
Imagine that, and you should also imagine yourself a happy man today.
That’s of course not what the U.S. headlines would say. If you bothered to read the translations, you would find accounts of a diplomatic breakthrough for the Bush administration, which on Thursday announced that it was removing your regime from its list of terror sponsors, and lifting some economic sanctions, in return for disclosure of details about your efforts to make weapons-grade plutonium. Come Saturday, you would see all the U.S. networks broadcasting footage of the demolition of the cooling tower at your Yongbyon nuclear reactor. You would note a guarded but general optimism among U.S. commentators that you were gradually keeping your part of the bargain to abandon your nuclear program in exchange for the turning back on of the aid spigot to your regime.
So why would you be happy?
To begin with, you’d still be sitting on top of a small but strategically valuable nuclear arsenal. You would know that the disclosure documents you just turned over say nothing of these; nor would you have committed to destroy them. You would not have disclosed — as required by the six-party agreement — anything about the secret uranium-enrichment activities of which you have long been suspected. Also required, and also dodged, would be any disclosure of the extent to which you have provided nuclear technologies to your client states, particularly Syria, whose efforts to build a nuclear reactor you assisted even after the six-party agreement was concluded — right up until the Israeli air force took notice and destroyed the reactor site. Your cooperation with Iran on missile technologies would be proceeding without a hitch. Your decision to shut down Yongbyon would be entirely symbolic: The reactor had reached the end of its life, and had given you pretty much all the weaponizable plutonium it could. You would know there was no verification mechanism in place even for the limited disclosure you had made — so if you were lying, you’d feel pretty sure to get away with it.
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