On a sparkling Indian summer day fifteen years ago, I was waiting in front of the Pyongyang Hotel with a British documentary producer. Our North Korean "counterparts" were picking us up for another round of "discussions" about when, where and what our film crew would be allowed to shoot. "They're all a bunch of liars," we agreed, after days of bluff, prevarication, dissembling and bait-and-switch games using even their own people. North Korea recognizes no ethic, law or morality that obtains beyond its water's edge, except for one: the Western doctrine of the sovereign equality of all nations, to which it clings with a passion and an almost quaint sincerity. Sometime in 1998, we are told, the North Koreans made a deal with our longtime ally in Islamabad: their missiles for Pakistan's uranium-enrichment technology. Sometime this past summer, we are again told, evidence that they are manufacturing enriched uranium came to light. If they maximize their efforts, using 1,000 centrifuges that they may or may not have, they could manufacture one or two very large and unwieldy atomic bombs every year.

When James Kelly of the State Department confronted them with evidence of this activity in early October, according to him they at first denied it and then admitted it, not without a certain belligerent satisfaction. On October 19 a high-level US official said the 1994 Framework Agreement that froze the North's graphite nuclear reactor at Yongbyon was null and void, a self-fulfilling prophecy since Bush's people declared it a dead letter soon after taking office. Thus comes to an end, it seems, the only diplomatic effort to solve a serious problem in Korea since the 1953 armistice. (There is nothing in the agreement prohibiting uranium enrichment, Bush spokespersons to the contrary, but the North certainly violated the spirit of the agreement.) This was a fully verifiable agreement under which thousands of plutonium fuel rods, the makings of five to ten bombs, were encased in concrete under UN inspection protocols. North Korea is still in compliance with it. But if the Framework Agreement is indeed dead, nothing prevents the North from extracting that fuel and making even more weapons.

The United States, of course, never lies or violates anyone's sovereignty. In 1957 the Eisenhower Administration deliberated secretly about how to become the first power to introduce nuclear weapons into the Korean peninsula even though the 1953 armistice agreement prohibited such a qualitative leap into weapons of mass destruction. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles worried that he would need "publishable evidence confirming Communist violations of the armistice sufficient to justify such action to our Allies and before the UN." But it wasn't there; the Communist side had introduced new weaponry but so had the United States, and neither constituted a radical upgrade of capabilities. Washington went ahead anyway, and from 1958 to 1991 maintained in the Korean theater hundreds of nuclear-tipped rockets, atomic bombs, battlefield tactical nukes and atomic demolition mines. George Bush Senior removed them at the end of 1991 because he couldn't pressure the North about its reactor until he did. But that didn't end the nuclear threat.

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