Pyongyang blackmail

It is doubly bad news that North Korea is building a secret underground nuclear facility. First, the idea that its Stalinist, hostile and repressive regime may once again -- or still - be committed to acquiring nuclear weapons is ominous in its own right. But the report calls into question as well a 1994 U.S.- North Korean agreement that is the basis for all other American dealings with that isolated state.

From the start there has been a question of who was stringing whom along with that agreement. Alarmed that North Korea was accumulating weapons-grade plutonium, the United States in 1994 agreed to lead a coalition of interested nations that would provide the impoverished North Koreans with two nuclear reactors of no military use, and a quantity of fuel oil, in exchange for the mothballing of a plutonium-producing reactor and other weapons facilities. The idea was to buy time, assuming that the world's last pure Stalinist dictatorship could not last forever, and it was a chance worth taking. But the danger was that the North Koreans were buying time themselves, taking advantage of U.S. generosity while pursuing their nuclear ambitions.

There is no question but that thousands are dying of hunger; there is no question but that this starvation is entirely political, a result of North Korea's flawed economics and the regime's total denial of freedom to its people. The West provides free food nonetheless. This is in part out of humanitarian principles and the belief that food should never be a political weapon, but it is also out of fear that a collapse in North Korea could cause the regime to lash out in some lunatic and destructive way.

On both counts, in other words, the North Korean regime successfully has practiced the politics of blackmail. Of North Korea is taking the ransom (fuel and food) and going ahead with its weapons program, then it becomes clear that North Korea is stringing America along and not the reverse.

So far the Clinton administration insists, at least in public, that North Korea is not yet in violation of the 1994 agreement. We hope that in private it is delivering a far firmer message. If North Korea's nuclear program is continuing, it should not take long to figure that the whole deal must be off.

-- The Washington Post