A deal to keep with North Korea
TANTALIZINGLY INCOMPLETE information about the Syrian site that Israel struck in a nighttime raid Sept. 6 has been coming out in dribs and drabs. Not surprisingly, hawks inside and outside the Bush administration are trying to use the apparent combination of a surreptitious Syrian nuclear plant and North Korean involvement with it to argue for a change of President Bush's policy for denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.
But there are heartening signs the hard-liners are losing that argument. That is the implication of Bush's refusal to abandon a recent agreement on the disabling of North Korea's nuclear facilities in exchange for parallel American measures that may eventually lead to normalized relations with the North.
Nuclear specialists viewing commercial satellite photos taken in August saw a structure at the Syrian site that resembles North Korea's gas-graphite reactor and a nearby pumping station alongside the Euphrates River that could be used to cool a reactor. These tentative observations, along with hints from anonymous officials about North Korean assistance for a Syrian nuclear project that would violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Syria has signed, do raise troubling questions about both buyer and seller.
On the North Korean side of the equation, the crucial fact is that any transfer of designs, materials or engineering expertise had to predate the denuclearization deal that was finalized a month after the Israeli raid. This is what the hard-liners commonly omit from their brief for annulment of the deal.
If there was no agreement in place when North Korea was involved in nuclear commerce with Syria, the North cannot be accused of breaking its promises. Indeed, a key strategic aim of drawing North Korea into a formal agreement involving China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia as well as the United States was to end not only the North's nuclear threat to its neighbors but also its sales of nuclear materials and know-how to rogue regimes elsewhere in the world.
There are still many important issues to be negotiated with North Korea on the path to a complete and verifiable ceding of its nuclear weapons program. The North will have to produce a full and accurate listing of all its nuclear assets; it will have to permit intrusive inspections; and it will have to get completely out of the business of peddling its nuclear wares to any willing buyer.
But it is encouraging that Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates continue to defend a diplomatic deal with North Korea that represents the administration's sole achievement in the realm of nuclear nonproliferation. A lesson of the Israeli strike against the Syrian site is that a negotiated nonproliferation agreement can be the soundest way to avoid the temptation of preemptive military attacks. 