August 21, 2007
North Korean "nuclear buyout" plan announced
Suppose you are the paranoid leader of a dynastic Stalinist state, and you’ve got the bomb. What do you do with it?
Start a war? Perhaps---but this course of action would bring a very swift and unpleasant end to your own regime.
Far better to blackmail the world and extract a payoff, which is exactly what the government of Kim Jong-il accomplished over the weekend:
GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) -- North Korea agreed Sunday to declare and disable all its nuclear facilities by the end of the year, the chief U.S. negotiator said -- the first time the communist country has offered a timeline to end its secretive atomic program.
And now the catch:
In exchange, the economically struggling North will receive oil and other aid. The United States, as part of the agreement, promised to begin the process of removing the country from the terrorism list and work toward full diplomatic relations.
North Korea has already received 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil from Seoul in return for the shutdown of its plutonium reactor in July.
The energy-starved country will eventually get further energy or other aid equivalent to 950,000 tons of heavy fuel oil in return for irreversibly disabling the reactor and ending all its nuclear programs ---CNN
You knew that was coming, didn’t you? The North Korean government is not only repressive and anachronistic---it is also hopelessly incompetent. More than fifty years of rule by the Kims has left the Asian nation on the brink of starvation.
While I am not happy about rewarding Pyongyang for bad behavior, I am able to look at the situaiton philosophically. Before this is said and done, millions of U.S. tax dollars will almost certainly find their way to North Korea in one form or another. In the long run, however, this will be a lot cheaper than fighting a war over North Korea’s nukes.
Nevertheless, North Korea assured the world that it was dismantling its nuclear program back in 1994, and that turned out to be an enormous lie. The North Korean should never, under any circumstances, be trusted; so let us hope that the buyout deal includes plenty of verification measures. Otherwise, this sorry drama will be repeating itself within a few years.
