The Real Crisis: North Korea's Nuclear Gambit. (End Paper)

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While the world's attention was fixated on Iraq, a more urgent crisis was brewing in Northeast Asia. In the midst of the protracted confrontation and war with Iraq, the deeply isolated, erratic, and unpredictable government of North Korea openly resurrected its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, and since then has taken serious strides toward the achievement of that objective. Iraq's nuclear weapons program was largely, if not entirely, destroyed by the United Nations as a consequence of UN inspection efforts during the 1990s, and there is presently no evidence that the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed the capability to manufacture nuclear weapons in the immediate future. In contrast, Pyongyang currently possesses the nuclear infrastructure and materials to produce some nuclear weapons in a matter of months, if not weeks. If North Korea succeeds in doing so, one of the world's most troubling and frightening regimes will have joined the nuclear club. If this happens. US security will be jeopardized, Northe ast Asia will be less stable, and the world will be a more dangerous place. Because the timeline to nuclear acquisition is so short and the consequences of a nuclear-armed North Korea are so adverse, this is the crisis that should have been at the top of the international agenda in the first months of 2003.

This is not the first time that Pyongyang has provoked a nuclear crisis. Indeed, North Korea has been playing nuclear games for more than a decade. In 1985, the country acceded to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and hence voluntarily assumed an international legal obligation to forsake nuclear weapons. For a number of years thereafter, however, it failed to reach a safeguards agreement to allow its …