U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry emerged from the latest round of Iran nuclear talks in Geneva earlier this month to say that negotiators are "clearly further down the road in understanding what the remaining challenges are." Yet with talks due to resume Wednesday, Mr. Kerry and his team have yet to address one of the biggest challenges: the example set by North Korea, which over the past two decades has shown the world-Iran, not least-how a rogue state can exploit over-eager western diplomacy to haggle and cheat its way to the nuclear bomb.
Since 1994, North Korea has cut a series of nuclear freeze deals, collecting security guarantees, diplomatic concessions and material benefits along the way. North Korea has cheated and reneged on every deal. Today, the Kim regime has uranium enrichment facilities, has restarted (again) its plutonium-producing nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, has conducted a series of increasingly successful long-range missile tests, and has carried out three nuclear tests, in 2006, 2009 and 2013.
Recent commercial satellite imagery of North Korea's Punggye-ri underground nuclear test site shows two freshly dug tunnel entrances and continuing excavation, according to a recent report from the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. If past activity is any guide, these signs augur the next nuclear test.
To understand the scale of Korean nuclear perfidy, one needs to trace the history of the three grand bargains struck in 1994, 2005 and 2007, not to mention a spate of lesser deals. Under the 1994 Agreed Framework reached under former President Bill Clinton, North Korea agreed to freeze and ultimately dismantle its nuclear weapons program, including its main reactor at Yongbyon. In return, the U.S. would move toward normalizing relations with Pyongyang, lead a consortium to finance and build two lightwater reactors on North Korea's east coast, and, pending their completion, provide North Korea with 500,000 tons annually of heavy fuel oil.
The idea, similar to the step-by-step approach the U.S. is now pursuing with Iran, was that the deal would unfold in phases, each replete with verification and rewards, leading to a more friendly and benign North Korea. Instead, North Korea carried on with missile proliferation not directly covered in the Agreed Framework.
The Kim regime shut down its Yongbyon reactor, but began to cheat and renege on other aspects of the deal, blocking inspectors and doing business with Pakistan's A.Q. Khan nuclear network. In 1999, a congressional panel called the North Korea Advisory Group reported that in the five years since the signing of the Agreed Framework, the threat of North Korea's proliferation activities, had "advanced considerably."
