N.Korea ‘to Stay on Terror List Until Verification Is Agreed’ N.Korea Halts Nuclear Disablement Korea and U.S. Carefully Assess Pyongyang's Nuclear Ambitions U.S. Democrats Committed to Denuclearizing N.Korea N.Korea 'Starts Reassembling Nuke Facilities' N.Korea ‘Breaking IAEA Seals at Nuclear Facility’

That agreement says Washington would remove North Korea from its list of terrorism sponsoring states if the communist country takes steps to disable its nuclear facilities and submits a nuclear inventory. But after the agreement, the U.S. government faced fierce opposition from within its ranks to striking North Korea from that list without verifying whether the nuclear inventory the North belatedly submitted was credible. Thus delisting has been delayed until now while the U.S. and North Korea have been engaged in a tug of war over the issue of verifying the content of the nuclear inventory. North Korea’s latest announcement shows talks have broken down.

It was a hasty decision on the part of the Bush administration, already in trouble over Iraq, to seek to win diplomatic points by hastily agreeing with North Korea to take it off the list before a proper system of verification was put in place. South Korea and the U.S. must see clearly the consequences of haste for the sake of political expediency when dealing with a country like North Korea in sensitive nuclear negotiations.

But North Korea should also realize that it has nothing to gain from reviving a sense of nuclear crisis after it started disablement and blew up its cooling tower at the Yongbyon plant. Verification of the contents of its nuclear inventory has to happen sooner or later. If North Korea, after delaying that process until now, says that it can scrap the entire agreement, the international community would have to doubt the veracity of the North’s determination to abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions. The reason why North Korea so desperately wants to be removed from the U.S. list is probably because it wants to be treated properly by the international community. If it has truly decided to give up its nuclear ambitions, it has no reason to threaten the world over the verification process.

North Korea may hope to get a better deal from the next U.S. administration, which takes office in 2009, by creating a sense of nuclear crisis. But nobody in either the Democratic or Republican parties would fall for such a used and abused tactic.

North Korea must abandon its nuclear ambitions no matter what crises and changes we end up facing to achieve this. Verification is at the core of North Korea’s nuclear disablement. The Lee Myung-bak administration and the new U.S. administration should not back down in their resolve to verify the North’s nuclear inventory by collecting samples from suspicious North Korea regions, making unannounced visits and subjecting North Korean nuclear facilities to international scrutiny.