Word: pyongyang
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...what did the U.S. give in order to achieve this? The primary chit handed over by the U.S. was to take North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism. That sounds important, but Pyongyang has been on that list for more than a decade solely for the purposes of negotiation. The last act that could qualify as a sponsorship of terrorism by North Korea was its involvement in the bombing of a South Korean airliner in 1987, and diplomats have been dangling removal from the list for the better part of ten years as an inducement to give...
...very political list," says Ferguson. "From a technical standpoint they should have been taken off that list a long time ago." Most important, the only significant result of taking the North off the list is that the U.S. is no longer required by law to block international lending to Pyongyang. The U.S. still can, if it likes, block that lending given the control it has over such loans at the World Bank and elsewhere. "If we learn 45 days from now that the North Koreans lied and cheated in their plutonium declaration," says Samore, "there's nothing that prevents...
Still, State department negotiators defend the U.S. move. They argue - and the dreary U.S. diplomatic history with North Korea bears this out - that Pyongyang simply doesn't move if it feels its negotiating partner isn't living up to its promises. In early 2007, for example, the U.S. agreed, over its own Treasury Department's objections, to unfreeze millions of dollars of North Korean assets then held in a bank in Macau. Once it did so, North Korea slowly began dismantling its nuclear reactor at Yongbyan, which provided the plutonium for the 8 to 16 nuclear bombs U.S. intelligence agencies...
...clear that President Bush has given his State Department marching orders to give the North what it wants, when it wants it - providing Pyongyang then delivers on the nuclear agreement. "Action for action," President Bush called this in a statement on Thursday. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a piece in Thursday's Wall Street Journal aimed at pre-empting critics of the deal, wrote: "We will not accept [Pyongyang's] statement on faith. We will insist on verification." That, however, could plausibly be the next stumbling block with Pyongyang, since nothing in the agreements North Korea has signed...
...diplomatic partners (China, Japan, South Korea and Russia) will have 45 days to review Pyongyang's declaration. Going forward, a key question remains: even if it destroys the reactor at Yongbyan, will the North say where it is keeping the nukes that it has already built? Will it reveal where the fabrication of its nuclear weapons took place, since it is clear it was not at Yongbyan? And what about the site of the October 2006 nuclear test? Will the U.S. and its partners insist that that be dismantled...