That was the condition for U.S. aid and incentives to North Korea set by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice when she announced the six-party agreement to bring North Korea’s multi-faceted nuclear weapons programs under international control, and ultimately dismantle them.
As expected, the minute the agreement was signed the North Koreans charged forward at top speed – not to implement it, but to stall, while insisting vociferously that they must reap all the promised fruits.
Former Undersecretary of State and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton does not believe the North Koreans will ever get rid of their nuclear weapons because they are “integral to the survival of King Jong Il’s regime.”
Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on April 5 along with AEI scholars Nicholas Eberhardt and Dan Blumenthal, Bolton argued that nuclear weapons were North Korea’s “ultimate trump card against the United States, Japan, China,” and indeed, against the North Korean people. “North Korea cannot give those weapons up in a way that we would consider acceptable and verifiable without fundamentally undermining the regime itself.”
President Bush set a high standard shortly after the agreement was announced two months ago.
“Those who say that the North Koreans have got to prove themselves by actually following through on the deal are right. And I’m one of them,” he said “[N]ow it’s up to the North Koreans to do that which they say they will do.”
And today, we can see that they haven’t. So what are we going to do about it?
According to Bolton, very little.
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