North Korea Has Agreed To Shut Down Its Nuclear Program. Is He Really Ready to Disarm?

For all its pomp and circumstance--the police-escorted limousines, the grand conference rooms, the hordes of assistants and aides--international diplomacy can be a grind. For three years, Christopher Hill had sought a deal to disarm North Korea, only to be frustrated at every turn. But in the early hours of Feb. 13, that changed. Shortly before 3 a.m., the U.S. negotiator returned to his hotel room in Beijing with a deal in hand, thanks to arm twisting of North Korea by the Chinese. "They kept us up late," Hill said later. He wasn't the only one losing sleep. His boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, phoned him at 4:15 in the morning Washington time to go over final details, checking in with Hill for the 12th time in three days. "He thought he had a tentative agreement," she told reporters Tuesday, "but I called him ... to make sure."

When dealing with North Korea, "making sure" is always the hardest part. Since 1994, when the Clinton Administration cajoled Pyongyang into promising to abandon its nuclear-weapons program, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il has repeatedly made and then reneged on such accords. For the Bush Administration, whose officials had once speculated openly about regime change, the agreement signed on Feb. 13 represented a marked shift to diplomacy. But have the U.S. and its four negotiating partners--South Korea, China, Russia and Japan--laid a solid foundation for eliminating Kim Jong Il's nuclear arsenal? Or is this agreement, as one former U.S. negotiator puts it, "just another false start, destined to end badly"?

The Administration can't be accused of overhyping what it got in Beijing. This was not a comprehensive solution that could bring about a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. Under the pact, North Korea agreed to shut down within 60 days its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, where it's believed to have produced the fissile material needed to make the six to 10 nuclear weapons Kim is estimated to possess. Pyongyang has also promised to allow international inspectors into the country to verify compliance. In return, the North is to receive an emergency shipment of fuel oil from the U.S., China, Russia and South Korea. If all that goes well, Pyongyang would receive more humanitarian aid, and the U.S. and North Korea would begin discussing an end to the standoff between the two countries that has lasted for more than a half-century.

Don't get your hopes up just yet. The Beijing agreement calls for Pyongyang "to discuss all of its nuclear programs." To the U.S. and its partners, that means the North must eventually dismantle both its plutonium-based weapons program and a suspected uranium-enrichment program. But Pyongyang, after first admitting to the uranium program when confronted about it by the U.S. in 2002, has since denied its existence--and may well have hidden it away deep inside a mountain somewhere in the countryside, beyond the reach of international inspectors. If Kim refuses to come clean about the uranium-enrichment program, the deal could come undone.

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