Curbing Korea's nukes

North Korea's secretive leader Kim Jong Il is a nuclear cheat and an extortionist. The world will only believe his pledge yesterday to scrap nuclear weapons when United Nations inspectors can verify it.

Still, North Korea may just be on the verge of taking a sensible cue from Libya and pre-war Iraq in abandoning weapons of mass destruction. If so, U.S. President George Bush will have managed to isolate Iran as the world's last truly worrisome nuclear renegade, and Tehran will be under intense pressure not to build a bomb it does not have, or need.

That was the hope raised by yesterday's announcement that China had brokered a deal between the United States and North Korea to ease a three-year crisis on the Korean Peninsula, home to 70 million.

This cools a bitter conflict between Washington and Pyongyang. It rewards South Korea's "sunshine policy" of engagement with the North. It shows the U.S. can accomplish more by working closely with countries like China, Russia and Japan.

In principle, Kim has agreed to "abandon" his one or two nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees and aid. He will allow U.N. inspectors back in and rejoin the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

This eases a crisis triggered in 2002 when Bush exposed Kim for cheating on a 1994 pledge to freeze plutonium-based efforts to build a weapon in exchange for aid. The Koreans were secretly using another route: enriched uranium.

Kim then expelled U.N. inspectors, cut U.N. seals on a mothballed reactor at Yongbyon, withdrew from the non-proliferation regime and announced he had the bomb.

Bush threatened to have the U.N. declare Pyongyang an outlaw, urged sanctions and contemplated military action to prevent Kim from giving terrorists nuclear materials.

In exchange for Kim's climb-down yesterday, Bush has pledged to respect the North's sovereignty, has affirmed he won't attack, has muted a demand that Kim give up civilian atomic power, and has agreed to provide aid and energy supplies. In effect, this resurrects the 1994 deal.

In November, the diplomats hope to negotiate the "sequencing" of all this. That will be tricky.

Kim deserves an early reward in food, energy and aid. But he can't be trusted. The U.N. must have speedy access to nuclear sites to deter cheating. And Kim should shut down the Yongbyon reactor.

His pledges are welcome. Prompt follow-up would be better yet.