As of now, no reliable inspection method exists for detecting the presence of a nuclear weapon in the millions of shipping containers that enter American or other Western nations' ports each week, nor the means of tracing the genesis of such after it has exploded. The perpetrators of an Al-Qaeda nuclear attack are unlikely to be traced, and, in any case, the fingerprints of Pyongyang would not be directly evident. It is a low-risk policy for Pyongyang. Its main advantage would not consist of the funds provided by Al-Qaeda, but the probable disorientation and weakening of the United States, Pyongyang's main enemy.

The Fundamental Problem

The nature of the regime provides an impenetrable barrier for any policy of verification of agreements. Nuclear disarmament is extremely unlikely without regime change.

The most important starting point for any understanding is recognition that this is a totalitarian tyranny. Like Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao Zedong's China, Enver Hoxha's Albania, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, this type of regime is the most extreme in terms of the regime's suspicion of its citizens, not to mention foreigners, and the pervasiveness of state controls of the economy and society. It is also a highly personalized regime, led by a deeply paranoid dictator.

We have learned, or should have learned from the behavior of the other examples of this, that the system of total control is a matter of regime choice, not necessity. The regime will not be subject to economic incentives to change the total political, economic and social system. This type of system exists to satisfy the ideological and psychopathological needs of the dictator, as Robert C. Tucker noted in his book The Soviet Political Mind. That is why he does not care about its economic inefficiency, nor about the massive cost of the system in terms of losses of millions of human lives. That is why the regime cannot be bribed into reform.

The systems of tyrannical totalitarian control in the ussr, China and Albania ended only with the death of the dictator, and in Cambodia with the regime's overthrow by foreign invasion. Not that they became democratic as a result, but at least the range of human freedom was less circumscribed. So long as Stalin, Mao, Hoxha and Pol Pot held power, their regimes could not retreat to the authoritarian-communist systems that now operate in China and Vietnam. The authoritarian reform alternative has been available for Kim Il-sung and his heir Kim Jong-il to see for two decades. Since the advent of pacifist governments in South Korea--first under Kim Dae-jung in 1998 and under Roh Moo-hyun since 2003--South Koreans have been advocating such a development. Yet, the North Korean leader has shown no genuine interest in emulating it.

A radical totalitarian tyranny is incompatible with a system of intrusive weapons inspections. Such inspections challenge the existence of such a system. Weapons inspectors, whatever their nationality, are assumed to be foreign spies. Compounded with this is the fact that the paranoid, fear-driven nature of such a system impedes the dictator from having a proper understanding of his political and military situation and his realistic options. This point has been made by others with regard to the Iraqi system of political decision-making.

Saddam's regime is but the latest example of the irrational decision-making of this particular sort of tyrant. Recall the example of Stalin's decision in 1937, at a time when he feared a dire military threat from Germany, to purge the Soviet officer corps of its most talented generals in the paranoid belief that they constituted a threat to his regime. This only weakened the Soviet Union's ability to resist its predatorial enemy, and thus encouraged an eventual Nazi invasion. On the basis of delusions, Stalin had weakened his regime in a bid to strengthen it.

Recall Mao Zedong's decision in 1963 to confront both the Soviet Union and the United States at the same time and then to launch the Cultural Revolution in 1966, which undermined the position of his armed forces, among other things. Like Stalin, Mao overestimated his regime's own strength for years and underestimated the resolve of his enemies. This almost led, in 1969, to a Soviet strike against China's nuclear weapons installations. Finally, recall Pol Pot's decision to attack Vietnamese villages in 1977 and his continuing provocations and refusal to negotiate with his immensely more powerful neighbor after his army's defeat in 1978, believing that his tiny army could win on the basis of its ideological purity. This fantastic behavior led the Vietnamese to invade and overthrow his regime.

The point is that totalitarian tyranny is not merely irrational but has tendencies toward self-destruction--a result only narrowly avoided in the Soviet and Chinese cases, but not in the Cambodian case. And these comparisons have a deeper resonance when one realizes that the current North Korean regime is not merely similar in its political structure and mentality to the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Phnom Penh under Pol Pot and Pyongyang under Kim the elder maintained a close political, diplomatic and advisory relationship. Indeed, while Pol Pot was in power, North Korea actually inspired and advised the regime. In fact, in 1979, after Vietnam invaded, the North Korean advisers had to flee Cambodia to Thailand to avoid capture.

It is fatuous to believe that Kim Jong-il is a misunderstood closet cosmopolitan, who is just waiting for the right foreign gesture to make him more reasonable in his domestic and foreign policies. Unfortunately, such thinking is widespread in the broad political culture and in the corridors of power of South Korea--a nation that should be America's most important ally against North Korea.

South Korea's Attitude Problem

One problem inhibiting American foreign policy, and in fact encouraging North Korean nuclear adventurism, is the attitude of South Korea. Over the past decade, South Korea's political culture has gradually adopted a left-wing, pacifist and appeasement-oriented attitude toward the North and an increasingly virulent hostility toward the United States.

A study by the Pew Center for the People and the Press in May 2003 found that 50 percent had an unfavorable view of the United States and 43 percent had a favorable view. In June 2002, 53 percent had been favorable and, in 2000, 58 percent had been favorable. A poll conducted by the Korean Gallup organization in late-2002 found that 53 percent of South Koreans disliked the United States and only 37 percent liked it. In the same poll in 1994, 64 percent liked the United States and 15 percent disliked it. This change is correlated with age: in South Korea, the older one is, the more likely one is to be staunchly pro-American and anti-communist; the younger one is the more one tends to be trusting and even affectionate toward the North, while distrustful of and openly hostile to the United States. A well-to-do 29-year-old South Korean woman expressed the typical attitude of younger Koreans toward America:

If the United States left I wouldn't mind. . . . If North Korea wants nuclear weapons, I think they should have them. The U.S. and so many other countries have them. There's no way North Korea will attack us with them. I don't think so. We're the same country. You don't bomb and kill your family. We share the same blood.

The current South Korean government of Roh Moo-hyun, like the Kim Dae-jung government that preceded it, reflects the views of the younger generation. The political consequences of this normative shift have been devastating for American policy and heartening for the North. No longer are political defectors from the North widely publicized in the South, and refugees are not as welcome as they once were.

Attempts by private citizens to make the North more open to information from the outside world are not tolerated by the Seoul government on the grounds that this will upset the authorities in Pyongyang and make the process of peaceful unification more difficult. For example, in August 2003, a group of South Koreans led by the German human rights campaigner Norbert Vollertsen attempted to send transistor radios into North Korea on specially designed cargo balloons. The purpose was to break Pyongyang's monopoly on news and information to which its subjects were exposed (all radios in North Korea can only pick up the government station) by making available radios that could pick up Korean-language government and private stations in China, Russia and South Korea. South Korean police intervened and stopped the action before it could begin, in the process subduing the middle-aged Vollertsen so roughly that he had to be hospitalized.

Another striking example was provided a few days later. During the Universiade international sports games in the South Korean city of Daegu, where North Korean teams participated, a small group of protesters carrying banners insulting Kim Jong-il were attacked by three North Korean "journalists" in attendance. Many of the protesters needed medical treatment as a result of the beating. But Seoul's response did not include the arrest of the thugs or the lodging of a formal protest to Pyongyang. Rather, Seoul apologized to the North, labeling the protesters "provocateurs."

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