Reminder: what disarmament looks like

North Korea just agreed to return to the six party talks and President Bush said he was pleased about this diplomatic development.

Just in case these talks lead to any kind of success, let us not forget what the Bush administration has previously said about dictators and their weapons of mass destruction. Please keep in mind, North Korea is now a nuclear-armed state.

In January 2003, the administrationp produced a document called "What Does Disarmament Look Like?"

Referencing past successes (South Africa, Ukraine and Kazakhstan), the White House (and Condi Rice) said:

The world knows what successful cooperative disarmament looks like. When a country decides to disarm, and to provide to the world verifiable evidence that it has disarmed, there are three common elements to its behavior:

* The decision to disarm is made at the highest political level;

* The regime puts in place national initiatives to dismantle weapons and infrastructure; and

* The regime fully cooperates with international efforts to implement and verify disarmament; its behavior is transparent, not secretive.

Those standards provide analysts a way to evaluate whatever outcome might emerge from the six party talks.


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Filed as: North Korea