Rogue realities.(NORTH KOREA)

WITH its nuclear test, North Korea has again flaunted an action that many nations would deny and engage in only on the sly. This is because rogue behavior is Pyongyang's most lucrative business endeavor. It thinks it can count on South Korean and Chinese support no matter what, and hopes to play the United States by selling "concessions" two or three times over--say, by freezing the nuclear program it was already supposed to have frozen in the 1990s.

We've assumed for a while now that Pyongyang has nukes, and the test was simply a dramatic confirmation. The North alone can't overturn the strategic status quo in East Asia. The real threat is that, already a practiced proliferator, it will sell its technology to other states hostile to the U.S. North Korea has been cozying up to Iran and Venezuela in particular, and we must make sure it doesn't transfer weapons or technologies to those or similar states, or to terrorists.

Democrats have been quick to blame North Korea's latest provocation on the Bush administration. They say Bush should have stood by the Agreed Framework, even though the North Koreans were discovered in 2002 to have begun cheating on it "as the ink was drying" in 1994. (The words are Colin Powell's.) Under the agreement, the North Koreans froze their plutonium program, but they kept operating a secret uranium-enrichment program. When the U.S. called them on it, they confessed, pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and sped ahead with their manufacture of nukes.

Bush critics maintain that the administration should have carried on with the Agreed Framework because at least the plutonium program--which is much more readily exploitable for nuclear weapons--was stalled. But there is no telling how much plutonium the North Koreans had diverted prior to the agreement, and as long as they were able to keep the fuel rods, as they were under the Agreed Framework, they could pull out of the agreement whenever they liked and reap all the nuclear material as if they had never signed at all.

Bush has also been scored for failing to talk directly to Pyongyang. But over the last decade we have talked to North Korea in every manner possible. The Clinton administration engaged in bilateral talks, resulting in the Agreed Framework. The Bush administration hoped to avoid the Clinton administration's mistake of cutting a deal North Korea had no intention of honoring. To this end, it initiated multilateral negotiations--the so-called six-party talks--that included North Korea's ...