The other day I attended a thought-provoking presentation by Art Brown. Until 2005 Brown worked for the CIA; he spent twenty-five years in the agency as an East Asia expert until resigning out of dissatisfaction with the Bush Administration's handling of intelligence about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. When the journalists here in Tokyo asked him what he thought about the news that North Korea was moving to reactivate its plutonium-processing facility in Yongbyon--the same facility that it shut down with such great fanfare a few months ago--his answer was simple. "North Korea has no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons."

As for the Six-Party Talks, the international negotiations aimed at ridding the North of its nukes, he described that process as "a sham, a pretense. "That's a pretty provocative statement. After all, even the Bush Administration, long opposed to talking with the North, has spent most of this year working hard to reach an agreement. Why would it waste its effort on a pointless exercise? Other experts on the Hermit Kingdom who share Brown's skepticism. They argue that creating a nuclear arsenal is pretty much the only real achievement that Kim Jong Il's government can point to in the fourteen years since the Dear Leader came to power in Pyongyang. His people have starved and his economy has shriveled while he has poured huge amounts of money and resources into his nuke program, and which is now pretty much the one thing he has left that forces the international community to take him seriously. (Along with his missiles and his weapons of mass destruction and the thousand or so artillery tubes aimed at Seoul.) If he gives away his nukes, North Korea goes back to being just plain Upper Volta again. Even worse, in fact, since Upper Volta doesn't have the disadvantage of being surrounded by some of the world's most dynamic economies. For that reason the possession of nuclear weapons is not just a means of scaring Kim's enemies; having those nukes is actually key to the very survival of his regime.

Didn't the North Koreans demonstrate their seriousness earlier this year when they dismantled the Yongbyon processing plant? They pulled fuel out of the reactor, invited in a team of international inspectors (including Americans), handed over 18,000 pages of impressive-looking documents about their plutonium program, and even blew up a cooling tower on live TV. Surely that must have proved their bona fides. Brown has a good answer to that one. Yongbyon, he points out, is the one part of the North Korean nuclear program that we know a lot about. It's above ground, entirely visible to any curious satellites poised overhead. (We know that the North Koreans, who suffered from intense American bombing back during the Korean War in the early 1950s, often bury many of their important military installations deep underground. So why leave this one in plain sight?) Plutonium reactors also give off by-products that can be monitored by sensors like the ones on U.S. spy planes that routinely sample the air above North Korea. All that makes Yongbyon, as a "known known" (to borrow Donald Rumsfeld's bon mot), an ideal bargaining chip, something that's easy to give up in return for goodies--fuel oil, perhaps, or food, or perhaps even diplomatic recognition--from relieved potential victims.

Meanwhile, according to the skeptics, the North retains another source of fissile material for its weapons: highly enriched uranium produced in a separate, parallel program whose existence has yet to be officially acknowledged by the North (unless you count the now-notorious negotiating session a few years back when a North Korean official boasted about such a program to his U.S. counterparts). As Brown points out, countries that have tried to develop clandestine nuclear weapons programs in the past, including South Africa and Libya, concentrated their efforts on enriching uranium, since the process is easy to conceal by packing centrifuge cascades into underground facilities. U.S. intelligence officials have advanced the claim that the North Koreans received uranium processing technology from the black-market nuclear technology network of the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. If the suppositions are true, the North can easily go on cranking out the bombs even once it's surrendered its plutonium reactor. At the Six-Party Talks this year the U.S. side has spent plenty of time cajoling the North to reveal details of its uranium program  (though perhaps Washington's negotiators haven't always been quite as insistent on that point as some would like).

As for the theory that Kim Jong Il's recent illness might have triggered the North's new intransigence on the nuclear issue, no one knows for sure. But it is worth noting that the brinkmanship we're seeing from the North right now bears a conspicuous resemblance to earlier North Korean maneuvers when Kim was clearly at the helm....

So why, then, continue with the Six-Party Talks? Well, perhaps because it's convenient for everyone involved to keep up appearances. Talks are better than no talks. As long as they go on the governments can claim that they're at least trying to address the problem, rather than the unpalatable option of acknowledging that North Korea is actually a nuclear power, with all the attendant consequences. That may sound cynical to some. But then, of course, nuclear weapons have always had a way of inspiring unappetizing compromises.