Any agreement that you have isn't going to be based on North Korea's intentions or trust.
From Mitchell Reiss
So, in a sense, the verification piece is irrelevant to the format issue.
The format's better because it gives us a much stronger hand to play when going to the North Koreans unified, with our allies and partners in the region, all of us saying the same thing: telling them their current course is unacceptable.
The other countries did not share the same concern the United States had in the early '90's - that North Korea actually had an ongoing nuclear weapons program.
Again, I think we have much greater diplomatic weight by having all of us sit on the same side of the table wanting the same thing, and putting it to the North Koreans.
First of all we have to recognize that despite all the problems - and in some cases failures - that this regime has been much more successful, much more resilient, than people had anticipated.
The nexus between terrorism and nuclear weapons, or even nuclear material, is obviously a current concern.
And it has to do with having no inventory or stockpiles on the shelf, but items arrive as you need to build your product. What that means is that it's much more difficult to actually find stockpiles of already built weapons.
We need to do a lot more thinking about how the regime is going to evolve, how the bad guys are going to adapt their tactics, and what measures we're going to need in order to go forward.
It's time for the IRA to go out of business.
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