SEOUL/PUSAN -- They say that a little bit of confession is good for the soul, but North Korea's sudden burst of religion is creating a moral dilemma for Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul. First, Pyongyang decides to come clean on the kidnapping of Japanese citizens, admitting to Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro that its agents did, as suspected, kidnap a number of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s and that most were now deceased. Then it confirms Washington's worst suspicions about its secret nuclear weapons program by confessing that it indeed has one, in direct violation of the 1994 U.S.-North Korean Agreed Framework, not to mention the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the International Atomic Energy Agency Safeguards Agreement, and the 1992 Joint North-South Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. What's going on here?
The reasons for playing true confessions with Japan are pretty obvious: Tokyo made it very clear that there would be no progress toward normalization (and the billions of dollars of colonial-era compensation that this is expected to bring in) unless Pyongyang came clean on the abductions issue. But coming out of the nuclear closet does not promise the same awards, while putting the Japanese rewards even further at risk -- the Japanese public has been so outraged by revelations of the poorly explained deaths and the controlled circumstances under which the five surviving abductees were allowed to visit Japan that the first confession may actually set back progress in Japan-North Korean relations.
Understanding the North's motivations for coming clean on their nuclear program at this point in time is more difficult. Clearly the North got caught with its hand in the cookie jar. When presented with the evidence of prohibited nuclear weapons activity by Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly during his visit to Pyongyang on Oct. 3-5 -- the first high-level visit by a Bush administration official -- the North reportedly vigorously denied the allegations at first and then, after an all-night meeting, was quoted as saying "of course we have a nuclear program," blaming U.S. President George W. Bush's "axis of evil" speech and the presence of U.S. forces in South Korea for their deliberate violation of the above-referenced agreements.