North Korea has announced that it has nuclear weapons and that it is abandoning multilateral talks designed to keep the Korean Peninsula free of them. Still, there is less to Pyongyang's declaration than meets the eye. North Korea has indicated in the past that it possessed nuclear arms, and its disdain for the multilateral six-party talks has long been apparent.
Nonetheless, the world cannot afford to dismiss Pyongyang's announcement as mere brinkmanship. The other five members of the six-party negotiations must work harder to convince North Korea to honor its obligations and find a peaceful solution to the crisis brewing in Northeast Asia. That does not mean offering Pyongyang yet more enticements to keep talking; it means showing the North that its negotiating partners mean business.
North Korea has pledged several times not to develop nuclear weapons: when it signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), when it and South Korea released their North-South Declaration in the early 1990s, when it created the Agreed Framework with the United States in 1994, and when North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made the Pyongyang Declaration in 2002.