NORTH Korea is a practised follower of the Northeast Asian school of negotiating tactics: when brinksmanship has won you everything the other side thought you wanted from a deal, it is time to sign, seal - and come back for more. There is still scope for Pyongyang to demand that its palm be further greased before it agrees to the construction of a South Korean nuclear reactor on its soil, or allows US experts to begin implementing last year's agreement on safe storage of its 8,000 spent fuel rods.
Those rods, if reprocessed, would produce enough plutonium for three nuclear bombs. That gives the North Koreans a great deal of bargaining power, which they have not hesitated to use over the months of painful negotiations since the October 1994 accord. Nor have they yet allowed any international inspection of their existing nuclear sites, despite the West's belief that Pyongyang may already possess enough plutonium for one bomb. That inspection is only to be permitted six years from now when the first of two new Light Water Reactors is on-stream.
Thus the world has to take on trust that what was once considered a rogue nation, liable to start a nuclear war on the whim of a possibly unstable dictator, now has nothing to hide and knows what it is doing. The world will also have to take North Korea's word for it that the old-fashioned, weapons-grade plutonium producing, graphite-moderated reactors which it has agreed to dismantle once the new power stations are built, will genuinely be mothballed in the interim.
Nevertheless, yesterday's joint statement issued by the United States and North Korea does offer measure of reassurance. The US team supervising the storage of the spent rods is to leave for North Korea this month. Armed with the assurance that the teams building the new reactors will also be US-led, Pyongyang has agreed to accept a model currently used and built in South Korea. That is a key concession. It has allowed US President Bill Clinton to reassure Seoul that it will be allowed to supply the reactors.
Since it is South Korea which is shouldering the US$4 billion cost of the accord, the North's previous refusal to accept the South Korean model had threatened to scupper the whole arrangement. But it would be premature to start cracking open the champagne.
The location proposed for the new reactors has yet to be confirmed, and the deal will not finally be done until Washington has put its signature to up to US$1 billion in additional infrastructure 'add-ons' demanded by Pyongyang. As the US ambassador to the nuclear negotiations, Robert Galucci, pointed out before leaving for Seoul yesterday: 'The devil's in the details.' The show may not be over yet.