North Korea can't be trusted to make a deal

The words entered America's general vocabulary in January during the one of the most inspiring speeches of President Bush's career to date: "Axis of evil."

He used the term to describe North Korea, Iraq and Iran and warned that their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction pose a "grave and growing danger" and will not be tolerated.

North Korea's inclusion may have come as a surprise for many Americans and foreign observers who had grown accustomed to putting an Arab face on terrorism and threats to the United States. But in the time since Bush uttered those words and commentators have repeated them thousands of times, North Korea has shown just how much it belonged on the list.

Take the developments of last week.

North Korea said Dec. 22 that it had begun removing U.N. seals and surveillance cameras from nuclear facilities.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog, which has been monitoring those facilities, said Pyongyang had unsealed a spent-fuel storage chamber that holds 8,000 irradiated fuel rods.

North Korean officials tossed out a ridiculous justification for the action: The North Koreans want to make electricity.

Those charged with monitoring North Korea's nuclear capabilities said it would be impossible to keep tabs on the North Korean's activities without the surveillance equipment.

And experts on the storage chamber said the 8,000 spent fuel rods had no relation to generating electricity.

Security experts believe North Korea already has made one or two nuclear weapons using plutonium extracted from another reactor in the 1990s.

A day after breaking the seals in Pyongyang, an editorial by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the country's official newspaper read: "If the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula is to be settled properly, the U.S. should stop posing a nuclear threat to the DPRK and accept the DPRK's proposal for the conclusion of a nonaggression treaty between the two countries."

But North Korean officials need only harken to the deal they struck in 1994 which averted an impending conflict with the United States. It involved the same facilities that are being tapped now. North Korea promised to freeze nuclear production.

Of course North Korean leaders running that country would like the United States to strike a deal so they can avoid the certain fate that awaits otherwise.

But they need to show they can live up to one promise before trying to make another.