“It’s the plutonium, stupid,” write Siegfried Hecker and William Perry in this morning’s Washington Post. The two leading members of America’s Korea fraternity argue that, when it comes to Pyongyang, America’s most immediate goal should be eliminating its only working reactor, which is located at Yongbyon. Arguments over the North’s uranium weapons program and proliferation of nuclear technologies can wait, they contend. Defanging Kim Jong Il, we are assured, is a step-by-step process.

There is a surface logic to Hecker’s and Perry’s arguments. After all, nobody thinks North Korea is actively building weapons with uranium cores. Therefore, if we disable Yongbyon, we will have effectively ended Kim’s ability to produce more weapons that he can detonate, sell, or store. American policymakers now believe that, after we establish a working relationship with Pyongyang, we can eliminate its nuclear program over time. According to this view, there are no other options.

Or are there? Indeed, there are no other options once we give up the idea of pressuring Beijing and insist on sticking with the conventional diplomatic strategies that created this disaster in the first place. Yet there are other problems with the Hecker-Perry approach. It ignores the fact that North Korea is dealing with us now because it has to–its economy is falling back and it is entering another period of extreme hunger and possibly famine. Yet by providing interim rewards to Pyongyang for its initial cooperation, we are allowing the regime to strengthen itself. After it has done so, it will undoubtedly return to its traditionally intransigent approach. The problem with the current deal with North Korea is that, like the Agreed Framework of 1994, the United States is throwing another lifeline to Kim Jong Il without completely eliminating his nuclear program.

The United States can afford to reward bad North Korean behavior, and we can buy the North Korean nuclear program. But we can afford to do so only one more time. At this moment, the Bush administration is intent on implementing partial arrangements that undercut the possibility of reaching enduring solutions. In other words, we are setting ourselves up to continually buy the Kim family nuclear program. We should realize that our bargaining position is stronger now than it has been in a long while. For instance, South Korea, for the first time in ten years, has a political leadership that is willing to take a tougher line against the North.

Yet at this moment, Washington has decided to abandon its leverage and follow China’s go-slow policies. For those who believe Beijing can be helpful–President Bush, this sentence is directed at you–it is useful to examine Chinese complicity in North Korea’s proliferation of reactor technology to Syria. The real tragedy is that, at a moment when trends permit a firmer policy to work, the United States is adopting a softline approach that is bound to fail. So this is not just about plutonium. It’s about ending North Korea’s nuclear ambitions once and for all.