It’s an item that doesn’t appear in the White House power points celebrating the nuclear with Iran and its supposed curtailment of Iran’s nuclear work, but the off-site loophole Secretary of State John Kerry, Undersecretary Wendy Sherman, and their team left is about to blown a mile wide.

Both President Obama and Kerry compartmentalize. They craft strategies based on the notion that states limit their activities to the borders of the state. This is one of the reasons why the administration has found the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) so challenging: Until 2014, the White House and State Department sought separate strategies for Iraq and Syria. Even today, the end-all and be-all of the administration’s strategy seems to be whether its anti-ISIS strategy diminishes that group’s territory in Iraq and Syria; its presence in Libya, Afghanistan, the Sinai Peninsula, and the broader Sahel doesn’t fit into the strategy and so are largely ignored.

Back to Iran: Kerry can brag that the inspections regime is rigorous (it isn’t) and that Iran has stopped all its work on possible military dimensions (PMD) of a nuclear weapon (that’s hope above change). In reality, however, Obama and Kerry are completely blind to any work Iran is doing inside North Korea. After all, Iran wants to operate outside the purview of inspections, and North Korea wants cash. Thanks to how Kerry constructed the deal, Iran now has $100 billion with which to play.

Now, word comes that North Korea is not only on the verge of the test of a new solid-fuel missile that could potentially deliver a nuclear warhead into the United States. As long-time Korea watcher Gordon Chang notes:

At Sohae last year, the North Koreans raised the height of the gantry by more than 10 meters to accommodate more powerful launch vehicles. That leads [Bruce] Bechtol to predict we will see “a new, larger version of the Taepodong,” North Korea’s longest-range missile. And we should expect Iranians at the site for the event. Iran has funded the new booster, which Pyongyang’s technicians have been developing for at least two years. “If,” Bechtol writes, “the missile the North Koreans launch is in fact the larger version of the Taepodong and the launch is successful, we can expect to see this missile proliferated to Iran.”

The Iran-angle is something upon which South Korean observers have also picked up. According to the Yonhap News Agency:

While announcing fresh sanctions on Iran last month, the Treasury confirmed that Tehran and Pyongyang have cooperated to develop an 80-ton rocket booster, with Iranian missile technicians visiting the North for the project in the past several years… U.S. military officials have expressed serious concern about KN-08, saying it is harder to keep an eye on as it can be launched from mobile platforms. In April last year, Adm. William Gortney, commander of the U.S. Northern Command, said the North is believed to be capable of miniaturizing nuclear warheads to put on the KN-08 missile and fire it at the U.S. mainland.

So Iran has been working with North Korea on a ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the United States. Perhaps it’s time to call John Kerry back before Congress to explain this loophole. Or, at least, to hear his convoluted argument as to why Iran-North Korea ballistic missile and perhaps PMDs doesn’t violate the Iran deal, doesn’t illustrate better Iran’s intentions than the tweets of the Islamic Republic’s two-faced foreign minister, and shouldn’t worry the United States.