SEOUL

THE UNITED STATES is executing one of the most devastating diplomatic reversals in the long and tortuous history of U.S. relations in Asia. North Korea has filed its long-awaited nuclear declaration. It was crafted to avoid all the contentious issues that precipitated the nuclear “crisis” in 2002.

While reluctantly acknowledging ill-defined concerns about a uranium program, North Korea refuses to detail what it’s been doing to develop the capability of exploding a nuclear warhead with uranium at its core.

The declaration contains nothing about the caves and redoubts, the laboratories and production facilities where North Korean scientists are learning to fabricate a warhead from highly enriched uranium. It gives no clues about the acquisition of centrifuges from the disgraced Pakistan physicist A.Q. Khan, and it says nothing about acquiring from him the technology if not the materiel or the training and experience needed to produce a uranium bomb.

Nor does the declaration say anything about proliferation of North Korea’s nuclear materiel and expertise to other countries, notably Syria, where the Israelis bombed a facility to oblivion in September. Similarly, it says nothing about North Korea’s long history of nuclear exchanges with other Mideastern countries, notably Iran.

Equally important, the declaration leaves out the question of what North Korea has done with all the plutonium produced for warheads at its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang. There’s no word on how many warheads it’s got there, leaving intelligence analysts to repeat longstanding estimates of anywhere from six to a dozen.

After having insisted repeatedly that North Korea had to “come clean” on its uranium program and proliferation, and also account for all the plutonium warheads, the U.S. forsook that approach in the interests of advancing the whole process of getting North Korea finally to abandon its entire program.

The North Koreans promised last October to deliver the declaration by the end of last year, but held out for six months beyond that date while spurning U.S. demands for far greater disclosure and transparency. The U.S. chief negotiator, Christopher Hill, meeting his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye Gwan, in Singapore in April, agreed that simple acknowledgement of concerns might be a way out of the impasse.

The inference from the diplo-speak is that the United States has decided to shelve the uranium issue in the interests of moving on with the deal of Feb. 13, 2007, calling for North Korea’s complete denuclearization in return for enormous amounts of energy aid. U.S. analysts now say the North’s enriched-uranium program is so rudimentary as not to pose any kind of threat, and North Korea has complied on the major point of stopping operations at Yongbyon preparatory to shutting it down. It’s in that spirit that North Korea decided to stage one of the great made-for-TV stories, blowing up the cooling tower at the Yongbyon complex.

The North Korean declaration, however incomplete, marks another milestone in an epic series of events that began in October 2002 when North Korea’s vice foreign minister, Kang Sok Ju, supposedly acknowledged to visiting U.S. envoy James Kelly the existence of a uranium program in addition to the plutonium program that was suspended under terms of the 1994 nuclear framework agreement between the U.S. and North Korea.

After the United States stopped shipping heavy fuel to the North as stipulated in the Geneva agreement, North Korea expelled inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and resumed making warheads from plutonium. Negotiations for a new nuclear agreement gained urgency after North Korea fired off several missiles in early July 2006, including a long-range Taepodong that fizzled and splashed down near the takeoff site, and then conducted an underground nuclear test on Oct. 9, 2006.

North Korea, in producing the declaration, has bargained hard for two understandings from President George W. Bush that will legitimize its leadership in the eyes of the world. Mr. Bush has agreed to take the steps needed to remove the North from the U.S. list of nations sponsoring terrorism, and also has promised to lift economic sanctions on business with a terrorist state.

The deal carries no guarantee, however, that North Korea will get rid of its nukes. All Christopher Hill would say is that “the North Koreans have acknowledged that we have to deal with weapons.” That’s an arduous process that’s likely to go on interminably while North Korea demands much more aid, including the light-water energy reactors promised in the 1994 Geneva agreement, and a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War.

Even then, there’s no saying that North Korea will really give up its nuclear arsenal.

Donald Kirk, an occasional contributor, is a longtime editor and foreign correspondent.