WASHINGTON -- North Korea's surprise announcement of a secret nuclear-weapons program has thrown cold water on a recent warming of relations with South Korea and Japan that included family reunions, rejuvenated economic cooperation and, in particular, a stunning admission of past misdeeds against Japanese citizens. In a similar vein, some have argued that this new nuclear revelation is North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's perverse but typical way of creating crisis to pull a reluctant Bush administration into serious dialogue.

Before the world accepts the North's confession as a perverse cry for help, we must see this for what it is -- a serious violation of a standing agreement that will in effect be North Korea's last gambit at peaceful engagement with the United States and its allies.

North Korea's actions constitute a blatant breakout from the 1994 U.S.-North Korean Agreed Framework designed to ensure denuclearization of the North. The implications of this act go beyond merely labeling it as a negotiating ploy. Arguably all of the improvements in North-South relations, including the June 2000 summit, breakthroughs in Japan-North Korea relations in 2001 and the wave of engagement with the reclusive regime that spread across Europe in 2000-2001, were made possible by what was perceived to be the North's good-faith intentions to comply with a major nonproliferation commitment with the U.S. in 1994. The diplomatic advances that came after 1994 would not have been possible without the Agreed Framework. And now the North has proved it all to be a lie. Though U.S. diplomats have been careful not to declare the framework dead, the likelihood that Congress would appropriate funds for its implementation are nil at this point. Suspension of the framework is the de facto result for now.