International attention is focused on Beijing as six nations convene to discuss the North Korean nuclear crisis. To call the meeting a negotiation is premature: This three-day session consists of little more than introductions and laying out positions. All participants must keep firmly focused on the goal: a peaceful solution to the crisis that includes North Korea's verifiable and irrevocable renunciation of its nuclear ambitions. Expectations need to be kept low. If this meeting concludes with an agreement to continue talking, then it should be considered a success.
The current crisis began last October, when the United States accused North Korea of cheating on the Agreed Framework, set up in 1994 to cap the country's nuclear weapons program, by establishing a clandestine uranium enrichment program. Pyongyang has not denied the allegation. Whether the North has a nuclear weapons program, or even a nuclear weapon or two, is uncertain, though.
Since then, Pyongyang has escalated its rhetoric, talking as if it had a weapon and maintaining that it has the right to possess one. Equally troubling, it has withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, ordered International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to leave the country and removed safeguards. It says it has completed the reprocessing of some 8,000 spent fuel rods, which could provide plutonium for several bombs, but that cannot be confirmed.