Distrust and verify

President Donald Trump wasted little time declaring victory after the summit June 12 with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” the president announced on Twitter. He declared “it is going well,” and “All Asia is thrilled,” and “If not for me, we would now be at War with North Korea!” The signals coming from North Korea and the U.S. intelligence community feel more foreboding.

In recent days, two useful reminders have come to the fore of how hard this will be and how wrong Trump is to take a victory lap too soon.

The first is the disclosure of a fresh assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency that North Korea intends to deceive the United States about the true scope of its nuclear warhead and missile program, as well as the facilities to manufacture fissile material. The assessment reportedly concludes that North Korea believes it can hide some of its most sensitive activities, such as a second, underground uranium enrichment factory.

The second development is the appearance of satellite imagery suggesting that North Korea is expanding an important factory for producing solid-fuel motors for its nuclear-armed missiles. Solid-fuel engines require little time to prepare for launch and have a smaller fleet of support vehicles, so they are harder to spot on the move. According to a report from experts at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, the images show the engine factory expansion is taking place at the Chemical Material Institute in Hamhung. What does this say about Kim’s thinking?

The key questions about an adversary always come down to capabilities and intentions. Kim’s capabilities, if hidden, must be exposed, and his intentions, if devious, must be seen clearly. Trump ought to wake up to the fact that he is at the beginning of the beginning of this process, not the end. Here’s an idea with a nice ring: Distrust, and verify.