Key question: Is N. Korea actually a nuclear power?

UNIT E DN ATIONS» As President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un stand on the brink of a widely expected second summit to reopen deadlocked nuclear diplomacy, a crucial but often overlooked question looms: Is North Korea actually a nuclear power?

Kim and his wellamplified propaganda specialists certainly say it is. And most casual observers, after watching last year’s run of increasingly powerful weapons tests by North Korea, would probably agree.

But Washington has always refused to accept that as fact. It is wary that doing so would allow Pyongyang to follow the path of India and Pakistan and a handful of other outliers who have built illicit nuclear programs outside the global Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty, which aims to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

Moon Jaein, the South Korean president whose tireless shuttle diplomacy has made TrumpKim Part II possible, is working this week to explain the results of his own recent summit with Kim to Trump and other world leaders gathered at U.N. General Assembly meetings.

At the same time, the debate over whether to treat North Korea as a de facto nuclear power could influence whether fragile diplomacy continues or Northeast Asia returns to the threats of nuclear strikes that had many fearing war just last year.

The technical state of North Korea’s closely guarded nuclear program is unclear, but experts believe that Pyongyang can probably arm its short and midrange missiles with nuclear warheads. However, its ability to accurately fire longerrange nuclear missiles at targets on the U.S. mainland — the benchmark for any viable nuclear arsenal — is probably not perfected.

Despite the uncertainties, some argue, North Korea is a nuclear power that will never relinquish its bombs.

These experts say Kim has studied the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and watched the fate of late Libyan leader Muammar alQaddafi, who was lauded by U.S. officials for giving up his nuclear development program in 2003 before being killed in 2011 during a revolution. They say North Korea will never relinquish the weapons that are the only way to make sure the Kim family dynasty lives on.

Kim “presumes that no great power would risk attacking a nuclear state or sticking a hand into its internal strife,” according to Andrei Lankov, a North Korea specialist at Kookmin University in Seoul, South Korea. “And so North Korean leaders are determined to stick to their nuclear development, and see nuclear weapons as the major guarantee of their security. There is no form of pressure that can convince them to budge on this, no promise that will seduce them into compliance. They believe that without nuclear weapons, they are as good as dead.”

Accepting North Korea for what it is could then allow negotiators to push for a freeze or a scaleback or a permanent test ban.

But the old dream that had guided so many U.S. negotiators intent on getting North Korea to abandon all its nukes? That’s not going to happen, at least not in the current scenario.