The word ‘terrorism’ is bandied around as an excuse for anything and everything these days, but it’s increasingly used without any attempt at a logical narrative:

The United States Saturday removed North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for a verification plan allowing the U.S. and other parties to monitor the communist country’s nuclear disarmament.

The issue of state construction of a nuclear deterrent is orthogonal to state sponsorship of terrorism (a nebulous phrase that I’ll accept at face value for now). This leads to two possible hypotheses:

1. North Korea was not a state sponsor of terrorism, and was placed or retained on the list as a bargaining tool to encourage co-operation in nuclear disarmament.
2. North Korea still is a state sponsor of terrorism, but has been removed from the list as a bargaining tool to encourage co-operation in nuclear disarmament.

Either way, the presence of a state on the list of sponsors of terrorism is based on political expediency rather than whether the state is, in fact, a sponsor of terrorism. The list does not achieve its stated goal of enumerating states that sponsor terrorism.

On the upside, the DPRK is co-operating on nuclear disarmament. I don’t think anyone’s much in favour of them having The Bomb.