Small question with consequences: Is North Korea a nuclear power?

UNITED NATIONS — As Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un stand on the brink of a widely expected Summit No. 2 to unstick deadlocked nuclear diplomacy, a crucial but often overlooked question looms: Is North Korea actually a nuclear power?

Kim and his well-amplified propaganda specialists certainly say it is. And most casual observers, after watching last year’s run of increasingly powerful weapons tests, 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 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which aims to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president whose tireless shuttle diplomacy has made Trump-Kim 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 longer range 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 al-Qaddafi, who was lauded by U.S. officials for giving up his nuclear development program in 2003 before being killed in 2011 during a revolution.