Buying Off Our Enemies

Sam Roggeveen has an idea - offer to buy North Korea's nuclear materials:

Snyder admits there are moral hazard problems with this approach, in that it seems to reward North Korea's bad behaviour. But the proposal does play to one of America's great and largely unexploited strengths in this dispute: its wealth.

Frustratingly, Snyder never suggests a price for North Korea's plutonium, so can I suggest $1.2 billion per year? That seems rather exorbitant, but it's not a random figure. It comes from noted game theorist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who has used predictive models to come up with an annual amount that might persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons.