The announcement that North Korea has agreed to make a full declaration of its nuclear programmes and to disable them by the end of the year is a notable moment in a diplomatic dialogue marked by many more squabbles and setbacks than substantial agreements. But in itself it is no cause for celebration – the day when North Korean gives up its nuclear weapons (if it ever does) is still many months in the future.

Because there is so little trust between the US and North Korea, the negotiators have wisely adopted the approach of beginning with the basics and keeping their early agreements and declarations as vague as possible. Better to agree on something, however impalpable (so the thinking goes), than to fall at the first hurdle squabbling over details. The result is that yesterday’s “agreement” is little more than a joint declaration of good intentions – certainly not a step back, but far from being a great leap forward.

What, for example, is a “full declaration”, and how do you know whether a declaration is full or not? To the Americans and their supporters it must involve verification, including the right to make unannounced visits to suspected facilities to make sure that North Korea really has “declared” everything. It is difficult to imagine the North agreeing to such intrusive inspections, but without them the US will be taking Kim Jong Il on trust.

What are “nuclear programmes”? Obviously, they include nuclear power plants and reprocessing facilities – we must assume, surely, that they also include nuclear weapons programmes, related to manufacturing, testing, launching and storage. But neither the US negotiator, Chris Hill, nor his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye Gwan, used the word “weapons”, another wise tactical ambiguity. But since no one knows how many warheads the North may have manufactured in the past few years, how will the rest of the world know whether it has declared them all or not? Then there is the timing. Mr Kim made no mention of any schedule or deadline in his account of the negotiations. Anyone who believes that Pyongyang will abandon its nuclear weapons “by the end of this year, 2007”, as Mr Hill claims, is dreaming.

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