Nuke admission puts US in tight spot
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - North Korea's unexpected admission that it has an ongoing nuclear-weapons program puts the US administration of President George W Bush, currently focused on going to war with Iraq, in a difficult bind.

The admission, made public by senior US State Department officials on Wednesday, came during the first formal high-level talks between a senior US official and Pyongyang in almost two years. It is likely to renew differences between Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has long argued for engaging North Korea in dialogue, and administration hawks, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.

It also risks creating tensions with Washington's two most important allies in East Asia, Japan and South Korea, who appear determined for the moment to continue their own detente with the North.

Finally, it adds yet another crisis with potential military implications to a growing list that includes the near-certainty of war with Iraq, stabilizing Afghanistan, and coping with signs of a revived and still-lethal al-Qaeda movement and its supporters from the Philippines to Yemen.

"We don't really need this at the moment," noted one administration official on Thursday. "There's been a decision made that the system can take only so much at one time," another unnamed official told the New York Times.

In some ways, the administration can take some comfort from North Korea's official confirmation of its nuclear-weapons program, in likely violation of a 1994 agreement between Pyongyang and the administration of former president Bill Clinton that was intended to freeze permanently North Korea's efforts to build a bomb. The Central Intelligence Agency estimates that Pyongyang had extracted enough plutonium in the program that was frozen in 1994 to build one or two nuclear warheads.

Hardliners concentrated in Cheney's and Rumsfeld's offices have long claimed that North Korea was not abiding by the accord and urged Washington to renounce it. Some have even suggested that Washington launch a preemptive attack on suspected nuclear facilities.

But even claiming vindication is likely to prove cold comfort to the hawks, who lack a serious military option, particularly at a time when they are building up forces in and around the Persian Gulf to prepare for war against Iraq.

"You may be able to invade Iraq, but you can't invade North Korea," said noted Korea historian Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago. "Our military thinks it would take at least six months to defeat North Korea at enormous cost, including the leveling of Seoul," which lies within artillery range of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates the two Koreas.

Cumings also sees the timing of Pyongyang's announcement - just before the November elections here - as significant.

"They know it's very hard for the president to launch a war just before an election; this is exactly what happened before the 1994 elections," when North Korea refused to permit United Nations inspectors to examine its Yongbyon reactor, setting off a major crisis that almost led to war and that was defused by the 1994 agreement.

Indeed, most Korea specialists here say they believe that North Korea, which has moved in recent months with unexpected boldness in both building ties with South Korea and in launching detente with Japan, intends its admission as a bid to move Washington in the same direction.

"It certainly is a way of getting attention and making us take them seriously," said Alan Romberg, a retired State Department analyst on Korea, currently working with the Henry L Stimson Center, a think-tank specializing in security issues. "I don't think North Korea is looking for a confrontation as much as it is to force the issue in their direction: to get the US to meet some of their needs that haven't been met, particularly on the security front."

Romberg pointed to the visit of a top North Korean military official here in late 2000 after which both sides pledged not to pursue hostile policies. While then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright repeated the promise in an unprecedented trip to Pyongyang several months later, "Bush has declined to do so," said Romberg.

Not only has the president publicly denounced North Korean leader Kim Jong-il as untrustworthy, Pyongyang was itself shocked when Bush included it, along with Iraq and Iran, as the third member of the "axis of evil" identified in the president's State of the Union address in January.

"The North has pointed out that a number of statements by senior administration officials over the last two years have betrayed the hostile intent of the United States," Romberg noted.

Cumings agrees. "Presumably, they want to trade their bomb program for things they've wanted from the US for a decade," he said, including full normalization of ties, aid, and access to international financial institutions.

While some reports about Pyongyang's new nuclear program, which is technologically very different from that at Yongbyon, have said it dates back to the mid-1990s, Cumings said he has seen other reports that indicate it began only last July. That would have been shortly after administration hawks had quashed Powell's proposal to send the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, James Kelly, to Pyongyang to end formally the 18-month-old hiatus in high-level talks.

Kelly, who finally traveled there early this month, was the official to whom the North Koreans conceded the program's existence, after he presented them with Washington's evidence.

"The North obviously decided that the best tactic to deal with this was to say, 'Yeah, we've been trying to talk with you about these things for some time, and we have some requirements as well, and perhaps now we can have that discussion,'" said Romberg. "That's a positive reading of what has happened. Whether it will be taken that way by the administration remains to be seen."

For now, the State Department is stressing that it wants to resolve this peacefully and in consultation with its allies and China, which has played a helpful role in the past in dealing with Pyongyang. Kelly and John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, were in Beijing on Thursday.

But at the same time, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said US plans to offer North Korea incentives for halting behavior deemed objectionable by Washington have been shelved, while the US ambassador to Japan, Howard Baker, reportedly warned Tokyo to proceed with caution in any of its own moves toward detente.

Other voices considered close to Pentagon hawks have called for Washington to pressure Tokyo and Seoul to freeze all aid plans and immediately stop their construction of two new light-water reactors, which were the tradeoff for Pyongyang freezing its nuclear program.

"I think Japan is going to want to keep engaging, and so will South Korea," said Romberg, "so there will be a serious alliance-management problem if the US tries to say that nothing will go forward until this problem is fixed."

(Inter Press Service)