Decoding North Korea

...Yes, North Korea will continue to demand a nonaggression pact, ruled out long ago by U.S...

...The news commenced the unraveling of the Geneva Framework—or, more specifically, the quid pro quo for Pyongyang's nuclear arms shutdown...

...The U.S...

...No joint final statement was released...

...There might even be a test firing—the North's first since August 1998, when it lobbed a medium-range missile over Japan into the Pacific...

...troops across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) staging periodic war games to keep in fighting trim...

...Both North Korea and China are believed willing to meet again late this year...

...When confronted by Kelly with proof of having failed to keep their word, his hosts acknowledged a second nuclear weapons program using uranium instead of plutonium...

...In any event, the North cannot afford a second Korean War because its economy is in a state of collapse...

...Seoul was greatly relieved to be able to say that President Roh's policy of encouraging reconciliation while remaining on good terms with the United States was vindicated...

...The Bush Administration, mired in Iraq, is hardly eager to get into a battle that would necessitate drafting young Americans into the Army for the first time since the last days of the Vietnam War...

...That is not to suggest the crisis will shortly melt away...

...This, it said, would prevent Washington from launching a "pre-emptive strike" against the North...

...With President Bush and Kim Jong II determined to cling to power, perhaps nothing describes where the U.S...

...Donald Kirk, who began writing on Asian affairs for the NL in 1966, is the author most recently of Korean Crisis...

...Mindful of the approaching Presidential election, it appears content to tread water, show up at talks and present a resolute demeanor sans real threats...

...mission to Pyongyang since the Bush Administration took office 22 months earlier...

...Weapons-grade plutonium, the final ingredient fornuclear warheads, can be extracted from the rods...

...The primary goal of Roh and his ministers has been to re-establish a dialogue between the United States and North Korea, and their assumption is that no one really wants war...

...They ensured that the fivemegawatt experimental reactor there was not revved up, and that the 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods stored in a cooling pond stayed put...

...Sure enough, within days North Korea denounced Bolton, saying its delegates would not deal with him...

...The torrent of rhetoric spewing forth from the Pyongyang propaganda machine, however, came as no shock to the other participants: the United States, Japan, Russia, China, and South Korea...

...North Korea demanded an exclusive dialogue with the U.S...

...North Korea has remained a member of the "axis of evil," as President Bush put it in his first State of the Union address in January 2001, but he has not used such language since...

...A new missile would undoubtedly be rolled out for the parade on the 9th, it was said...

...Seasoned hands in Seoul concluded that Pyongyang had no intention of jeopardizing its chances for a drastic increase in aid from a U.S.-led consortium in exchange for a promise to halt its nuclear program...

...What a Dictator Wants Decoding North Korea By Donald Kirk Seoul As THE 55th anniversary of North Korea's Communist government approached in September, several leading newspapers here in the South speculated about how it might be marked...

...The pact was at the top of Kim Jong Il's agenda when China's President Hu Jintao appealed to him directly and at last convinced the North to join the August talks...

...But since Pyongyang knew he would not be a delegate, the saber hardly rattled...

...South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young Kwan, back from a meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in Washington, remarked that a missile test could be enough to negatively impact the next round of multilateral talks, tentatively scheduled for November...

...They remained confident North Korea would return to the table...

...Construction of the reactors' infrastructure was not stopped—hundreds of workers labored on at the site—but the U.S...

...The U.S...

...The six-nation mediation talks held in Beijing in August appeared, if anything, to exacerbate it...

...Such talk met a ready audience in South Korea, where Leftists led by Hanchongryun, the most prominent national students' group, blamed the United States for aggravating the situation and called for the withdrawal of American troops...

...A senior military aide was trotted out, though, to read a statement declaring that the North has every right to produce and test nuclear weapons...

...Once North Korea expelled the IAEA inspectors at the end of last year, refired its Yongbyon reactor, and started removing fuel rods from the cooling pond, the nuclear standoff escalated to the crisis level...

...The United States—especially after the North's behavior during an attempt at one-on-one meetings in April, with China serving as host—pushed for six-party talks but made the South's inclusion a minimal condition...

...This was a disappointment to the South Koreans and the Japanese, who had agreed under U. S. pressure to supply most of the heavy equipment for the project...

...On the national scene, though, the Leftists were isolated: The elder generation, remembering the Korean War, staged demonstrations against them, and the vast majority of South Koreans, who doubt the imminence of war, remained apathetic...

...Clinton Administration holdover Charles (Jack) Pritchard, a retired Army officer serving as liaison with North Korean officials based mainly in New York, was forced to resign...

...position, in fact, bears an uncanny resemblance to that of North Korea...

...The North Korean negotiator's insistence, during his conversation with his American counterpart, that his country had to jorn the ranks of elite nations that have actually triggered a nuclear warhead did not spoil the show...

...delegate...

...Critics feared his comments might torpedo the negotiations scheduled to get under way August 27...

...IAEA officials had long maintained that North Korean engineers buried evidence of what was going on at Yongbyon prior to 1994, and that they had plans for building two reactors much larger than the known five-megawatt unit...

...About 10,000 soldiers marched through the capital under the gaze of dictator Kim Jong II, while he stuck to his long established habit of keeping his mouth shut...

...In the wake of August's discussions, the pressure to avoid conflict seems to have trumped the sense that without agreement conflict is unavoidable...

...Back on the other side of the coin, Pyongyang paired direct dialogue with a call early this year for a U.S.-North Korean nonaggression pact...

...Another disturbing factor was the North's insisting on its "right" to develop nuclear weapons and conducttests for the sake of defending not only itself but the entire Korean Peninsula...

...True, barring Seoul from the nuclear dialogue did not seem to fit a pattern of rising economic, cultural and social contacts between North and South...

...reacted with veiled warnings that any such exercise would require a response...

...Saying the U.S...

...Before Geneva, the Central Intelligence Agency reported that the North's nuclear effort consisted of a couple of harmless prototypes...

...The North had committed to freezing its nuclear program at Yongbyon, a city roughly 60 miles north of the capital...

...Essentially on a fencemending assignment, he carried evidence that the spirit, if not the precise wording, of the 1994 Geneva Framework agreement had been flouted...

...and North Korea now stand more accurately than Winston Churchill's dictum, "better to jaw-jaw than to war-war...

...Both must work with China, which opposes a military showdown and is pursuing strong economic relations with South Korea, not to mention Japan...

...The worst public assessment was North Korea's condemnation of the talks as "useless...

...modestly said it was pleased with what transpired...

...Pyongyang fanned the flames by broadcasting that it was proceeding with the development of a plutonium warhead...

...Washington not only went along, but put aside its previous proviso that the North demonstrate it had started to dismantle its nuclear weapons program...

...To the embarrassment of the pundits who forecast an escalation of the nuclear crisis looming over the Korean Peninsula for the last year, Pyongyang held a relatively low-key celebration...

...It had also forsworn any development of nuclear weapons somewhere outside the watchful eyes of inspectors from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose presence in Yongbyon was accepted...

...In the interim 150,000 Chinese troops have been deployed along the North Korean border, not to back up the North's forces in case of war but to protect Chinese citizens from North Korean soldiers who have been staging occasional raids in search of their own refugees...

...Not only were there no new missiles on display (or test fired), there was hardly any armor...

...A slowdown in activity at the Yongbyon complex has reportedly been noted by American intelligence...

...For it was in October 2002 that James A. Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, led the first U.S...

...Bolton berated Kim for amassing a war machine and imprisoning his own people...

...This reflected its historic drive to diminish South Korea in matters of security...

...planned a "pre-emptive strike" also streamed from Pyongyang, but targets were never specified...

...and South Korea—by promotiong inter-Korean cooperation and casting Washington as the spoilsport meddling with the North's good faith moves toward reconciliation...

...officials, but it will settle for a face-saving "guarantee" of security despite the presence of 37,000 U.S...

...After all, the two had reached agreements on family visits, on road and rail contracts and on building an industrial park at Kaesong, just past the DMZ and only 30 miles north of Seoul...

...Then, in December, Washington cut off monthly shipments of 500,000 tons of heavy oil...

...The South Koreans liked to point out that they were the largest contributors, but the money the government spent flowed back into the South's economy, or at least into the hands of a government-controlled corporation...

...One sign of North Korea's underlying posture was its handling of a tendentious speech delivered in Seoul in late July by John R. Bolton, the neoconservative Under Secretary of State for Arms Control...

...Its actions, however, indicate a pattern of compromise in the light of domestic politics...

...Part of an international effort headed by the U.S., the reactors were to fulfill the country's long neglected energy needs...

...Attached to North Korea's acquiescence was the stipulation that its delegate hold a private session with the U.S...

...Calling them "useless," the North exited with boasts that its membership in the club of nuclear powers was imminent and inevitable...

...First to go was a plan to set up twin lightwater nuclear reactors at Kumho, on the northeastern North Korean coast...

...Critics have accused the Administration of lacking a clear policy toward North Korea...

...Nor were South Korean officials noticeably dismayed by the failure of the six-party talks to produce results...

...Meanwhile President Roh Moo Hyun, who was inaugurated this past February, has continued the policy of his predecessor, Kim Dae Jung, and seeks reconciliation with the North without reneging on the military alliance with the United States...

...China later blamed Washington for not being more flexible, without suggesting what Washington could have done...

...That would be the perfect way for Pyongyang to demonstrate its defiance of Japan and the United States, it was further observed, given their fear of North Korea's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction and deliver them at long range...

...For all of his representatives' obfuscations and stonewalling, the consensus was that Kim Jong II understands negotiations serve his interests better than an armed confrontation...

...The U.S...

...Had the building of the lightwater reactors been canceled completely, the biggest loser would have been the Korea Electric Power Company, which held a contract worth several billion dollars from Seoul to put them up...

...But the double-dealing was part of a strategy to create a rift between the U.S...

...And Washington is not about to risk a war that would drain its already faltering economy...

...refused to provide the technology required to turn the bricks, cement and mortar into anything more than an empty shell...

...Of course, it was fully aware that the very notion of a nonaggression pact has been in ill repute in the Western world since the breakdown of the notorious Hitler-Stalin pact on the eve of World War II...

...Daily accusations that the U.S...

...wanted to wipe out the nuclear complex at Yongbyon would have been confirmation that it was worthy of attack...

...In November, China hopes to host a second round of multilateral talks that might be called a diplomatic anniversary waltz...

...What inspired the particular demand is unclear, but despite the United States' persistent disinterest, Pyongyang has refused to let it go...

...Indeed, the Under Secretary's address aroused greater concern in Washington, where it revealed a rift in the State Department...

...They will surely restate previous positions, yet the rhetoric may be softening...

...Favoring measures to bring about reconciliation, he had opposed Bolton's tough talk...

...The bombast was nothing new...