A Game of Nuclear Roulette

By Bruce W. Nelan

When North Korean and American diplomats emerged after an hour of secret negotiations in a basement room at U.N. headquarters last week, Pyongyang's ambassador Ho Jong stopped to talk briefly with reporters. North Korea, he declared with satisfaction, had made some unspecified proposals aimed at resolving the dispute over his country's nuclear program.

The next day, a Foreign Ministry official in Pyongyang announced that the meeting at the U.N. had "removed a series of stumbling blocks" and produced a "breakthrough." Officials in Washington said that more details would have to be worked out before they could speak of a breakthrough but that the U.S. has "moved closer" to its goals. They expect to close a deal soon under which the U.S. would call off its annual "Team Spirit" military exercises in South Korea, whereafter the North Koreans would allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to resume routine inspections of their seven declared facilities -- but not the two sites they are trying to keep secret. At the same time, the North would begin talks with the South on denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

America is negotiating with deadly seriousness. President Clinton has vowed, publicly and unequivocally, that the U.S. will not allow the North Koreans to acquire atomic weapons. Whether they do or do not already have them profoundly affects how the U.S. and all of North Korea's neighbors can and should respond. Pyongyang is playing a dangerous form of nuclear roulette. A new study by U.S. intelligence agencies has concluded that North Korea probably has already built one or two atomic bombs.

If that finding is true, Clinton is on the edge of a major, long-term foreign crisis that could make Somalia and Haiti look like the small skirmishes they really were. He will have to decide how to make good his pledge -- not only to keep the North Koreans from producing nuclear weapons but also to take away any they might have built and hidden. The solutions are neither easy nor obvious. Proposals for U.N. economic sanctions probably would be blocked in the Security Council by China, Korea's next-door neighbor, which considers such pressure unacceptable. Clinton might be tempted to use American military power as a last resort, but air strikes, for example, could trigger another full-scale Korean war, and if the North has a bomb, it is probably hidden. That leaves direct, bilateral diplomacy, the course Washington intends to keep pursuing. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali tried to help the process along by visiting Pyongyang and Beijing over the past two weeks but found North Korean President Kim Il Sung and Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen unreceptive to a role for the U.N.

But is the new intelligence finding correct? To begin with, most recent accounts have made the conclusion sound more certain than it really is. The U.S. intelligence community knows very little for sure about secretive, Stalinist North Korea. Specifically, the U.S. has no hard evidence that Pyongyang's elaborate nuclear facilities have produced any bombs. U.S. spy satellites provide photographs, infrared images and other reports from space that allow Washington to track the general course of Pyongyang's nuclear and military programs. Other forms of solid information are difficult to come by.

What Washington does know is that the North Koreans have extracted some plutonium -- the raw material for weapons -- from its 5-megawatt nuclear power plant at Yongbyon, but the U.S. does not know exactly how much. Experts think it could be as much as 12kg (26 lbs.), which would be enough for one or two bombs -- if Pyongyang's engineers are able to build them.

Given the uncertainties, the CIA's new, classified Special National Intelligence Estimate does not actually say the North Koreans have a couple of bombs. Rather the report concludes there is a "somewhat better than even" chance that they have one or two. Even so, the Koreans' arsenal is not growing now. In order to obtain more plutonium for bombs, the North Koreans would have to turn off and cool down the reactor so its fuel rods could be removed. Infrared sensors aboard satellites would detect any such action. So far, close scrutiny has not revealed any recent shutdown.

This is familiar terrain for the experts in Washington, who say the main focus of the new intelligence estimate is considerably broader: an attempt by the U.S. Government to decide whether Pyongyang might ever be persuaded to give up its bomb program. The Defense Intelligence Agency took the most pessimistic view in the interagency study. Pentagon analysts think the North Koreans already have a bomb and are using the negotiations in order to buy time to advance their nuclear program.

At the State Department, which leads the U.S. negotiating team, the position is that diplomacy might work because North Korea has much to gain. State believes Pyongyang might allow international safeguards and inspections on all its nuclear installations -- even the two waste sites it has been trying to hide -- in exchange for diplomatic recognition by the U.S., plus trade and economic aid from such countries as South Korea and Japan. The CIA takes a middle view: that the North Koreans may allow inspection of their seven declared facilities but not the two undeclared ones. The reason, the agency said in the report, was that Pyongyang would want to retain what it already has, whether that is plutonium, a couple of bombs or only the nervous uncertainty of its neighbors.

Bargaining on these central issues is still only prospective. The U.S.-North Korean talks at the U.N. are just a hopeful prelude to yet another round of high-level negotiations. The agreement Pyongyang and Washington were talking about last week is simply a reprise of one made last summer, when Pyongyang told the U.S. it would permit routine inspections and resume talks with South Korea. The North never fulfilled those promises, and it must do so in order to get to the next, third, substantive round of talks with the U.S. That is where the key issues are to be discussed: diplomatic recognition, trade and aid for North Korea in return for ending its atomic weapons program. "This has all been shadowboxing," says an official in Washington. "They want to hold back as many concessions as they can for the third round, and so do we."

None of the players on the U.S. side of the game knows for sure whether Pyongyang will make the big concession and halt its drive for nuclear weapons. And if it does, the Clinton Administration is demanding more: the surrender by the North Koreans of any nuclear weapons they have hidden away. Even then the U.S. might not offer recognition in return unless Pyongyang is receptive to complaints about its human-rights abuses and sales of missiles to the Middle East. No matter how the intelligence estimates may vary, all the experts agree this is an agenda that will be under negotiation for years.

With reporting by Jay Peterzell/Washington