Pyongyang's Dangerous Game

By J.F.O. McAllister/Washington

Sitting in the conference room of Peace House on the South Korean side of the line in the truce village of Panmunjom, Seoul's diplomats were shocked by the steamy rhetoric from their Northern counterparts. "Seoul is not far from here," warned the North's Park Yong Su, reading a prepared text to the South's Song Yong Dae. "Should a war break out, Seoul will be a sea of flames, and you, Mr. Song, will find it difficult to survive."

The grisly threat, replayed over and over on South Korean television, was a sharp reminder of the acrimony growing between North Korea and most of the world after Pyongyang once again refused to submit to international nuclear inspection. The North cranked up its noisy propaganda machine to proclaim the Korean peninsula on "the brink of war" and pointedly reminded the U.S. not to forget that 54,246 American soldiers died in the Korean War.

The West spoke back last week in a quieter but no less assertive tone. A third and supposedly climactic round of high-level talks between North Korea and the U.S., to discuss trading diplomatic recognition and economic aid for the North's full compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and other Western demands, was scratched. South Korea put its 633,000 troops on alert. Seoul also accepted an American offer to deploy 48 Patriot missile launchers to defend against North Korean Scud missiles and announced that it had resumed planning for the Team Spirit military exercises with the U.S., suspended in February to placate the North. Washington weighed whether to supplement its 34,830 troops in South Korea and beef up their equipment. All the military talk sparked fears that the yearlong diplomatic campaign to haul Pyongyang back inside the safeguards of the nonproliferation treaty had collapsed. Given the touchy unpredictability of the Kim Il Sung regime, Seoul and Washington were worried that even small military signals could escalate toward a catastrophic war.

"I do not want to be an alarmist on North Korea," Secretary of Defense William Perry told TIME last week, "but I take the threat of military action very seriously." Two-thirds of Pyongyang's army is stationed within 100 miles of the border and could march to the demilitarized zone in an hour and to Seoul in two. The North, he says, is "persisting in the development of a nuclear-weapons program." And, adds Perry, "it's a very erratic regime. I don't know of anybody anywhere who can predict with confidence what philosophical views the North Korean leadership has about war and peace." But, he concludes, "I see no imminent danger of military actitivies." Nevertheless, the Pentagon is re-examining its contingency plans for South Korea, and it plans what Perry called "further moves that strengthen our + defensive forces" -- even though the U.S. realizes Pyongyang will regard those actions as provocative.

Information about North Korea's intentions has been at a premium since the aborted mission by the International Atomic Energy Agency in early March. After being stonewalled since February 1993, inspectors were finally allowed back to seven sites at the North's Yongbyon nuclear complex. Nothing unusual was found at six of the sites, but at the seventh, where plutonium for bombs can be extracted from nuclear-fuel rods, the team discovered that an IAEA seal on an area containing a "glove box" for handling radioactive material was broken -- a janitor's mistake, claimed North Korea. But the inspectors were not permitted to take samples from the "glove box" that would reveal any recent handling of the North's plutonium stocks. They saw no evidence of a major breach, but the off-limits lab "was the heart of the matter," says IAEA spokesman David Kyd.

The agency's decision on whether North Korea had complied with the treaty terms was crucial. Director-General Hans Blix reported the truncated inspection prevented "any meaningful conclusion" about whether the North had diverted nuclear material for possible use in weapons. That was enough for the agency to turn the matter over to the U.N. Security Council. The council has the power to impose economic sanctions on the North for its recalcitrance. But since China, Pyongyang's friend, is still likely to veto any such measures, the U.N. at present does not have the inclination.

President Clinton warned last year that "we will not allow the North Koreans to develop a nuclear weapon." That threat is easier made than implemented. The North Korean problem is a four-dimensional chess game where each major player -- the U.S., North and South Korea, and the IAEA -- fears the political consequences of making concessions and the military consequences of getting tough. Last week a new player appeared on the scene when Russia tried another opportunistic raid into U.S. diplomatic territory by proposing an international conference to settle Korea's problems. Washington politely dismissed the idea as a harmful diversion.

If it came to a war, the U.S. and South Korea both insist they would win in the end -- but at a prohibitive cost in casualties and damage. Economic sanctions are not very attractive either. The North says it will treat them as a declaration of war, but instead of retaliating with an all-out attack, it might quit the nonproliferation treaty or engage in small-scale military action, such as fire fights across the DMZ. Because the North is already poor and trades little, some experts doubt that an embargo would have much effect unless China cut off oil sales, which is not likely.

The Clinton Administration has decided a gradual move from purely diplomatic to economic and military pressures is still the best response. That is the only way the Security Council might earn backing from China if sanctions are needed later. Last week the U.S. strained to avoid appearing bellicose. The Patriot batteries are being shipped to South Korea rather than flown. No date has been set for the renewed Team Spirit exercise. The Security Council resolution Washington is drafting is expected only to admonish North Korea to comply with treaty terms and to warn that sanctions might be imposed later.

This gentle strategy flows partly from a widely shared view in Washington that the North may simply have miscalculated when it denied the IAEA complete access to the seventh site. Pyongyang is an exceedingly tough bargainer, practiced at extracting rewards time and again for the same concession. This time it tried horse trading access to the seventh site for Seoul's agreement to postpone an exchange of high-level envoys to discuss nuclear questions, something the U.S. opposed. The IAEA, tired of being endlessly diddled, would not buy the deal, a reaction that appears to have surprised the North. "They calculated that the rest of the world would understand" when they balked at a small part of the IAEA inspection to get their way on the envoys, says a U.S. official. The result, says another official, is that "we find ourselves in a harsher situation than I think anyone expected or desired."

There are signs that Pyongyang is trying hard not to deepen the crisis. Its talk of destroying Seoul may scare the uninitiated, but this "is not particularly unusual" for North Korean propaganda, says Ezra Vogel, the CIA's national intelligence officer for East Asia. In a statement by a Foreign Ministry spokesman that the U.S. considered authoritative, Pyongyang only vaguely threatened to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty if Team Spirit resumed in 1994 and other Western pressures were applied -- but it did not denounce Washington's decision to send Patriots.

In South Korea, the fine gradations of Northern propaganda were lost in a wave of pessimism about the chances of finding a peaceful accommodation with a country still preaching war. The civilian government of President Kim Young Sam came to power believing its military predecessors had manufactured tensions with the North to prop up their own misrule. Kim's ministers spoke in rosy tones about how they would vanquish ideology and unite the two countries. Now, says a Seoul official, "the romantic view is gone." Kim has shelved plans to encourage investment in the North, toughened the South's military stance and made sure there were no gaps between Seoul and Washington for the North to exploit. Last week he traveled to Tokyo and Beijing to seek allies against Pyongyang's intransigence.

The West is now waiting to see whether Pyongyang backs down. Some analysts are sure the end of the diplomatic road has already been reached. They argue that the regime and especially its unproved heir apparent, Kim Jong Il, view an atomic program as the trump card of their credibility and will not forgo it for anything. Other experts think Pyongyang might eventually give up its nuclear dream, but only in exchange for massive economic aid, a guarantee of Western support for Kim Jong Il's succession and a withdrawal of U.S. troops from the South -- concessions neither Seoul nor Washington will accept. The Clinton Administration still believes North Korea can be persuaded to trade away its bomb -- or at least its capacity to build any more than it may now have -- for diplomatic recognition and reasonable financial aid.

The task for Clinton is to keep prodding and cajoling Pyongyang down that path without devoting so much attention to the problem that he raises the value of the North's nuclear card even higher. Right now, his wait-and-squeeze strategy has strong congressional support, but that could erode if the North were to escalate. Says a U.S. official: "Quite frankly, the real problem will be keeping extraneous issues -- Somalia, human rights in China, Whitewater -- from affecting our response and getting us off track." Then an embattled Clinton might be prompted to try what former ambassador to Seoul Donald Gregg calls "compensatory toughness": setting deadlines the North will snub or making demands from which neither side can back down. Getting off track with North Korea could cause a war.

With reporting by Edward W. Desmond/Tokyo and Jay Peterzell/Washington