The Kims are the Addams Family of global politics. Their North Korea is a haunted house, so isolated from the rest of the world, so secretive and paranoid in its dealings, that there’s no way for outsiders to know why the rulers do what they do. Last week the Kims and their minions appeared to be risking economic sanctions, and even war, rather than open all of their nuclear facilities to inspection by the United Nations. Washington took a grave view of the standoff. “I hope we are not headed toward a full-blown crisis,” President Clinton told reporters. “I hope we can avoid one, but I am not positive that we can.”
Clinton’s alarming remarks were deleted somehow from the official transcript of his session with reporters; when asked about it, the White House blamed a defective tape recording. Despite other efforts by the administration to play down the sense of crisis, it was clear that Clinton and the Kims were on a collision course. The North Koreans said their latest offer, to open five of their seven nuclear facilities to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, was the best they could do. They defied Clinton to accept their terms or bear responsibility for breaking off the “dialogue.” But was that a final ultimatum or just a negotiating ploy? No one outside Pyongyang, the capital of the “hermit kingdom,” could know for sure.
U.S. intelligence is convinced that the North Koreans have no intention of giving up their nuclear-weapons program. They still refuse to grant access to two of their waste dumps, the contents of which could enable inspectors to estimate how much plutonium North Korean bomb-makers already have extracted from their reactor. The Pentagon believes North Korea has made two or three nuclear devices–crude and untested, but probably workable. The CIA is less alarmed, but late last month it gave some bureaucratic ground; the latest unified assessment by the U.S. intelligence community said the possibility that the North has a bomb cannot be ruled out. if so, it’s already too late for diplomacy to prevent proliferation.
Clinton’s remaining options include many more carrots than sticks. At a meeting between the president and his top national-security advisers early last week, sources said, the administration decided to sweeten its offer to North Korea. Previously, Washington promised that if the North Koreans accepted full inspections, they would eventually receive a number of rewards, including diplomatic relations with Washington and cancellation of Team Spirit, the annual U.S. military exercises with South Korea. Now Washington is prepared to make its concessions at once if North Korea accepts complete inspection.
If the Kims refuse, there may not be much Clinton can do to punish them. The logical next step would be for the U.N. Security Council to impose economic sanction;. But North Korea, whose economy is already in tatters, says sanctions would be a cause for war. South Korea and Japan do not want to provoke the North, and China might use its veto in the Security Council to block sanctions. Military action seems equally unpromising and even more unlikely. The Pentagon has concluded that it cannot launch a pre-emptive strike, if only because it does not know the location of all North Korean nuclear facilities, many of which are underground.
Clinton might as well be patient until the Security Council takes up the matter next month. “This is a negotiation,” says a diplomat from a friendly Asian country. “The North’s response may not have been to our liking, but it was a response. A dialogue can now continue over the next three critical weeks.” It’s a dialogue in which the secretive Kims have a built-in advantage: their reading of Clinton must be clearer than his understanding of them.
