N. Korean Nuclear Issue Simmers on a Back Burner

One might say that this year’s North Korean nuclear crisis has been postponed -- to be rescheduled at a date more convenient for the political calendar.

Dealing with Pyongyang’s headlong pursuit of nuclear weapons, once described as the biggest security threat to the United States, has been downgraded to a droning diplomatic process with little sense of urgency -- at least until after the U.S. presidential election.

“It is like they are just going through the motions,” said Charles L. Pritchard, once a lead U.S. negotiator with North Korea and now a harsh critic of the Bush administration’s handling of the Stalinist regime.

The latest delays come on top of months of fits and starts on North Korea as the war in Iraq largely dominated the world’s attention. As the standoff over the North’s nuclear ambitions drags into its 19th month, Pyongyang is likely to be exploiting delays to perfect its bomb-making technology.

The most recent round of six-party talks -- involving the United States, North Korea, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia -- ended inconclusively in late February. Another round is supposed to take place before July. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il arrived in Beijing on Monday for talks with Chinese president Hu Jintao. Working groups are being established to discuss technical aspects of the nuclear problem.

In Pritchard’s view, this flurry of activity creates an illusion that the North Korean nuclear program is under control when it is not.

The Bush administration “can say with a straight face that we have engaged the international community. We have a multilateral approach. But they are not headed to legitimate resolution of the problem,” Pritchard said. “They have merely obtained their interim goal, which is to keep Korea off the front pages.”

The brewing North Korea crisis is fast becoming a campaign issue, with Democrats calling it a failure comparable to that in Iraq. Presumptive Democratic nominee John F. Kerry said over the weekend on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that his No. 1 priority if elected would be to change the approach to North Korea. He has criticized the administration’s insistence on only negotiating with Pyongyang in a multilateral setting and has said he would engage immediately in direct talks if elected president.

In a question-and-answer session last week with students at Howard University in Washington, Kerry accused the Bush administration of “ignoring [the North Koreans] for two years, while the world gets more dangerous.”

Even Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the key architects of the administration’s North Korea policy, complained during his recent Asia trip that the process was moving too slowly.

“Time is not necessarily on our side,” Cheney told students at Shanghai’s Fudan University on Thursday.

But some participants in the six-party talks blame the Bush administration for dragging its feet. One frequently voiced complaint is that Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly, the lead negotiator in the two previous rounds, has had little latitude for negotiating and has been merely reading scripts prepared in Washington.

Teymuraz Ramishvili, the Russian ambassador in Seoul, said that the Russian delegation came home from the February talks with the distinct impression that neither the United States nor North Korea was ready to negotiate seriously.

“Four countries are ready to make a deal. Two countries are not,” Ramishvili said in an interview. “When those two countries are ready, there will be a basis for negotiations.”

The North Koreans appear to be just cooperative enough to attend the negotiations -- as if following Woody Allen’s famous dictum that 90% of life is just showing up. But they, too, seem to be dragging their feet, with the hope they will be dealt a better political hand if Kerry is elected president.

“The North Korean reading is that the political tea leaves have changed. They are hoping for a Kerry victory, and in the meantime, they are moving toward becoming a nuclear power,” said Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea who is in contact with the North Koreans as head of the New York-based Korea Society.

“It matches Bush’s belief that he will be reelected and that the revalidation of a reelection will allow him to move toward a tougher policy on North Korea,” Gregg said. “This creates a dangerous situation.”

In the last round of talks, the North Koreans scuttled a joint statement to be issued by all parties by demanding revisions at the last minute. In recent weeks, they have balked at setting up working-level meetings.

Relations between North Korea and the Bush administration have been particularly poisonous since Bush included Pyongyang in the “axis of evil” he named in his 2002 State of the Union speech.

The South Koreans have encouraged Pyongyang to negotiate seriously now rather than take its chances with the U.S. election.

“If DPRK is tempted to wait until November, I think that is a misguided position,” said a South Korean diplomat, using the initials for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “I don’t believe that Pyongyang can expect a more amenable position from a Democratic administration when it comes to the substance of the issue.”

North Korea’s immediate neighbors have been working hard in recent months to instill the dilatory negotiating process with a sense of urgency. The Chinese have been so active as to leave an impression that the United States has subcontracted the entire messy nuclear affair to Beijing. Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing visited Pyongyang last month in a prelude to Kim’s visit this week to Beijing, and China has hosted the two previous rounds of six-party talks.

The South Koreans, meanwhile, have picked up the slack by drawing up a variety of proposals and road maps, the latest of which was the basis for the talks in February.

Russian Ambassador Ramishvili says, however, that nothing positive can happen until the two principals in the dispute -- North Korea and the United States -- are able to sit down and talk to each other.

“We are telling our American colleagues ... you will have to face the situation and talk to the North Koreans like you have in the past,” Ramishvili said.

A crisis postponed is not necessarily a smaller crisis; to the contrary, the more Pyongyang advances with its nuclear program, the more reluctant it will be to give the program up -- and the more leverage it will have in resisting U.S. pressure, many believe.

“When you talk to the North Koreans, they say, ‘We’re not like Libya, or Iraq, or Iran. We already have nuclear weapons,’ ” said a Western diplomat who asked not to be quoted by name.

The mounting panic is only exacerbated by recent claims by Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan that he was shown three completed nuclear devices during a trip to North Korea five years ago.

A 1994 deal under which North Korea was to freeze its nuclear program in return for energy assistance collapsed in October 2002 after the U.S. confronted Pyongyang with allegations that it was cheating. The Bush administration cut off fuel oil to North Korea, which retaliated by expelling United Nations arms inspectors.

With the benefit of hindsight, diplomats say it was a terrible mistake to stop the fuel shipments and in effect throw away the 1994 agreement. Former Ambassador Gregg, who served under President George H.W. Bush, and others advised the White House not to do so. The result was that a panicked North Korea, convinced by its own propaganda that it would be the next target after Iraq of a preemptive U.S. strike, apparently not only restarted but accelerated its nuclear weapons program.

In the ensuing months, although the Bush administration and its allies argued about whether to use the carrot or the stick, North Korea has reportedly been extracting weapons-grade plutonium from its nuclear reactor’s spent fuel rods.

A private U.S. delegation that visited North Korea’s main Yongbyon nuclear complex in January concluded that the North most likely had finished reprocessing 8,000 fuel rods -- meaning it would have enough plutonium for five or six nuclear bombs, in addition to one or two reportedly produced before the 1994 deal.

One unexpected side effect of the North Korea crisis, diplomats say, is that it has brought about a new level of cooperation in northeast Asia. The very process of getting the United States, China, South Korea, Japan, Russia and North Korea together for regular meetings has created a new forum for dialogue.

Among the major players, there have been remarkably few differences over the underlying belief that proliferation of weapons of mass destruction must be stopped. That creates a far better atmosphere than existed at the time of the 1994 deal for crafting a multilateral agreement that would prevent a nuclear arms race on the Korean peninsula, a U.S. official said.

“There is a process going on that is quite positive. It is a new way of interacting and having dialogue with each other,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Whether we are closer to solving the North Korean problem, that is another story, but we do think we are.”