U.S. pledges support for South Korea

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday pledged U.S. support for South Korea as it tries to punish North Korea for a torpedo attack that killed 46 sailors and sank inter-Korean relations to Cold War levels.

“This was an unacceptable provocation by North Korea and the international community has a responsibility and a duty to respond,” Clinton said during a brief visit to Seoul on her way back from China. The United States, she said, “has been reviewing additional options and authorities to hold North Korea and its leaders accountable.”

Clinton did not say what new ideas might be in the offing. Despite the tough language, the United States and South Korea have few options to punish an already isolated and impoverished regime that historically has thrived on conflict and provocation. North Korea’s ailing 68-year-old leader, Kim Jong Il, is likely to exploit an atmosphere of crisis to shore up his hold on power.

With its economy vulnerable to any whiff of war, South Korea does not want to strike back with its military, instead seeking sanctions from the U.N. Security Council. North Korea is already under various sanctions because of its nuclear weapons program.

The United States and South Korea also face resistance from China, North Korea’s longstanding ally. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is to meet Friday with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in Seoul to discuss the matter.

Chinese officials say they are not yet convinced of North Korea’s guilt, despite an investigation last week that found the underwater equivalent of a smoking gun: a piece of the torpedo’s propulsion system with Korean lettering that matches a previously examined North Korea torpedo.

The Chinese government is “carefully and prudently studying information” on the sinking, China’s Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhiyun said Wednesday in Beijing.

Former U.S. officials and other analysts have speculated that the United States and its allies might seek to tighten a Security Council resolution adopted last year with the objective of further limiting North Korea’s ability to conduct financial transactions with foreign companies and government entities.

Though Pyongyang’s interaction with the outside world is limited, its government has shown itself highly sensitive to such curbs on its ability to do business abroad.

The South Korean navy patrol boat Cheonan was ripped apart by an explosion March 26 while it was on a routine mission near disputed waters in the Yellow Sea; 26 crew members died.

“It is now difficult to retaliate because it is already 60 days since the incident and public opinion is against it,” said Baek Sung-joo, a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul.

Despite the calls for restraint, the tension in Seoul is palpable. South Korean news reports said four North Korean submarines, similar to the one blamed in the Cheonan sinking, had left a naval base on the east coast and that at least two were unaccounted for, meaning they might be on a mission in South Korean waters.

A Seoul-based defectors group, North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, reported that its sources in the North said the nation’s military were “told to get ready for combat.” South Korea’s newspapers were full of photographs of tanks and military maneuvers near the 150-mile-long demilitarized zone.

The sinking of the Cheonan “ends 10 years of rapprochement on the Korean peninsula and returns inter-Korean relations to the dark days,” the conservative South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo said in an editorial Wednesday.

North Korea on Tuesday said it would sever communications with South Korea and expel South Koreans. Eight people who work in an inter-Korean relations office at Kaesong, a jointly run industrial park just north of the demilitarized zone that divides the peninsula, were told to leave Wednesday.

But in a hopeful sign that tempers might be cooling, hundreds of South Korean employees at the industrial park were permitted to report to work as usual. The industrial park, once a symbol of inter-Korean cooperation, is one of the few sources of hard currency for the North Korean regime.

barbara.demick@latimes.com

Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington and researcher Park Ju-min of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.