N. Korean President Points to ‘Unprecedented’ Crisis : Asia: Comments follow regime’s warning of a war over nuclear inspections. Atomic energy agency meets in Geneva to discuss refusal to allow the inspections.

Amid growing international tension over Pyongyang’s suspected nuclear weapons development program, North Korean President Kim Il Sung declared Monday that his nation faces an “unprecedented” political and economic crisis.

Kim’s comments came one day after Pyongyang warned that any attempt to force it to accept special international inspections could touch off another Korean war.

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency met Monday in Vienna in an unprecedented private session to discuss North Korea’s refusal to allow its investigators access to two nuclear waste sites.

North Korea, the world’s most hard-line Communist state, acknowledges that it has a nuclear research program but denies that it is trying to develop weapons.

Analysis of material from six previous IAEA inspections in North Korea, permitted by Pyongyang, yielded “major inconsistencies” on the quantity and quality of nuclear material in North Korea’s possession, IAEA spokesman Hans-Friedrich Meyer said in Vienna.

The agency wants to send inspectors to the waste sites to resolve these inconsistencies, he said.

In Washington, a State Department official said he expects the IAEA to meet in Geneva for another day or two before deciding what action to take.

He said Monday’s session was devoted primarily to speeches by participants, including a North Korean representative.

“There’s a general mood to see through a resolution (requiring IAEA inspections),” the State Department official said. He said neither Russia nor China--North Korea’s two neighbors and former patrons--is giving support to Pyongyang in its effort to resist the IAEA inspections.

He said American officials are uncertain how to interpret Kim’s comments Monday. “They’re pretty stiff but about what you’d expect,” the State Department official said. “With the North Koreans, you get this kind of rhetoric, whether they are heading into a confrontation or into a deal. So it’s never possible to tell.”

In a statement earlier this month in Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said that “the U.S. and others are obviously concerned that North Korea has denied the IAEA access to certain sites at its Yongbyon nuclear complex. North Korea has an obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and under their safeguards agreement, which they signed with the IAEA, to permit the inspections.”

The day before Boucher made his comments, North Korea accused Washington of trying to use the IAEA inspections to spy on its military facilities.

A Sunday commentary in the official North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun warned that “if a ‘special inspection’ or ‘sanctions’ are forced on us and the inviolable soil of our country is infringed upon by big powers, it would result in plunging the whole land of the north and the south into the holocaust of war.”

The commentary said great powers wanted to use the U.N. Security Council to force special inspections on North Korea “as part of their moves to isolate and stamp out (North Korea), the bastion of socialism.”

Kim, in comments reported Monday by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency, made an extraordinarily frank admission of difficulties.

“The grave situation in which socialism has suffered a setback and capitalism has made a comeback in some countries and the frantic machinations of the imperialists and reactionaries against socialism and our republic . . . are creating a great difficulty for our revolution,” he said. “The crisis, which we should overcome now, is unprecedented in its seriousness and severity.”

North Korea’s economy has been severely hit by a cutoff of aid and preferential trade from Moscow over the last few years, with energy supplies particularly low. In late December, China--Pyongyang’s other major benefactor--announced that it, too, wanted to be paid in hard currency for all trade beginning Jan. 1.

Pyongyang has taken tentative steps to open up its economy along the Chinese model, including passage last October of a law allowing establishment of foreign joint ventures in North Korea. But there has been little progress toward genuine reform of its Stalinist economic system.

Kim had hinted at the severity of the situation in a New Year’s address, in which he declared “it is particularly important to give absolute precedence to the coal industry. Only when the production of coal is sharply increased is it possible to ease the strain on electricity and to put production in various sectors of the national economy . . . on a steady basis.”

In his comments Monday, Kim, 80, called for national unity around his son and designated successor, Kim Jong Il, 51. Citizens should “support the leadership of the party with loyalty united around Comrade Kim Jong Il in one mind,” he said.

The younger Kim is scheduled to visit China in early March for talks on diplomatic and trade issues.

Times staff writer Jim Mann in Washington contributed to this report.