Facing the N. Korean Threat: For Now, More Diplomacy : Alternatives in nuclear issue range from unpalatable to terrifying

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, fresh from high-level meetings in Pyongyang and Beijing, has counseled continued patience in efforts to get North Korea to open its nuclear facilities to international inspection. The Clinton Administration, which has been talking about this and other issues with North Korean representatives in New York--the two countries have never had diplomatic relations--is clearly ready to act on that advice, if only because its assessment of the efficacy of political and military alternatives to diplomacy allows little room for optimism.

This week brought some hints of progress in the U.S.-North Korea talks. But a satisfactory end to North Korea’s challenge to the international control of nuclear weapons is not yet in sight. If North Korea persists in that challenge the security of two key American allies, South Korea and Japan, will be directly endangered. Stability in Northeast Asia will be put at risk, and the survival of the international non-proliferation regime will be in grave doubt.

The immediate need is to get North Korea to open all of its nuclear facilities to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, including at least two sites that U.S. intelligence agencies believe have been involved in reprocessing nuclear reactor fuel into weapons-grade plutonium.

North Korea has threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty rather than permit the full inspections the agreement requires. The IAEA on its part could soon ask the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions unless Pyongyang allows access to the nuclear sites. Even if the council agreed to sanctions, risks would remain, and could even intensify.

Some analysts, South Koreans and Japanese among them, fear that Kim Il Sung’s economically enfeebled and diplomatically isolated regime could react to sanctions by lashing out militarily. The result, as President Clinton warned during his visit to South Korea last summer, would be suicidally destructive for the north. But even as that devastation was taking place, South Korea and perhaps even Japan could come under the gun. North Korea may already possess a crude nuclear device. Even if it does not, it could bring Seoul--home to one-fourth of South Korea’s 44 million people and only 25 miles south of the demilitarized zone--under murderous artillery and rocket attacks.

An embargo--especially on oil--that did not have the full support of Russia and China, both of which share a border with North Korea, would be wholly ineffective. So would an embargo that failed to halt the $1.8 billion a year in hard currency that flows from Korean residents of Japan to the north. Japan has done nothing so far to interfere with these vital transfers of money, and there’s no assurance the Japanese would be effective in halting them even under a Security Council requirement. As always, then, the sanctions option is less than foolproof.

The military option, meaning preemptive U.S. attacks on North Korea’s nuclear facilities, is even less attractive. First, it risks the release of large amounts of radioactive material into the environment. Second, it could well fail to destroy any nuclear devices the north has already made and hidden. Third, it would certainly bring South Korea under immediate retaliatory attack. These possibilities for now seem even less appealing--especially to South Koreans--than the prospect of North Korea working to develop a nuclear bomb. So diplomacy for the moment remains the best course, with Washington offering inducements to North Korea--diplomatic ties, trade, economic aid--if it forgoes its nuclear ambitions.

However, diplomacy also has its limits; at some fairly early point, barring achievement, other options, however unpalatable, will have to be considered. The vital need is that these other potential measures be internationally supported, first of all by South Korea and Japan, but no less needfully by as broad a coalition as possible.

At issue is not a test of wills between Pyongyang and Washington but a challenge by North Korea to the integrity of the global non-proliferation agreement. The United States cannot emphasize that point too strongly, or too often.