Seoul Would Support N. Korea Sanctions : Asia: Foreign minister says South Korea would back U.N. action to force nuclear inspections.

After meeting with top U.S. officials, the South Korean foreign minister said Friday that his country will support tough international sanctions against North Korea if the U.N. Security Council decides to take such measures.

The Security Council is expected to rule soon--after a meeting Feb. 20 of the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency--on whether to impose sanctions against North Korea for barring international inspections of its nuclear installations.

The Vienna-based agency is likely to declare that it cannot guarantee North Korea is not diverting nuclear fuel for weapons purposes and thus is in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The CIA has said it believes that North Korea already has developed the technology to assemble a nuclear bomb and may have built one or two.

Until now, the South Korean government has been cautious about appearing hostile toward its northern neighbor and has avoided openly condoning sanctions against North Korea for failing to comply with the international agency’s requests. The dispute is over inspections of seven nuclear installations, which North Korea says are being used for peaceful purposes.

But on Friday, in answer to a question about how the Seoul government would respond if the Security Council chose to take punitive measures, Foreign Minister Han Sung Joo said, “We will support and respect the decision and measures the United Nations will take.”

He suggested, however, that some milder measures might be possible initially.

“The choice may not be between doing nothing and imposing very harsh sanctions from the beginning,” Han said.

His remarks seemed to hint that South Korea might support proposals for the imposition of gradual sanctions against North Korea that would be less formal and less severe than U.N. sanctions. These gradual sanctions could include a reduction of oil supplies to North Korea and steps by Japan to hamper the ability of North Koreans to send home money that they earn in Tokyo and other Japanese cities.

In an apparent effort to calm the concerns in his country and in North Korea over recent publications about the Pentagon’s readiness to do battle with the Asian nation, Han said that “the war scares are not warranted by the existing situation.”

The United States has been increasing the diplomatic pressure on North Korea in an effort to force it to comply with the inspections.

Earlier this month, the Clinton Administration gave preliminary approval to a plan to send Patriot antimissile batteries to South Korea to strengthen U.S. forces there and help discourage any possible attacks by North Korea.

Han said that consultations between the United States and South Korea on the Patriots are ongoing and declined to comment on whether his government would support their deployment.

The crisis over the North Korean nuclear program began a year ago, when the IAEA told Pyongyang that it wanted to inspect two waste sites where it believes North Korea has hidden waste materials produced when it secretly reprocessed plutonium for weapons purposes.

North Korea responded by announcing its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.