N. Korea Agrees to Inspection of 7 Nuclear Sites

North Korea sidestepped the threat of impending U.N. economic sanctions Tuesday by agreeing, after months of delay, to allow international inspections of seven nuclear facilities.

The International Atomic Energy Agency announced that the Pyongyang regime of President Kim Il Sung has accepted the agency’s plans and conditions for inspecting the facilities. The inspections are expected to take place within a few weeks.

Although other issues remain unresolved, both the IAEA and the Clinton Administration portrayed the new agreement as an important step forward. Discussions will now move to inspections of two other disputed sites in North Korea, although with no imminent threat of sanctions.

The agreement came less than a week before a Feb. 21 deadline for compliance. If North Korea had not agreed to the inspections, IAEA Director General Hans Blix had been expected to tell the agency’s board of governors that it was no longer possible to guarantee that North Korea was not diverting nuclear material for weapons in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Such a declaration could have led to economic sanctions against North Korea. The Clinton Administration recently began talks with other members of the U.N. Security Council about the possibility of such sanctions. North Korea, in turn, had warned that it would consider the imposition of economic sanctions an act of war.

North Korea’s willingness to submit to IAEA inspection temporarily defuses the controversy over its nuclear program but does not end it. The agreement covers only the seven nuclear installations that North Korea has formally acknowledged are on its soil. It does not apply to two undeclared sites where North Korea is suspected of having disposed of nuclear waste.

The effect of the new agreement, in fact, is to put the dispute over North Korea’s nuclear program back where it was a year ago. In February, 1993, the IAEA asked to inspect the two undeclared nuclear sites. North Korea countered by threatening to withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty and then barring the IAEA from making routine inspections at the seven declared sites.

Last summer and again two months ago, the Clinton Administration reached agreements with North Korea that U.S. officials believed would pave the way for the routine inspections. But on both occasions, North Korea subsequently raised new questions and obstacles that prevented the inspections from taking place.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Mike McCurry told reporters Tuesday, “We welcome the agreement, and we look forward to the beginning of these inspections as soon as possible.”

White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers called the agreement “a step in the right direction.”

Last December, after negotiations in New York City, Clinton Administration officials thought they had concluded a groundbreaking deal with North Korea in which Pyongyang was supposed to allow inspections of its seven declared nuclear installations in exchange for a pledge that the United States and South Korea would give up their annual Team Spirit joint military exercises.

Under this arrangement, the United States and North Korea would then move to a broader round of diplomatic negotiations in which the United States would offer such incentives as a normalization of relations and economic benefits in exchange for steps by North Korea to give up its nuclear program.

But the deal between the United States and North Korea was made conditional on an agreement between the Pyongyang regime and the IAEA on the terms and conditions for inspections of the seven nuclear facilities. And North Korea quickly began trying to impose restrictions on the ability of the IAEA to make these inspections.

U.S. officials said that until Tuesday, the United States had had no meetings with North Korea since the December talks.

One senior State Department official denied that China, North Korea’s powerful neighbor and longtime ally, had played any role as an intermediary in working out the settlement.

“I wouldn’t say China was an intermediary,” he said. “But we’ve constantly told them in recent meetings to weigh in (with North Korea). And we are confident that they have.”

Another State Department official said that the IAEA had had a long list of things it wanted to do as part of its inspections of the seven North Korean facilities.

“They (IAEA officials) got like 98% of what they wanted, which is pretty good for any negotiation,” the official said.

But he would not identify what kinds of inspection activities the IAEA had decided to forgo during its negotiations with North Korea.

Throughout the negotiations, the IAEA was trying to avoid making any concessions to North Korea that could be used as a precedent by other potential nuclear powers, such as Iran. But U.S. officials acknowledged that the inspections the IAEA will now make in North Korea are not the same as the regular inspections it makes elsewhere in the world.

A State Department official said that because of the “special circumstances” in the North Korean case, the IAEA will make a new kind of inspection, not yet carried out in any other country, in which it will examine the North Korean facilities exclusively for the purpose of guaranteeing the continuity of the IAEA’s traditional nuclear safeguards--and not for looking at North Korea’s past behavior.

Williams reported from Vienna and Mann reported from Washington.