Why Prioritize Pyongyang? : The nuclear stakes override everything

The ante has gone up again in the North Korea nuclear poker game.

Last week Pyongyang, reneging on an earlier promise, barred inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency from visiting facilities that could be involved in making nuclear weapons. A few days later its delegate stalked out of a can-we-talk meeting with South Korea, tossing over his shoulder the casual threat that North Korea might decide one of these days to incinerate the capital city of Seoul, home to more than 10 million people and only 30 miles from the boundary between the two Koreas.

On Monday the IAEA voted to ask the U.N. Security Council to get involved. President Clinton, reaffirming the U.S.-South Korea security pact, then announced that U.S. Patriot antimissile missiles would soon be headed for South Korea “purely as a defensive measure.” South Korea at the same time put its 650,000-man army on a state of heightened alert. Democratic and Republican congressional leaders say they would support a buildup of U.S. power in South Korea. The North Korean nuclear threat, said Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), is “probably the most serious thing on the radar screen now.”

Serious, certainly, but is it an imminent threat to peace? Are North Korea’s threats, which play to fears that its leaders may be madly unpredictable, propaganda or policy? While anything may be possible, do the odds favor North Korea’s inviting national destruction by starting a war that its leaders know can’t be won? The truth is that Pyongyang, thanks to years of shrewd bluffing and cheating, has taken every hand so far in this nuclear poker game. It’s time for the Security Council to demand a new deal.

The Security Council should vote economic sanctions against the North to force it to comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s goals and obligations. The key player in this approach will be China, which more than any other country can control the flow of goods into the North. Will China go along? Secretary of State Warren Christopher, fresh from a disastrous visit to Beijing, says he’s confident China won’t block U.N. action. But political favors, especially one of this importance, aren’t given for free. Washington may have no choice now but to start soft-pedaling its emphasis on human rights in China and its threat to take away most favored-trading-nation status, if that’s the price for getting Beijing’s vital cooperation on this momentous issue.