N. Korea Pushes It to the Brink : Kim seems to be daring the world to act in nuclear crisis

President Clinton is now facing his biggest foreign policy crisis. North Korea, breaking a written promise, has prevented international inspectors from examining the spent fuel rods it is withdrawing from its only operating nuclear reactor. At a minimum, that action feeds worries that Kim Il Sung’s regime is indeed covertly diverting plutonium to build its own nuclear weapons.

The refusal also effectively ends U.S. efforts to coax North Korea into compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by offers of closer diplomatic ties and economic aid. The Administration’s next step is to ask the U.N. Security Council to impose economic sanctions. Kim’s regime, now in its fifth decade of iron control, has already warned that it would regard sanctions as an act of war. Responsible world powers may soon decide they have no choice but to test the threat implicit in that declaration.

Washington and South Korea know the risks of confronting an antagonist as nuttily irresponsible as North Korea. With a million-man army and with far more artillery pieces and tanks than the South Korean army and the 38,000 U.S. troops that directly support it, Kim Il Sung could risk all on one roll of the dice and rapidly strike south, as he did 44 years ago this month. There is no chance that North Korea could win a second Korean war. But before it was thrown back and militarily annihilated it could inflict enormous damage on Seoul, home to 25% of South Korea’s 44 million people.

It’s this possibility that prompted the Clinton Administration to seek a diplomatic solution to the challenge posed by the North 15 months ago when it announced it was quitting the NPT. All good-faith efforts have now failed. The International Atomic Energy Agency, along with Washington, has been repeatedly bamboozled.

If North Korea succeeds in making a mockery of the NPT, other nuclear aspirants--Iran, Iraq, Libya--will not be far behind. If North Korea can build nuclear weapons and put them aboard the medium-range missiles it is developing, South Korea, Japan, much of China and parts of Russia will fall within its target zone. Pressures within South Korea and probably Japan to go nuclear would be enormous.

It won’t be easy getting a U.N. Security Council consensus on sanctions; China and Russia both have expressed their distaste for such an approach. But with its economy a shambles, North Korea could be highly vulnerable even to partial sanctions. If, for example, Japan acted to halt money transfers to the North from Koreans living in Japan, Pyongyang’s primary source of hard currency would be gone, and its ability to pay for vital imports would shrink.

President Clinton should promptly speak to the American people, and to the world, about just how serious the threat now emanating from North Korea is. He should candidly concede that there are grave risks in implementing sanctions. He should be no less clear in emphasizing that the ultimate risks of doing nothing in response are immeasurably greater.