U.S. Drafts Compromise on N. Korea : Asia: Plan to be submitted to U.N. this week would first target scientific and cultural exchanges if Pyongyang continues to defy nuclear inspectors. Goal is to enlist critical players, like Japan, and forestall Chinese veto.

The United States has prepared a draft resolution designed to pressure North Korea by further isolating it in cultural, scientific and diplomatic areas, but it falls short of immediate full economic sanctions, U.S. officials said Saturday.

The resolution, to be submitted to the United Nations this week, would apply stiffer sanctions at a later date if the regime of President Kim Il Sung continues to prevent international inspections of its nuclear facilities.

The “phased” sanctions plan, which is being hammered out this weekend by the Clinton Administration, is effectively a compromise designed to guarantee support from reticent but critical players in the escalating drama, notably Japan, and to ensure that China does not veto the plan. As one of five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, China has the power to veto any resolution that comes before it.

Beijing has long been Pyongyang’s closest ally and has repeatedly declared its opposition to an international economic embargo against North Korea. While China still may not vote for a sanctions resolution, U.S. officials hope it will at least abstain in any U.N. vote.

The goal of the draft resolution is to spell out the costs of repudiating the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is seeking the nuclear inspections, without imposing stiff measures that might lead North Korea to take even more dangerous steps, a U.S. official said Saturday.

“We want to make a serious response without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So we’ll hold in reserve a much tougher set of sanctions that will bite economically,” he said.

The mild sanctions in the first phase of the proposed sanctions could include stopping scientific and cultural exchanges and halting U.N. technical assistance.

The U.S. strategy is a step back from a tougher package developed by the Clinton Administration after North Korea stalled long enough to prevent an IAEA team from inspecting samplings from a nuclear reactor--evidence that could indicate the scope of a suspected nuclear weapons program. Pyongyang has denied that it has any nuclear warheads, but the CIA estimates that it has already manufactured enough weapons-grade plutonium to make one or two nuclear bombs.

The new strategy would basically offer North Korea a choice between further sanctions that would devastate its already troubled economy and financial incentives to help bail it out.

And North Korea has signaled that it might be open to compromise.

An American scholar who met with Kim last week said the regime has offered to “freeze” operations of two key nuclear facilities suspected of producing weapons-grade plutonium in return for help in acquiring safer, more modern nuclear technology.

Selig Harrison, Asia specialist with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Saturday in Beijing that several senior North Korean officials, including Kim, have told him of their readiness to halt operations at the two controversial nuclear facilities that have graphite-based reactors. According to experts, alternative “light water” reactors are safer and much more difficult to use as a source of weapons-grade plutonium.

Although construction of new reactors could take as long as eight years, Harrison said the North Koreans offered to “suspend” the operations of the graphite facilities as soon as an agreement could be reached to replace them.

The draft of the sanctions resolution, which U.S. officials cautioned may undergo changes before it is presented at the United Nations as early as midweek, follows a week of intense consultations between the United States and its allies.

In Istanbul, the Turkish capital, Secretary of State Warren Christopher attended a NATO summit and held talks Friday with Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev and others. Those talks led to another compromise as Washington agreed to reward North Korea with an international conference, which would discuss economic incentives and symbolize its re-entry into the world community, if Pyongyang complies with the IAEA.

On Saturday, Japan promised to support sanctions against North Korea, whether imposed by the Security Council or in a separate alliance with the United States.

“There would be no choice but for Japan to cooperate,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroshi Kumagai said in a speech in Hamamatsu, Japan. He called the decision a matter of “whether to continue or to abandon the nearly 50 years of post-World War II prosperity brought on by the U.S.-Japan alliance.”

Foreign Minister Koji Kakizawa, meeting with his South Korean counterpart, Han Sung Joo, in Seoul, said, “Japan regards suspicions of North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons as an issue of concern to Japan itself.” But he added, “It is important to keep open the door to dialogue with North Korea,” stressing his government’s desire for a milder approach at first.

Kakizawa leaves for Beijing today to add to appeals that China not block any punitive measures.

In a separate meeting in Seoul, U.S. Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff and South Korean Unification Minister Lee Hong Ku also backed the step-by-step sanctions approach.

The strategy fits in with what key U.S. officials have been saying over the past two days.

“Sanctions are not an end. They are a tool so that we can make sure of several things,” Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Friday on the “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.”

“One is that we want the North Koreans to come back to the negotiating table. We want to set up some way to reconstruct this history. . . . But the more important part of this is to protect the future, so that we can make sure they do not have the capability to make more weapons-grade material and weapons themselves,” she said.

Times staff writers Rone Tempest in Beijing and Sam Jameson in Tokyo contributed to this report.