U.S. Ceding Upper Hand to N. Korea, Critics Say : Asia: Washington wants Pyongyang’s nuclear program frozen. But its concessions could invalidate any deal.

The outlines of a deal between the United States and North Korea are slowly emerging, and critics say they aren’t pretty.

As part of a bargain to stop the fast-growing North Korean nuclear program, the Clinton Administration has quietly made concessions that could permit the program’s resumption on short notice, outside analysts say, even though it would be frozen for the immediate future.

Leaders of the isolated Pyongyang regime will retain “a latent ability to break out of this deal if they feel it is unsatisfactory,” said Jonathan Pollack, a Korea expert at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica.

And if they do, maintained Henry Sokolski, a former Pentagon specialist on non-proliferation, “North Korea would still be producing new plutonium in the reactor it had before and be able to make at least as many bombs as it now can.”

The CIA estimates North Korea has already produced enough nuclear material for one to two bombs.

The United States and North Korea began to move toward a settlement of the nuclear crisis in a vague, conditional agreement signed Aug. 12 after talks in Geneva. Those talks are scheduled to resume Friday.

In the deal sketched out last month, the United States said it is prepared to take steps toward diplomatic recognition of North Korea and to supply it with new, less dangerous nuclear technology if North Korea will freeze its nuclear program and will rejoin the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The treaty provides for international safeguards to prevent development of nuclear bombs.

Administration officials argue that the emerging deal is of tremendous benefit to the United States and its allies, primarily because it would eliminate what Robert L. Gallucci, the top U.S. negotiator with Pyongyang, regularly calls North Korea’s “strategic” nuclear capability--the ability to produce regular, large amounts of nuclear fuel that it could use to make bombs or export to other countries.

But an examination of the fine print of the written agreement signed by U.S. and North Korean officials last month and the public explanations they have offered since shows that, for a number of the promised gains won by the Administration, there were significant qualifications or concessions:

* North Korea would halt construction of two huge new nuclear reactors. But its existing, smaller reactor at Yongbyon--which has already been used to produce plutonium, a key ingredient for nuclear weapons--would be left intact.

* North Korea has agreed to “seal” its reprocessing plant, which could turn spent nuclear fuel into plutonium. But so far, there is no guarantee that this reprocessing facility would be dismantled in the fashion the United States wants.

* About 8,000 rods of spent nuclear fuel removed from the Yongbyon plant in the spring would be sealed or encased for protection. Yet instead of the rods’ being shipped out of the country for disposal, as the Administration had wanted, U.S. officials have begun to acknowledge that they could be kept in North Korea.

* The Clinton Administration is still insisting that North Korea submit to special international inspections, which would clear up what North Korea has done in its nuclear program. But the Administration also has begun to make concessions about the timing of the inspections, admitting they can be put off for now and perhaps for years.

“It is our view that the actual implementation of special inspections, which we recognize is a serious political issue for (North Korea), need not be undertaken immediately for a settlement to be successful,” Gallucci said at a press briefing earlier this month.

Postponement of the special inspections is significant, because they are the issue that sparked the Korea crisis in the first place.

In March, 1993, after the International Atomic Energy Agency asked to inspect two sites in North Korea that officials felt might contain telltale nuclear wastes, Pyongyang countered by announcing its withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The terms of the deal now being envisioned by the Administration would bring North Korea back into the treaty. But the deal would also mean that North Korea has won extensive talks with the United States and the first moves toward diplomatic recognition and economic help before it goes along with the special inspections the IAEA originally sought.

U.S. officials point out that North Korea will not get the big final payoff--a $4-billion light-water nuclear facility produced with foreign technology and financing--until it goes along with the special inspections and explains how much weapons-grade nuclear fuel it has already produced.

The light-water reactor itself will take an estimated six to 10 years to complete, so the special inspections could be done during this extended period.

Those who defend the proposed agreement are not worried about the delay. “If this deal works, the question of the past will take care of itself over time,” asserted Robert Manning of the Progressive Policy Institute.

But some skeptics contend that the proposed deal won’t accomplish much. “In some very profound sense, we are exactly where we were when this whole crisis began,” Pollack said.

After a year of talks, North Korea will be back in the Non-Proliferation Treaty without submitting to special inspections now or anytime soon. And it will have at hand, and ready for renewed use, much of its current materials and technology if it decides to resume the weapons program.

Why did the Administration decide to make such a deal? How did it find itself giving benefits and asking its allies in Seoul and Tokyo to contribute still more rewards to have North Korea finally comply with the international rules it was supposed to obey in early 1993?

The first factor, analysts say, is that the Administration had surprisingly few weapons in its arsenal to pressure North Korea. Administration officials made it plain that they did not want to get into a war with North Korea that, by Pentagon estimates, would be winnable but result in tens of thousands of U.S. casualties.

And, last spring, the United States found that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to persuade China and Japan to go along with economic sanctions against Pyongyang.

As a result, said Douglas Paal, a former George Bush Administration official who now heads the Asia Pacific Policy Center, North Korea now “senses that the United States will seek an agreement at any price.”

The second factor affecting the Administration is the underlying belief among many in Washington that North Korea’s Communist regime probably will fall apart in the next few years, so the promised economic benefits may not have to be paid.

With the death last July of President Kim Il Sung, North Korea faces a difficult transition to new political leadership at a time when its economy is steadily declining.

“Time is on our side,” argued one congressional source, echoing sentiments voiced elsewhere in Washington. “As long as we can maintain the current freeze and continue talking, it is to our advantage. I think we’re never going to see a light-water reactor up and running in North Korea, because there’s a good chance there won’t be a North Korea at the time it is ready.”

The third factor underlying the deal is Pyongyang’s tough, clever negotiating tactics: The rapid, continuing pace of the North Korean nuclear program put the Administration in the position of having to struggle just to maintain the status quo and prevent the situation from getting worse. Thus, one of the main concessions won by the Administration in Geneva was to prevent North Korea from finishing new nuclear reactors that are much bigger than the ones they already have.

Moreover, the Clinton Administration has been forced to try to figure out what should be done with the 8,000 highly radioactive fuel rods North Korea suddenly removed from the Yongbyon reactor in the spring. In taking that nuclear fuel from the reactor, North Korea created a major new problem that didn’t exist a year ago--and used it to extract further concessions.

North Korea’s pattern of first creating problems and then bargaining them away is likely to continue. Indeed, some experts warn that in the next few weeks, North Korea could use these fuel rods to try to extract some more concessions from the Administration.

“The North Koreans are deliberately letting the spent fuel deteriorate,” said a Washington-based diplomat who follows North Korea. “A few weeks from now, the North Koreans could say that these rods are deteriorating so fast that they have to be reprocessed (into plutonium). That would be the next round of brinkmanship, and the United States would be at a disadvantage.”

In the weeks since the August agreement, Administration officials have devoted most of their efforts toward trying to organize and work out specifics of the economic package they will offer to North Korea.

The biggest of these is the proposed light-water reactor--which would supply nuclear power with technology that cannot easily be used for nuclear weapons--because the reactor produces a much lower quality of plutonium than the gas-graphite reactors North Korea is now using.

In recent weeks, the United States has been quietly trying to put together a consortium of countries or companies to supply the technology for this reactor and to finance the $4-billion project.

That effort is in some ways a mammoth dispute over construction and design contracts. “It’s not clear how the consortium would work,” one U.S. official said recently. “I think it’ll be a combination of South Korea, Japan and Germany.”

But another U.S. official said he doubts that South Korea, which will provide most of the financing for the project, will be willing to help pay for North Korea to get any German technology.

U.S. officials admit that one of the biggest unresolved problems is that the Administration will have to get clearance from Congress for South Korea to supply light-water reactors to Pyongyang. Some U.S. laws forbid exports to North Korea, and other laws restrict the re-export of American-licensed nuclear technology.

“There is going to have to be some nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and North Korea,” said one congressional source. “That’s a dicey proposition.”

The Administration also has been quietly trying to work out details of another benefit it promised North Korea in writing last month in Geneva--that the United States will arrange for “interim” energy supplies for North Korea in the years before the light-water reactor is built.