N. Korea, U.S. Near Nuclear Arms Pact

The Clinton Administration is preparing to conclude a far-reaching new agreement with North Korea that will permanently freeze that country’s nuclear weapons program but also will postpone for several years the requirement that it submit to special inspections of its nuclear waste dumps, U.S. officials said Friday.

Under the deal, the United States and North Korea will set up liaison offices in each other’s capitals within six months, the first step toward establishing diplomatic relations.

The Clinton Administration will drop its earlier insistence that radioactive nuclear fuel rods now sitting outside the North Korean nuclear plant at Yongbyon be transported out of the country, agreeing instead that they can be stored inside North Korea.

The accord is expected to be signed within the next two or three days in Geneva, where Special Ambassador Robert L. Gallucci has been negotiating with representatives of North Korea.

U.S. officials cautioned Friday that there still could be some last-minute hitch to delay the deal.

But Administration officials have begun briefing Congress and the South Korean government on details, and Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord said Friday that the United States and North Korea “may be on the verge of a rather significant breakthrough.”

The proposed deal will enable the Clinton Administration to claim victory for persuading North Korea to stop its nuclear program. It may also provide ammunition for Republicans and conservatives to attack the Administration for making concessions to Pyongyang.

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The reported terms of the deal also drew sharp criticism in Seoul. Critics declared that the United States had sold out South Korea’s interests. They said delaying the inspections could allow North Korea to continue dodging questions about its nuclear capacity.

“There are too many concessions and nothing gained for the South Korean side,” said one government adviser and expert on North Korea. “There are two winners, the United States and North Korea, and one loser--South Korea.”

But Hangyoreh, a leftist newspaper in Seoul, said: “It’s a big breakthrough. It’s a disappointment to hard-liners, but we have to learn to live with North Korea.”

The special inspections requested by the International Atomic Energy Agency are aimed at finding out how much nuclear fuel North Korea has already produced. By the CIA’s estimate, North Korea possesses enough weapons-grade plutonium to make one or two nuclear bombs.

In sharp questioning over the reported deal before the National Assembly on Friday, Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hong Koo told legislators that the government was not satisfied with the terms but had to accept them to prevent the outbreak of another war on the Korean peninsula.

Experts here said the U.S. interest in keeping North Korea in the nuclear non-proliferation treaty--even at the price of tolerating Pyongyang’s possession of one or two bombs--was fundamentally different from South Korea’s interest. Unlike the United States, South Korea is directly threatened by even one bomb and so has tried to argue furiously for the inspections of Pyongyang’s nuclear facilities.

But Seoul failed--a smashing diplomatic triumph for Pyongyang, one expert said.

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Selig Harrison, a specialist on North Korea at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said the proposed deal “is a true compromise . . . reflecting diplomacy at its best.”

Harrison has argued for several years that North Korea would be willing to bargain away its nuclear capability in exchange for political and economic benefits from the West.

In August, U.S. and North Korean negotiators in Geneva reached a first, vague and preliminary agreement that set out the goals both countries wanted to achieve. The United States said it would agree to exchange liaison offices with North Korea at some point and would arrange for North Korea to get new civilian light-water nuclear technology for energy production, if Pyongyang would freeze its nuclear weapons program.

But that earlier agreement left the most important questions unanswered--such as when the diplomatic liaison offices would be set up, what country would supply the light-water technology and what would happen to the 8,000 fuel rods now cooling in a pool outside the Yongbyon reactor.

Moreover, there was no agreement in August on the crucial issue of when international inspectors could examine nuclear waste dumps near Yongbyon. North Korean negotiators later said they had no intention of ever permitting special inspections.

If it is finally signed, the proposed new agreement will go much further and be much more detailed than the previous one.

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In a new concession, Pyongyang will agree to let South Korea take the lead role in providing North Korea with new light-water civilian nuclear technology, which is worth about $4 billion.

The United States and its allies have said they are willing to supply this light-water technology to Pyongyang, because it cannot be used to make fuel for nuclear weapons as easily as North Korea’s current gas-graphite nuclear facilities.

South Korea has been seeking the right to supply this light-water technology to North Korea, both because the contracts are economically important and because Seoul hopes that, some day, a reunified Korea will have all its nuclear plants using the same technology. Until now, however, North Korea had demanded that the equipment to come from Russia or Germany.

In the most significant compromise in the new accord, North Korea would explicitly agree for the first time to submit to the special inspections of two sites where it is believed to have dumped nuclear wastes.

But in a concession of its own, the Clinton Administration would agree that the inspections need not take place for three to five years, until after significant amounts of the new light-water technology and equipment arrive in North Korea.

Under the deal, North Korea would also agree not to reprocess the 8,000 fuel rods and would promise not to refuel or start up its current nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. In exchange, the United States would agree to let the fuel rods remain inside North Korea.

Russia reportedly had said that it was willing to accept storage of the rods on its soil in exchange for money, but North Korea did not want the rods shipped out of the country.

Meanwhile, North Korea ends a 100-day mourning period for the late President Kim Il Sung today with a ceremony that could reveal whether his son, Kim Jong Il, is being formally named the nation’s leader. The younger Kim has not been named head of the Korean government or its ruling Communist Party, and there has been speculation in the West that he is suffering from some undisclosed illness.

Times staff writer Teresa Watanabe in Tokyo contributed to this report.