A Game of Risk With North Korea

In years of confrontations with North Korea, it was almost always the Americans who blinked.

U.S. leaders believed that a regime that would starve its people, assassinate foreign leaders and risk war through military provocations could not be rational and had to be placated with concessions.

Today, the Bush administration faces a deepening crisis with a new attitude: Pyongyang’s leaders are sane and, under pressure, will realize that they must give up their nuclear program and illicit arms trade if they want their government to survive.

This view marks a revolution in official U.S. thinking about a regime that some people consider the most dangerous in the world.

And it explains why the White House has been able to look on with seeming serenity in recent days as North Korea has taken step after step toward restarting a nuclear program that was halted in 1994 by a U.S.-brokered aid deal.

“They’ve turned the old philosophy on its head,” said L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs, a research organization in Washington. Administration officials believe that North Korean leaders “are rational to the point that they wouldn’t do anything that would risk suicide ... and we can ratchet the pressure up as much as we want.”

However, he added, if the administration’s analysis is incorrect, the results could be catastrophic.

“If they’re wrong, they’re going to be incredibly wrong,” Flake said.

Perhaps the clearest example of the traditional U.S. view is the 1994 Agreed Framework, an international energy aid package that was worked out when the Clinton administration confronted circumstances very much like those in place today.

Amid signs that Pyongyang was forging ahead with a nuclear program, the Clinton administration considered putting various kinds of pressure on North Korea. President Clinton even thought seriously about a military strike on the country’s nuclear facilities.

But officials feared that if backed into a corner, North Korea’s Stalinist regime could respond by unleashing an artillery attack on Seoul -- the South Korean capital, only about 35 miles from the border with the North -- that could conceivably kill hundreds of thousands of people in the first few hours. Although the United States knew it could eventually win any war on the Korean peninsula, it could not accept the losses that were likely in the opening stages of such a conflict.

“The tolerance of risk was always much lower on our side,” Flake said.

Under the 1994 deal, the North Koreans were promised supplies of fuel oil and construction of two civilian light-water reactors to produce energy if they suspended work on reactors and a reprocessing plant that were suspected of being part of a covert nuclear weapons program. They weren’t required to provide proof that they had dismantled the program, thus keeping alive the option of restarting it at a later date.

At the same time, the impoverished country continued to receive supplies of food from international donors, including the United States.

But President Bush, who in his most recent State of the Union address described North Korea as one of three members of an “axis of evil,” made it clear that he was offended by this approach. From the earliest days of his administration, U.S. officials have described North Korea’s efforts as intolerable “blackmail diplomacy.”

When North Korea revealed two months ago that it was pursuing a nuclear program in violation of the 1994 deal, U.S. officials said they were prepared to offer Pyongyang no new incentives to halt the program again, and they insisted that any new negotiations must come on U.S. terms.

This week, as North Korea removed U.N. surveillance cameras from its nuclear complex and took steps to resume production of nuclear materials, U.S. officials renewed their denunciations of North Korean “blackmail” attempts.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned the North Koreans on Monday that the United States could win any war on the Korean peninsula, even if U.S. forces were fighting Iraq at the same time.

On Tuesday, monitors at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna reported that the North Koreans were continuing their efforts to restart the program by beginning to try to repair a nuclear research reactor and completing their efforts to unseal a facility used to reprocess spent nuclear fuel rods.

State-controlled media quoted defense official Kim Il Chol as saying that the U.S. was putting the peninsula on the “brink of a nuclear war” and that its policy toward the North could result in “an uncontrollable catastrophe.”

U.S. officials have made it clear that, united with key Asian countries, they can apply powerful economic and diplomatic pressure to make Pyongyang give in. North Korea badly needs trade, and one-third of its population may die this year without international food aid, experts say.

Although analysts do not believe that a nuclear-armed North Korea would necessarily lead to war in the short term, it could set off a spiraling arms race in an already heavily armed region and increase the spread of weapons technologies around the world.

Experts say that so far, the U.S. efforts to build a diplomatic wall around North Korea have been successful -- in large part because North Korea’s moves have frightened neighbors, who have stampeded into the U.S. camp.

In the new environment, Japan’s talk of paying war reparations to North Korea has disappeared, said Flake, of the research group.

Flake said that most South Koreans want their government to be cautious in its approach to North Korea, even though the election this month of human rights lawyer Roh Moo Hyun as president was widely taken as a sign of public desire for continued contacts with the North.

China and Russia have expressed displeasure with North Korea’s actions concerning its nuclear program and appear willing to take part in U.S. efforts to cut off the North’s illicit trade in missiles, he said.

“So far, they’ve been remarkably on board,” Flake said.

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Times staff writer Alissa J. Rubin in Vienna contributed to this report.