N. Korean Admission Doesn’t Stall Nuclear Talks

SEOUL -- This week, a North Korean team jetted to New York for three days of meetings in a Park Avenue high-rise on insurance and liability for a nuclear power system in North Korea. A week earlier, another delegation had traveled from Seoul to Pyongyang in the North to hash out the logistics of a satellite telephone system for the $4.6-billion project.

Given that the Bush administration has practically declared the nuclear project dead, it would seem like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

But the international consortium in charge of the power system has hardly missed a beat since the White House announced last month that North Korea had nullified a 1994 accord under which it promised to give up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for help with its dire energy shortage. The deal calls for the building of two light-water nuclear reactors.

“Obviously, I’m still here,” said Chang Sun Sup, the South Korean representative to the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or KEDO, as the consortium is known. “Generally speaking, everybody is saying that the agreement is nullified. But until it is officially pronounced dead, we are alive and breathing.”

“We are working until we are told otherwise,” said another KEDO official, who asked not to be named.

North Korea, which only a few weeks ago looked as if it might be emerging from 50 years of isolation, reverted to its status of an international pariah when it admitted it had violated the 1994 agreement and, furthermore, felt it had every right to develop a nuclear bomb.

The admission came during a meeting last month in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, with U.S. envoy James A. Kelly and has been followed by a series of increasingly belligerent pronouncements. In talks this week, the North Koreans refused to even discuss the nuclear issue with Japan, shutting the door on what had appeared to be promising normalization talks between the two nations.

Despite the soaring tensions, a large delegation of North Korean scientists is due to arrive in Seoul in a few weeks for on-the-job training in South Korean nuclear power plants.

“There is a certain surreality to this,” said Peter Hayes, head of the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley, which studies nuclear issues involving North Korea. “But even if you are a conservative, you don’t necessarily want to rupture relations with North Korea. Everybody is just holding their breath because the situation is so volatile.”

The 1994 agreement grew out of another nuclear crisis that brought the United States and North Korea uncomfortably close to war. At the time, the Clinton administration believed that North Korea had removed fuel rods from a nuclear power plant to use for a nuclear bomb. The accord required North Korea to freeze and dismantle its graphite-moderated nuclear reactors in exchange for two light-water nuclear reactors -- which cannot be easily converted to military use.

The three main partners in KEDO -- the United States, Japan and South Korea -- all agree that they need to exert pressure on North Korea to abandon its ambition to become a nuclear power. But just how much pressure and how to apply it are matters of dispute.

The White House wants to see North Korea disarm before any talking begins. But South Korea, the country potentially most threatened by North Korea’s nuclear program and the largest contributor to the KEDO project, wants to gently nudge the North into compliance.

South Korean President Kim Dae Jung won a Nobel Peace Prize for his policy of engagement with North Korea and does not, in the last months of his term, want to abruptly reverse course.

In Seoul, one would hardly perceive that the Korean peninsula is in the throes of what has been widely touted as a nuclear crisis. Just as planning for the light-water reactors has continued without pause, so have the North-South exchanges that have been a hallmark of Kim’s “sunshine policy.”

“We don’t need to exert pressure by suspending North-South exchanges or instituting economic sanctions,” Jeong Se Hyun, South Korea’s unification minister, said in a lecture Wednesday at Korea University in Seoul. Noting that North Korea needs outside assistance simply to feed its people, he added, “They are not in a position to pursue brinkmanship, so the chances are very high to solve the nuclear issue through persuasion.”

A North Korean economic delegation, which includes a brother-in-law of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, has spent the past week touring the capitalist splendors of South Korea -- an amusement park, an auto assembly plant and a container port were on the itinerary -- andmaking politely enthusiastic comments at every stop.

“It’s too bad I have only two eyes. I’d like to see more,” one delegate was quoted as saying after touring the sprawling markets of Seoul.

Another round of talks opened Friday on plans to build a reunion center for families estranged since the 1950-53 Korean War. Also Friday, the Koreas announced that for the first time since the war, they will conduct a joint survey on flooding of the Imjin River, which runs along the demilitarized zone between the countries.

A majority of South Koreans bristled at President Bush’s inclusion this year of North Korea as part of an “axis of evil.” Now some also question whether a hawkish White House isn’t again being unduly harsh.

The unification minister, among others, has questioned what exactly was said at the Pyongyang meeting at which Kelly confronted the North Koreans with evidence of the uranium-enrichment project and reportedly received an unapologetic admission and a declaration the 1994 deal was dead.

Under one line of reasoning now popular in Seoul, the North Koreans readily confessed because they wanted to negotiate in earnest with the U.S.

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Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.