More Talk of Diplomacy for North Korea

Despite indications that North Korea is pressing ahead with its quest for a nuclear arsenal, President Bush and South Korean officials said Monday that a diplomatic solution could be found.

“I do believe we can solve this issue diplomatically by encouraging the neighborhood -- the Chinese, the South Koreans and the Japanese -- to join us with a single voice that says to Mr. Kim Jong Il: ‘A decision to develop a nuclear arsenal is one that will alienate you from the rest of the world,’ ” Bush said Monday at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

On Sunday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he thought diplomacy could be used to get Pyongyang to give up its weapons.

Bush’s statement Monday came hours after Ra Jong Yil, South Korea’s national security advisor, said he expected multilateral talks including the U.S., North Korea and other Asian partners would occur soon. The South Korean daily newspaper Korea Times quoted an unidentified source as saying the negotiations would be held Sept. 6.

U.S. officials have praised China’s role in trying to arrange talks but dropped no hints of an impending announcement.

Officials from both the United States and South Korea said a New York Times report that U.S. intelligence officials suspect North Korea is processing plutonium for nuclear weapons in a secret underground plant was unsubstantiated.

U.S. officials said Monday that the evidence for a second plant, in addition to the one at Yongbyon, was inconclusive, and they warned against assuming that North Korea has made good on its recent claim to have finished reprocessing its 8,000 spent plutonium fuel rods. Bush also brushed off the reports.

“The desire by the North Koreans to convince the world that they’re in the process of developing a nuclear arsenal is nothing new,” Bush said. “And, therefore, we must continue to work with the neighborhood to convince Kim Jong Il that his decision is an unwise decision. And we will do just that.”

A secret plutonium reprocessing plant would complicate the already unpalatable options for U.S. or South Korean military action against North Korea. Experts say it already is too late to bomb the Yongbyon plant -- a strike President Clinton considered and rejected in the early 1990s -- because satellite photos have shown trucks apparently moving plutonium fuel rods away from the site.

Lee Soo Hyuck, South Korea’s deputy foreign minister, said that even if a second nuclear reprocessing facility did exist, it would have minimal impact on the talks with Pyongyang.

“Even if the report on the second facility is true, it only shows that U.S. intelligence authorities have pushed for talks, even with the knowledge of its existence all along,” Lee told South Korea’s TBS television. “The U.S. will for a peaceful diplomatic resolution of the crisis remains firm, regardless.”

The reassuring messages from Seoul and Washington contrast with a steady drumbeat of reports suggesting that North Korea is beefing up its conventional military and nuclear capabilities -- or doing its best to make the world believe it is.

South Korea’s Defense Ministry on Saturday released a lengthy military assessment concluding that North Korea was building up its military. The report said North Korea had deployed additional medium-range Rodong missiles on its east coast -- within easy striking distance of Japan and U.S. bases in the Pacific. The report also said the North Koreans had moved forward artillery at the demilitarized zone that has separated the Koreas since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

In recent days, though, North Korea has softened its rhetoric. “If the United States dropped its hostile policy toward [North Korea] and legally committed itself to nonaggression, the latter would be ready to dispel the U.S. concern,” the Korean Central News Agency said in a report monitored by Reuters.

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Demick reported from Seoul and Efron from Washington.