NORTH KOREA KNOCKS

NORTH KOREA KNOCKS
Washington Post: The Bush administration would dearly like to postpone any major engagement with North Korea. A hotly contested South Korean presidential election is only days away, and a decision on whether to go to war with Iraq may need to be made within weeks. But North Korea's brutal and isolated dictator, Kim Jong Il, apparently intends to force his way onto Washington's agenda, even if it means bringing his country to the brink of war.
Thursday's announcement by Pyongyang that it would reactivate its closed nuclear reactor and resume construction on two others brings North Korea to the edge of activities that the United States has previously regarded as grounds for military intervention. Bush administration officials said Thursday that the threat won't change their stance of refusing Kim the political negotiations he craves. The question is whether that tough stance will yield concessions -- or further escalation by a desperate regime.
The strategy of isolating the North, which the administration re-adopted after Pyongyang admitted to a secret uranium enrichment program, has the advantage of allowing the United States to turn its attention elsewhere while waiting for Kim to give in. Administration officials argue that the policy has been a success, at least in the sense that Japan, South Korea, Russia and China have joined in Washington's demand for an end to the enrichment work.
Last month, with the acquiescence of its Asian allies, the administration halted U.S. deliveries of fuel oil to the North under the 1994 pact known as the Agreed Framework, under which North Korea shut down a nuclear complex that was the suspected center of an earlier weapons program. Administration officials say they are determined not to repeat the Clinton administration's course of responding to provocative behavior by Pyongyang with negotiations; this time, it is insisted, Kim must first change course.
Ominous announcement
The dictator has instead done what some in the region warned he might: escalate the crisis further, in the hope of forcing the United States to talk to him. Thursday's announcement was vague but ominous, saying that the North would "immediately resume the operation and construction of its nuclear facilities to generate electricity." The threat lies in the fact that the reactor generates spent fuel that can readily be processed into bomb-grade plutonium.
International inspectors are monitoring some 8,000 spent fuel rods; should North Korea expel the inspectors and make use of these rods, it could produce dozens of nuclear weapons in a matter of months. Kim's crude calculation is that this prospect will compel the United States to give him the political concessions he wants, including recognition of his murderous regime and a guarantee against a U.S. attack. In exchange Washington would presumably get another promise of a freeze on nuclear weapons development.
The Bush administration is rightly resistant to this attempted blackmail.