The Post doesn't think the Times has it right about the second reprocessing plant.
Proposals To N. Korea Weighed
U.S. Might Offer No-Attack Pledge
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 22, 2003; Page A01
Bush administration officials are considering granting North Korea formal guarantees it will not come under U.S. attack as part of a verifiable dismantlement of its nuclear facilities, in what would be part of a diplomatic gambit by the Bush administration aimed at resolving a standoff over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.
In extensive talks last week with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo, administration officials asked him to inform the North Koreans that the United States would agree to meet again with Chinese and North Korean officials in Beijing, provided the session was followed almost immediately by multilateral talks that include South Korea, Japan and possibly Russia, U.S. officials said yesterday.
Administration officials said that at this broader multilateral meeting, they would formally unveil a U.S. plan for ending the crisis, which has prompted intense discussion within senior levels of the administration about the form of the proposal and how it would be presented.
U.S. officials have indicated to Asian allies they would open with discussion of how the administration could reassure North Korea it does not face a U.S. invasion and then move toward what one official called a "whole gamut" of issues between North Korea and United States, such as providing energy and food aid if the North Korean government meets a series of tough conditions, including progress on human rights.
The diplomatic activity -- including a willingness to bend on the administration's previous insistence that its next meeting with North Korea must include South Korea and Japan -- suggests the administration is actively looking for ways to defuse the crisis.
A White House official, however, disputed any notion the administration had shifted in its public refusal to negotiate with North Korea. "As we have said many times, we will not submit to blackmail or grant inducements for the North to live up to its obligations," he said.
"We must continue to work with the neighborhood to convince [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Il that his decision [to develop nuclear weapons] is an unwise decision, and we will do just that," President Bush said yesterday in Crawford, Tex.
Since North Korea admitted in October the existence of a secret program to create the fuel for nuclear weapons, the administration has insisted it would not reward the government in Pyongyang for nuclear blackmail. But some officials said they believe they have succeeded in diplomatically isolating North Korea enough -- including enlisting the support of China, North Korea's main patron -- that they can begin to delicately and formally dangle the incentives available to North Korea if it ends its nuclear programs.
North Korea has long demanded that the United States sign a nonaggression pact, but it is highly unlikely such a treaty would be approved by the Senate, so any U.S. proposal may fall short of North Korean desires. Bush has repeatedly said he does not want war with North Korea, but he also has labeled it part of the "axis of evil," including Iran and the former government of Iraq .
Other nations in the region, especially China, have urged the administration to formally assure North Korea it will not be attacked. North Korea's state-run KCNA news agency yesterday called on Washington to "legally commit itself to nonaggression."
U.S. officials have invested months of effort in convincing other nations in the region they must work together to thwart North Korea. Bush has also refused to agree to senior bilateral talks with North Korean officials, as demanded by Pyongyang.
At the only trilateral meeting -- in April, with the Chinese in attendance -- North Korean representatives said Pyongyang would give up its nuclear weapons and missiles only after the United States fulfilled a long list of conditions, including full diplomatic relations. Since then, the Bush administration and some of its allies, especially Japan, have signaled they will increase the pressure on North Korea by cracking down on the illegal smuggling and weapons trade that provides much of its foreign revenue.
Earlier this month, North Korea said it had successfully reprocessed 8,000 spent fuel rods to separate out the plutonium necessary to fashion several nuclear weapons, alarming other nations in the region. China, in particular, has embarked on an unusually aggressive diplomatic effort. Dai spent four days in Pyongyang before flying to Washington for consultations on Friday. He held a 21/2-hour meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell after seeing Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice at the White House.
South Korean national security adviser Ra Jong-yil yesterday predicted another round of talks will be held soon, telling South Korean television that "we are in the final stage of fine-tuning the format of dialogue." He said that Pyongyang's security concerns need to be "addressed in some way."
Senior U.S. officials, meanwhile, yesterday cast doubt on a report over the weekend that the United States had evidence that North Korea might have a second, secret facility to reprocess spent fuel rods. U.S. officials have long speculated North Korea might have built a second facility underground, but they said no new evidence of such a project had emerged.
Two officials said the report, which was first published in the New York Times, appears to have started with information South Korea received from North Korean agents, and officials viewed it as part of a series of North Korean provocations. There are indications of activity having started at the Yongbyon reprocessing plant 55 miles north of the North Korean capital, but so far there is "no indication that anything of significance has emerged at the other end," according to a senior administration official familiar with the intelligence.
While the report suggested that krypton gas released by the reprocessing had come from a direction other than Yongbyon, supporting the theory of a second plant, officials and other experts said that was unlikely.
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington research organization, recently completed a "worst case" study of the possibility that North Korea could have a secret reprocessing plant. In that study he determined that the amount of krypton released from reprocessing "would barely be above background level" -- the amount contained in normal air. Given the small amounts, Albright said, "there would be almost no chance to determine the direction from which it came."
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