What Does North Korea Want?

By MICHAEL DUFFY

Kim Jong Il has long taken a personal interest in staging North Korea's biggest celebration: his birthday. Typically, Feb. 16 is marked by fireworks displays, mass loyalty pledges, forced pilgrimages to Kim's mountaintop birthplace and the sudden appearance of food--gift bags of candy and cookies for the children unlucky enough to be born in such an isolated, impoverished and tyrannical land.

But Kim has outdone himself this year. Days before his 63rd birthday this week, his government announced that, as has long been suspected by U.S. intelligence, North Korea has indeed built nuclear weapons "for self-defense." Though the bulletin ended years of speculation about the general state of Kim's nuclear-weapons program, the declaration was actually two blows in one: Pyongyang also announced it was pulling out of joint talks with the U.S., China, Japan, Russia and South Korea to keep the Korean peninsula nuclear-free. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, hoping to play down the news, called the announcement "unfortunate."

It is a lot more than that. For more than a decade, the U.S. and its allies have insisted that they would not allow Kim to acquire nuclear weapons, out of fear that he would sell nukes to anyone willing to pay for them and set off an Asian arms race. Pyongyang's declaration, while impossible to confirm, means Kim has probably realized his quest. A nuclear-armed North Korea means that President Bush's multilateral strategy for preventing Pyongyang from acquiring nukes has failed just as dramatically as Clinton's policy of direct engagement did a decade ago. It means that even when they are united, Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo, Seoul and Washington haven't found the right combination of levers to halt nuclear proliferation by a rogue state. And it probably means that even if the U.S. and its allies can coax Pyongyang back into negotiations--a big if--their hand is weakened by what the declaration described as Kim's "arsenal." At a time when the Bush Administration is trying to increase pressure on Iran over its purported ambitions to obtain the bomb, Washington confronts a more immediate crisis with a country that claims to have it already.

North Korea has been doing an elaborate fan dance about its nuclear assets for so long that many experts assumed it had gone nuclear months or even years ago. All that was lacking was an official confirmation, and so when that came, speculation centered on why Kim had decided to come clean. North Korea's 1,100-word declaration argues that the country had little choice but to brandish its weapons after several weeks of warmongering by Washington. It cited comments by the President in his Inaugural Address and Secretary Rice in her confirmation hearings--Rice labeled Korea an "outpost of tyranny"--which to Kim's ears sounded like calls for regime change.

But there was another explanation for the announcement: Pyongyang needed to change the subject. Two weeks ago, the White House secretly dispatched two National Security Council (NSC) aides to Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul armed with evidence that North Korea may have supplied a uranium compound to Libya for its weapons labs. The gaseous compound, known as uranium hexafluoride (UF6), is a precursor to bomb-grade uranium, something bombmakers feed into centrifuges to harvest the highly fissionable isotope uranium-235 (U-235) that is at the heart of an atom bomb. Though UF6 is hard to make, it's possible to track: forensic tests focus on trace isotopes, such as U-234, whose prevalence differs from country to country and even from mine to mine. After the U.S. gained access to Tripoli's bombmaking labs a year ago, it ran tests on the UF6 it found there. U.S. officials would not connect all the dots, but one told TIME the fuel from Libya bore "a very clear signature" that pointed to North Korea.

The new U.S. evidence was rushed to officials in Beijing, who have tolerated Pyongyang's denials that it has a UF6 processing facility. The U.S. intelligence made that view seem dangerously naive. If North Korea was producing enough UF6 to export to Libya, it surely had enough for its weapons labs at home. There is some evidence that North Korea sold its UF6 not directly to Libya but via the black-market bazaar of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. That means that North Korea may not have known where its UF6 was going when it sold it, says Gordon Flake, a North Korea analyst at the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs. The new UF6 evidence was apparently strong enough to help the two NSC aides, Michael Green and William Tobey, win an audience with Chinese President Hu Jintao two weeks ago. U.S. officials would not detail Hu's reaction to the briefing, but one told TIME, "It made an impression."

But that hasn't led to much clarity about what to do. Two questions occupy the Bush team's sometimes highly divided proliferation squads: Just what is the nature of Pyongyang's arsenal? And what, if anything, can be done about it? The type and number of weapons Kim has remain unknown. Most analysts think the count is fewer than a dozen. Size actually matters more than quantity: the smaller the warhead, the easier it is to mount it in an airplane or atop a missile. Several of Pyongyang's medium-range systems, if operational, could reach Japan; one long-range weapon could theoretically reach Alaska.

What alternatives does the U.S. have? Given that a pre-emptive military strike against potential weapons sites would be fraught with complications--who knows how the situation might escalate, especially considering North Korea's substantial conventional arsenal--even anti-Kim hard-liners acknowledge that diplomacy remains the most palatable option. Kim repeated his demand last week for bilateral negotiations with Washington, a prospect the Administration rejects out of hand. The U.S. still hopes to confront the North Koreans in a multilateral setting, and the linchpin of that strategy is China. Bush has long believed that Beijing has the most to gain and lose on the Korean peninsula and would quietly pressure Pyongyang to give up its nuclear ambitions. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Beijing has been North Korea's closest ally, funneling oil and food. China would have to absorb many refugees if Kim's regime failed.

In the wake of Pyongyang's latest fulminations, the Administration is counting on China to drag the North Koreans back to the six-party table--a role China embraced in a phone call between Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing and Secretary Rice on Saturday night. "China will stay in touch with all relevant parties," Li told her. James Lilley, who was ambassador to both China and South Korea in the 1980s, says Pyongyang's tactics are designed to stall for time and force concessions from outsiders before sitting down to talk again. The only way to counter it, he believes, is to take swift action both jointly and alone. Japan, he argues, could cut off all shipping; South Korea could halt its many industrial and tourism projects with the North; the U.S. could again press for economic sanctions at the U.N. And the Chinese, Lilley says, could "go to the North Koreans, put their arms around their shoulders, kiss them on both cheeks and then whisper in their ears, 'Oh, by the way, your oil? We're gonna cut it 10% a month.'" Says Lilley: "Lets see what happens then. My bet is you'll see fuming and lots of shaking fists and million-man parades, and then they'll come to the table."

That may be the best bet for averting a crisis. But China has yet to sign on to a hard line. Beijing last month sent a Foreign Ministry diplomat to Pyongyang to discuss restarting the talks but never threatened to cut off aid. Its official returned without a deal and convinced that the North's resolve was unbreakable. "Even if China cuts aid," says a member of China's foreign policy establishment who was briefed on the meetings, "they will not weaken." Unless the U.S. and its allies get tough and together in a hurry, the world may soon find itself worried less about how fast Kim is building nuclear bombs than about how we're going to live with them. --Reported by Matt Forney/Beijing, Jim Frederick/Tokyo, Donald Macintyre/Seoul and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by Matt Forney/Beijing; Jim Frederick/Tokyo; Donald Macintyre/Seoul; Elaine Shannon/Washington