Seoul vows more efforts on North

South Korean officials continued to say yesterday that their highest priority was to dissuade the North from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel supplies now in storage at its Yeongbyeon nuclear facility, but they gave no details of how they intend to proceed.

A series of high-level meetings among officials from Seoul, Washington, Tokyo, Beijing and Moscow are on tap this week after the North expelled international inspectors from its reactor site. The inspectors are now packing, the International Atomic Agency said, and are expected to leave North Korea tomorrow.

The United States, however, has apparently already decided on its response, which officials speaking on background in Washington called "tailored containment." The strategy, according to these officials, would be to ratchet up the multilateral pressure on Pyeongyang, perhaps through action at the United Nations Security Council, and remove it as a bilateral U.S.-North Korean issue.

Regarding those reports, a South Korean senior official said the Bush administration's plan cannot be implemented quickly. "To implement such a policy would take a lot of time and considerably heightened tension -- to the crisis state," the official said. "Seoul and Washington are responding extremely calmly to the North -- so indifferently that the North probably feels discouraged about its decision to try to force a crisis."

Korean, Japanese and American officials will meet next week to discuss their next steps, which could include a suspension of work on two civilian nuclear reactors on North Korea's east coast. Seoul also said it would send envoys to China and Russia in early January.

Foreign Minister Choi Sung-hong spoke with his Chinese counterpart, Tang Jiaxuan, on Saturday, but officials here said only that they confirmed the principle of a nuclear-free peninsula and a peaceful resolution to the looming crisis.

The Bush administration's approach, designed to enforce international sanctions against the North until it halts its nuclear program, could bring Seoul and Washington into open conflict. Roh Moo-hyun, Korea's incoming president, has vowed to step up the pace of interaction and collaboration with North Korea.

But Seoul -- or at least some leaders here -- has apparently rethought its initial assumption that the North's nuclear threats were only a game of brinksmanship to bring the United States to the negotiating table. Defense Minister Lee Jun told the National Assembly Saturday, "It is possible that Pyeongyang would develop nuclear weapons using its plutonium facility," despite Pyeongyang's justification that it needs its mothballed nuclear reactor to generate more electricity. That claim has met with widespread international skepticism; the facility is a research reactor and apparently has never been used to generate power. There is also a conventional, oil-fired electrical generating plant at the Yeongbyeon site.

"To generate power through that nuclear reactor, as North says it wants to do, transformers are indispensable," said Shin Sung-taek, a nuclear expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis. The five-megawatt reactor at Yeongbyeon, which was closed under the terms of the 1994 Geneva framework agreement, has had no such devices since it was first activated in 1986, the International Atomic Energy Agency said.

Experts have said the North could acquire enough plutonium to manufacture six nuclear warheads in about four months by reprocessing the 8,000 spent fuel rods now in storage at the site.

by Lee Young-jong, Kim Min-seok