U.S. Is Warning North Koreans on Nuclear Test

The New York Times
May 16, 2005
U.S. Is Warning North Koreans on Nuclear Test
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, May 15 - The Bush administration on Sunday warned North Korea for the first time that if it conducted a nuclear test, the United States and several Pacific powers would take punitive action, but officials stopped short of saying what kind of sanctions would result.

"Action would have to be taken," Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser, said on the CNN program "Late Edition." Asked earlier on "Fox News Sunday" about recent reports that intelligence agencies have warned that North Korea could conduct its first test, Mr. Hadley added: "We've seen some evidence that says that they may be preparing for a nuclear test. We have talked to our allies about that."

But he cautioned that North Korea was "a hard target" and that correctly assessing its intentions was nearly impossible.

Mr. Hadley's warnings represented the first time anyone in the Bush administration had approached drawing a "red line" that North Korea could not cross without prompting a reaction. The term red line was often used during the cold war to set the boundaries in confrontations, with perhaps the most extreme example President Kennedy's action in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis to curb a nuclear risk.


In the case of North Korea, the threat has risen incrementally over 15 years. Mr. Bush's aides have said in interviews over the past year that if they drew a clear line, they believed that the North Koreans would see it as a challenge and walk right up to it.

On Sunday afternoon, senior administration officials said that concerns about baiting North Korea helped to explain why Mr. Hadley did not specify what kind of penalty was possible. Instead, Mr. Hadley noted that "the Japanese are out today already saying that those steps would need to include going to the Security Council and, potentially, sanctions."

He appeared to be referring to comments by Shinzo Abe, the secretary general of Japan's governing Liberal Democratic Party. Returning to Japan from a recent trip to Washington - where he met Mr. Hadley, Vice President Dick Cheney and others - Mr. Abe said Japan faced the most direct threat if North Korea proved that it could detonate a nuclear weapon.

"If North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons becomes definite," Mr. Abe said on Asahi TV, and North Korea "conducts nuclear testing, for instance, Japan will naturally bring the issue to the U.N. and call for sanctions against North Korea."

Mr. Abe also told Asahi TV that it was "unthinkable not to impose any sanctions in case of a nuclear testing."

In an interview with The New York Times during his visit to Washington, Mr. Abe acknowledged that making sanctions work would "depend on the cooperation of China," though he noted that Japan would be capable of cutting off a considerable flow of money into North Korea sent by ethnic Koreans living in Japan.

North Korea has repeatedly declared that it would consider any sanctions imposed through the United Nations as an act of war.

Mr. Hadley, known for his caution, appeared somewhat more tentative Sunday than Mr. Abe did in discussing sanctions. He offered no specifics. Nor did he mention the extensive studies under way at the State Department, and in his own National Security Council to come up with a range of options, either in the event of a nuclear test or North Korea's continued refusal to rejoin negotiations that it has boycotted for nearly a year with South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

For the Bush administration, devising meaningful sanctions is difficult because the United States has prohibited almost all interchanges with North Korea, except for some emergency food aid, since the Korean War ended five decades ago.

Any effective sanctions would require the full cooperation of North Korea's neighbors, South Korea and China, at a time when they are going in the opposite direction. South Korea is expanding economic ties with the North, and trade between China and North Korea has significantly increased in the past year.

The sanction options could range from establishing a quarantine of North Korea - searching shipments in and out of the country for weapons, drugs and counterfeit currency, the country's main sources of foreign cash - to cutting off its oil supplies. But all of those depend on the cooperation of China, and Chinese officials have insisted, at least publicly, that they do not believe that it is time to pressure North Korea economically.

A senior Chinese official, Yang Xiyu, told The Times in an interview published last week that it was true that "we do not yet have tangible achievements" in ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program. "But a basic reason for the unsuccessful effort lies in the lack of cooperation from the U.S. side." He cited Mr. Bush's references to Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, as a "tyrant" who keeps dissidents in concentration camps.

Mr. Hadley played down the differences with China, saying that "we're comfortable that we are all on the same page."

Other administration officials contended last week that the Chinese, in private, have said they are trying to pressure North Korea not to take provocative action. Yet in recent days, North Korea has seemed to ignore such caution, boasting that it had already removed 8,000 spent fuel rods from a nuclear reactor to make more bomb-grade plutonium.

At the same time, administration officials and outside experts have said the Chinese fear instability in North Korea and are opposing sanctions that may destabilize the government and send millions of North Koreans over the Chinese border.

Mr. Hadley, on CNN, also appeared to increase the official American estimate of the number of nuclear weapons the North Koreans possess. Officially, the Central Intelligence Agency has said one or two, though most government analysts say the number is higher.

On Sunday, Mr. Hadley said: "Estimates range from two to six. We just really don't know." At issue are estimates about how much plutonium North Korea has harvested from its nuclear reactor, a subject of disagreement among the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Japanese and the South Koreans.

While the Bush administration has been criticized by Democrats for letting North Korea's program expand in 2003 when the United States was tied up in Iraq, conservatives have also been critical of the White House for not speaking more clearly.

Asked about Mr. Hadley's comments on Sunday, Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute who has urged the United States to draw clear red lines, said, "My impression is that until now there has been a muscular effort to change the topic" when administration officials were asked how they would react to a test.