Korean defiance piles pressure on Bush

The Bush administration this weekend was mounting an intense diplomatic drive to prevent the confrontation over North Korea's nuclear weapon ambitions spinning out of control, even as it makes the final preparations for a war with Iraq.

The effort, which could see the appointment of a high-level US envoy to take charge of the crisis, reflects the difficulties North Korea's brazen defiance of Washington pose for the President. Not only are some Republicans as well as Democrats questioning the very different treatment of Iraq and North Korea; his own advisers are increasingly convinced that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, will move his weapons programme into top gear while Washington is totally preoccupied by Iraq.

Publicly, the US is committed to a diplomatic solution, as Mr Bush repeated on Friday. But he made clear that he has not ruled out force. "All options are on the table," he declared before heading for the presidential retreat at Camp David.

That comment is being taken by the North Koreans as indicating that the US is preparing to attack them. Pyongyang yesterday urged South Korea to help restrain its American allies, with the state-run daily Rodong Sinmun saying: "The situation on the Korean peninsula is inching closer to the phase of serious crisis. There is no guarantee that the US war hawks, seized by extreme war fever, would not ignite a war of aggression." It added, ominously: "This war will not bring disasters to the North alone."

Earlier, in another deliberate signal that the US was ready to act if Kim Jong Il's regime went too far, the Pentagon disclosed that two dozen long-range bombers had been put on standby to fly to the region.

But the reclusive Communist regime responded by heating up its rhetoric further, and warning that any build-up by the US, which already has 37,000 troops stationed in South Korea, would see "the whole land of Korea reduced to ashes" and "horrible nuclear disasters".

US officials do not take that threat literally. But they admit that the risk of North Korea going nuclear has never been higher. The CIA has long believed it may have a couple of nuclear devices; if US satellite photos are correct, and the Koreans are moving spent fuel rods at its Yongbyon facility to a secret site for reprocessing into plutonium, then the regime could have four to six warheads in just a few months.

As late as mid-week, Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, was still assuring the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that while North Korea was "a big problem", it was not a crisis.

But even he was forced to admit the glaring inconsistencies of Mr Bush's policy: that North Korea has kicked out United Nations inspectors, while inspectors are busy at work in Iraq; that its record on arms proliferation was worse than that of Baghdad, and that Pyongyang might sell fissile material – just as it sells missiles and missile technology now -- in a desperate bid to stop its economy from collapsing.

"As this loose nukes disaster unfolds, and the options for dealing with it narrow, the world does nothing," Ashton Carter, assistant defence secretary in the Clinton administration, told the committee. "What is going on at Yongbyon as we speak is a huge foreign policy defeat for the US, and a setback for decades of US non-proliferation policy."

The US is in a diplomatic dilemma: it knows the crisis must be solved at a regional level. Yet it believes the concessions to Pyongyang sought by South Korea and Japan would amount to appeasement.

At the same time Russia and China, the countries which have most influence with North Korea, refuse to increase the pressure as Washington would like. "And why should they," one analyst here asked, "when the US won't listen to their demands to go more slowly on the crisis with Iraq?"

Theoretically the military option remains, as Mr Bush indicated. However, analysts doubt that, for all its overwhelming power, even the US can wage and win two major regional wars simultaneously.

No less important, any strike to knock out North Korea's nuclear facilities would trigger a second all-out war on the peninsula in little more than half a century.

Among the first victims would be the 10 million citizens of Seoul, and the US would automatically be dragged in.