Clinton leaves Pyongyang a little room to manoeuvre

WESTERN leaders commemorating the 50th anniversary of D-Day were forced yesterday to consider how to deal with North Korea, a modern tyranny that appears to be close to obtaining what Nazi Germany never had - nuclear weapons.

In a television interview on the US aircraft carrier George Washington, off the French coast, President Bill Clinton insisted yesterday that there was 'still time for North Korea to change its course'. The secretive Stalinist regime has refused to allow international inspectors to test fuel rods being withdrawn from an experimental reactor, making it impossible to tell whether plutonium has been extracted in the past for possible military use.

Yesterday North Korea remained defiant, repeating its stock threat that any attempt to impose punitive sanctions would be considered 'an act of war'.

The US is committed to seeking sanctions against Pyongyang in the United Nations Security Council, probably this week, following a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency that its inspectors had been prevented from carrying out their work. Two inspectors remain at North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex, but while they can watch the reactor's 8,000 fuel rods being replaced, they are not allowed to take samples. 'It is not enough, because . . . we cannot determine the age of the fuel,' said a spokesman for the agency, Hans-Friedrich Meyer.

It is now all but impossible to determine whether any fuel may have been diverted between 1986, when the reactor started operating, and 1992, when IAEA inspectors were first allowed into Yongbyon, said Mr Meyer: 'The history is lost.' The agency's 35-member board began a week-long meeting in Vienna yesterday, but beyond reporting North Korea to the Security Council, there is little it can do.

Sanctions are one of the few options open to the international community, despite the reluctance of key players and doubts whether they will be effective against one of the most isolated societies in the world. One reason why the US wants to be seen giving North Korea every chance is to avoid a veto from China, almost the only serious trading partner of the regime. Washington believes Peking may abstain if it is persuaded that there is no longer any alternative to sanctions, but China wants to explore the Russian proposal of an international conference on the crisis. A further cause of delay may be opposition to sanctions in Japan.

Any international consensus on sanctions, whether within or outside the UN framework, is likely to entail a gradual increase in pressure on North Korea, with incentives in the form of economic aid if Pyongyang agrees to comply. But so far the North Koreans show no sign of blinking. 'No sanctions, no pressure will help solve the so-called nuclear problem of Korea,' Kim Yong Nam, the North's Foreign Minister, said yesterday.