One of the few authorities on North Korea has arrived in Maine to spend the summer at his place on Islesford. Three weeks ago, Selig Harrison, a newspaper correspondent-turned-scholar, was in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. His long talks with leaders of the reclusive communist government have given him a far better sense then most as to why they are slow to jump at President Bush’s June 6 offer to restart negotiations.

The Bush offer came three months after he overruled Secretary of State Colin Powell and decided against picking up negotiations where the Clinton administration left off after making considerable progress. Mr. Bush said at that time that Pyongyang could not be trusted. He said vaguely that the talks could resume “at some point in the future.” His words were widely seen as rebuffs to both North and South Korea. They had been moving toward reconciliation, largely through overtures by South Korea’s President Kim Dae Jung. Things stalled with the change in administrations. Both sides have been awaiting favorable action by President Bush.

Mr. Harrison gives Mr. Bush a C-plus thus far. He credits the willingness to talk but notes that the new offer contains not much carrot and a lot of stick. The Bush administration, split between hawks and doves, wants to talk about on-site inspection of North Korea’s nuclear plants and removing some of its troops from the border with South Korea, as well as the ban on its missile exports. The Bush plan is to start low-level talks. It would expand humanitarian aid and ease sanctions only if North Korea takes “appropriate action” to “demonstrate the seriousness of its desire for improved relations.”

North Korea wants high-level talks, such as the Clinton plan for a presidential visit to Pyongyang. And, most of all, it wants emergency energy aid pending completion of two nuclear power plants to be provided by the United States in exchange for North Korea’s freeze of its plutonium processing. They were targeted to go on line in 2003, but that date has been pushed back to nine or 10 years from now.

The North Koreans are hard to deal with, but they have some good arguments. For example, they see as a threat the thousands of U.S. and South Korean troops massed just south of the border. And they want to head toward eventual normal diplomatic relations with the United States, a goal not mentioned by the Bush team.

After seven visits to North Korea starting in 1972, Mr. Harrison has watched the country gradually open up. Foreigners can move around the capital and telephone each other without surveillance. Pyongyang now has ll restaurants and six karaoke bars. Tips and most other transactions are in U.S. dollars.

A compromise proposal to Pyongyang and Washington would give priority to concluding a missile export deal, with the U.S. providing substantial food and electricity aid as compensation. International inspection of nuclear sites is more ticklish. Mr. Bush has hinted that he suspects North Korea is cheating on its agreement to halt its development of nuclear weapons. He wants inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to start now. The North Koreans fear that the Pentagon will use the inspectors as a cover for broad intrusions into their military facilities. The compromise would gear inspections, step by step, to progress in construction of nuclear power plants.

Mr. Harrison has found that the North Koreans probably would go forward with negotiations. Much depends, however, on whether President Bush resists pressure from right-wing zealots who seem to prefer the blacks and whites of the Cold War to the uncertain and sensitive path toward a final settlement of a half-century-old war.