Opening in North Korea

Everyone should know by this time that North Korea is building nuclear weapons. But if you want to know what’s really going on there and how to deal with it, don’t listen only to either the fear mongers and the war hawks.

Selig S. Harrison, a Washington-based scholar who has just returned from his eighth visit to North Korea since 1972, reports a changed country, with a developing market economy, a government divided between pragmatists and hawkish militarists, and a national leader, Kim Jung Il, who leans toward the pragmatists but feels the pressure of influential military leaders. The pragmatists seek negotiations to settle the nuclear-weapons dispute and favor economic reforms, which have produced the start of a market economy that is “irreversible.”

Cell phones and television sets are already part of the urban scene. As in China’s more advanced free market, “people have discovered what it’s like to have money and something to do with that money.”

In a front-page report in the Financial Times and in a lecture at a community forum in Gloucester, Mass., Mr. Harrison saw the North Korean nuclear weapons program as being guided by fear of the United States. He said threatening statements by American leaders including Vice President Dick Cheney have helped the hard-liners and weakened the pragmatists. Bush administration officials have freely predicted economic collapse and favored continued sanctions to help bring it about.

Mr. Harrison has come to know leading government officials and says he has been able to discuss their weapons program and relations with the United States frankly and constructively, as distinguished from the belligerent outbursts by minor officials there that often make the world news wires.

In a series of lengthy interviews, the officials spelled out proposals for solving the dispute. Kim Yong-nam, president of the Supreme People’s Assembly, who had just finished watching a CNN program about Bob Woodward’s new book, said he thought President Bush was delaying action on the nuclear issue because of concerns about Iraq and the November election. According to Mr. Harrison, he said this would give North Korea time to strengthen its nuclear deterrent – unless the White House helps find a mutual agreement to dismantle the program completely and verifiably.

Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye-gwan reportedly said North Korea would freeze its plutonium program in exchange for multilateral energy aid, an end to U.S. economic sanctions and the removal of North Korea from the U.S. list of terrorist states, which would open the way for aid from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Instead of responding to the step-by-step proposal, the Bush administration insists first on talks limited to complete, verifiable irreversible dismantling of the nuclear weapons program with no U.S. commitment on what it would do in return.

Surprisingly, one of the officials said that if a new U.S. administration proved less hostile, North Korea might reconsider its demand for a security guarantee ruling out any U.S. attack. Mr. Harrison had made it clear that no U.S. president could rule out a retaliatory second strike if North Korea should attack South Korea, Japan or the United States.

The situation will worsen as time goes by. The Bush administration should grasp the opportunity and negotiate a step-by-step resolution, with matching concessions by each side.