North Korea was stating the obvious when it unexpectedly claimed it had been building nuclear weapons. American intelligence had long been confident that the hermit nation already had made a few warheads. A Congressional Research Service report concluded two years ago that North Korea could make more than 200 nuclear weapons by the end of this decade.

Pyongyang’s official news service also said North Korea was suspending its participation in intermittent six-nation nuclear talks until “positive results” could be expected.

The announcement caught official Washington by surprise. Just four hours earlier, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton had told reporters that all the other participants – the United States, Japan, South Korea, Russia and China – expected North Korea to return to the talks. The group had not met since last June.

In preparation, Mr. Bolton had led an effort to persuade other members to present a tough united front demanding that North Korea completely dismantle its nuclear weapons program and permit international inspection and monitoring or face harsh international economic sanctions. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other officials, while supporting a diplomatic solution, had been adding pointedly that military action was not ruled out.

Another preparatory step was leaked U.S. intelligence finding that North Korea had probably been secretly preparing a second nuclear weapons program employing highly enriched uranium. Its weapons complex at Yongbyon, 60 miles north of the capital, had been using a plutonium process since the 1970s. It suspended that program under a 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration but resumed it when the Bush administration disavowed the Clinton agreement.

North Korea has never acknowledged publicly that it also is following the alternate route of using highly enriched uranium. The Bush administration says it is almost certain that Pyongyang is far along in the enriched uranium process and has sent emissaries to China, Japan and South Korea to present its evidence.

The evidence, according to the leaked report, proves almost beyond doubt that North Korea has been producing uranium hexafluoride, a gas that is a preliminary step in producing highly enriched uranium as fuel for bombs.

Government scientists are said to have reached that conclusion by analyzing a supply of the gas, UF6 for short, that Libya turned over to the United States last year when it abandoned its own nuclear weapons program. Although no sample was available from North Korea, no other sample matched the Libyan batch. So the scientists decided that North Korea must have been the source.

Relying on the process of elimination is a flimsy basis for accusing North Korea. Besides, even the sale or possession of UF6 is a long way from the production of a uranium weapon. The gas can be refined into bomb fuel by a complex process of feeding it through a multitude of nuclear centrifuges. But there has been no showing that North Korea has sufficient centrifuges or knows how to use them.

Other nations may be skeptical of the new plutonium threat, just as some have questioned the U.S. conclusion about a uranium-bomb program.

North Korea’s nuclear program, whatever its stage of progress, is a problem for its neighbors even more than for the United States. Rather than trying to stampede them with a get-tough policy, which could lead to one more armed conflict, the Bush administration should take into account North Korea’s economic and security needs and its very real fears of U.S. aggression, paranoid though they may be, and work with other countries to give diplomacy a full chance.