NUCLEAR FREEZE; CASH THAW

Two trains traveled 15 miles in May and made significant, if limited, history. The point was that they crossed the Demilitarized Zone that has divided North and South Korea for 56 years, ever since the Korean War ended without a treaty but only a cease-fire.

Both Koreas – the Communist dictatorship in the North and the booming capitalistic democracy in the South – hailed the pair of train trips as a move toward possible reunification of the Korean Peninsula. That may be some time off, but the positive news was buttressed with progress on nuclear-weapons talks and a likely end to a standoff over $25 million in North Korean funds at a bank in Macao, frozen there since the U.S. Treasury Department accused the bank of taking part in money laundering and counterfeit-currency trafficking for North Korea.

Reunification is one of the goals of a six-nation negotiating process in Beijing. It also seeks denuclearization of the peninsula. The talks produced an agreement Feb. 13 on a step-by-step process intended to accomplish both aims.

The first agreed step was for North Korea to shut down and prepare to abandon its nuclear plant at Yongbyon, provide a complete list of all its nuclear programs, and readmit inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. In return, North Korea will get 50,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil. The agreed deadline was April 14, now long passed.

But there was a catch. The U.S. Treasury Department asset freeze also, in effect, banned financial firms anywhere in the world from having anything to do with North Korea, leaving China as its only outlet to international commerce.

Although the United States appears to be working hard to settle the matter, die-hard U.S. opponents of any deal with North Korea remain suspicious. John R. Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, blasted the agreement in a Wall Street Journal article headlined “Pyongyang’s Perfidy.”

He blamed Bush administration weakness for letting North Korea miss the first deadline.

But Mr. Bolton seems to have given away the real motive behind the freezing of the $25 million and the accompanying blacklist. If the State Department lets North Korea into international markets, he wrote, “who will ever again take us seriously when we threaten strangulation of rogue states and terrorist groups?”

But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, apparently with President Bush’s approval, has given up on the strangulation strategy. She continues to try to speed up the transfer of funds. Bloomberg News Service reported last week that she spoke by telephone on the matter with South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min Soon and that he told reporters, “We are moving in the direction of resolving the technical problems. However, it’s not proceeding as fast as we’d hoped.”

Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator, continues to hope for an early settlement and prompt North Korean action to shut down its nuclear plant.