N. Korea Actions Draw Rebuke

VIENNA —  The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency and South Korea’s outgoing president Thursday criticized North Korea’s moves to restart its nuclear arms program, accusing the communist regime of engaging in “nuclear brinkmanship” and of “aggravating” an international standoff.

The criticisms came as two influential U.S. senators urged the Bush administration to begin talks with North Korea, a step the White House has insisted it will not take until the government in Pyongyang abandons efforts to build nuclear weapons.

In Vienna, Mohammed Baradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, warned that North Korea “has no current legitimate peaceful use for plutonium.

“Restarting its nuclear facilities without appropriate safeguards, and toward producing plutonium, raises serious nonproliferation concerns and is tantamount to nuclear brinkmanship,” he said.

In Seoul, President Kim Dae Jung, in some of his harshest comments in weeks, told a special Cabinet meeting Thursday that South Korea “can never go along with North Korea’s nuclear weapons development.”

“Despite the international community’s efforts for a peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue, North Korea moved to restart frozen nuclear facilities, further aggravating the situation,” the South Korean president said.

Kim, whose term ends in February, was the architect of a new policy of engagement that led to a historic summit between the North and South in June 2000. Fearful that South Korea would be caught in the middle of any confrontation between the U.S. and North Korea, he wants his country to take the initiative to stem the dangerous downward spiral of relations.

“We will not be pushed aside,” he reportedly told the Cabinet.

An aide to South Korean President-elect Roh Moo Hyun said Thursday that Roh will send a special envoy to Pyongyang, the North’s capital, in January to try to open a dialogue. The trip would most likely follow an anticipated visit to Seoul in the new year by Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly, another aide to Roh said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Roh released a statement criticizing the North today and said its recent actions could make it difficult for him to continue the South’s reconciliation policy. “Whatever North Korea’s rationale is in taking such actions, they are not beneficial to peace and stability on the Korean peninsula and in Northeast Asia, nor are they helpful for its own safety,” Roh said.

Even as condemnations of its actions continued, North Korea moved 1,000 fresh fuel rods into a 5-megawatt research reactor at its Yongbyon nuclear complex, the IAEA reported. The move was seen as another step toward resuming the nuclear program that the North officially halted in 1994 under an international agreement.

North Korea has made several moves toward restarting its nuclear complex since last weekend, when it began shutting down U.N. surveillance cameras and unsealing locks that have been in place for eight years.

IAEA officials said that Thursday’s move is significant, although the reactor is not yet in working order and is expected to need one to two months of repair before becoming operable. The reactor, which produces plutonium as a byproduct, requires 8,000 rods to operate.

Moving the fresh fuel rods is a far less dangerous step than if the North Koreans had begun work on another installation at the same complex, a nuclear-fuel reprocessing lab, which can extract plutonium from spent fuel. There are 8,000 spent fuel rods at the site. U.S. officials say they believe the North Koreans could build new nuclear weapons by the second half of 2003.

IAEA inspectors remain at the complex and have not yet been asked to leave, according to the agency’s Vienna headquarters.

U.S. officials have been talking with other countries in the region about the brewing crisis, but the Bush administration has insisted that it doesn’t intend to resume talks with the North Koreans until Pyongyang signals a willingness to honor its commitments not to resume a nuclear program.

A State Department official reaffirmed that view Thursday. “We’re not going to reward bad behavior and violation of previous commitments they have made,” the official said.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, continuing a round of what have become almost daily conversations with foreign governments about the Korean peninsula, telephoned Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov on Thursday.

Expressing concern, two senators urged the administration Thursday to intensify efforts to end the diplomatic standoff.

“Our strategy now has to be one of multilateral engagement,” Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show.

He and Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the current chairman of the committee, urged the administration to begin such an effort with South Korea, Japan, Russia and other Asian powers.

Meanwhile, North Korea issued its most conciliatory statement yet about the maneuvers. “Our measure has nothing to do with plans to develop nuclear weapons,” said a commentary on Radio Pyongyang. “Our republic constantly maintains an anti-nuclear, peace-loving position.”

South Korean officials said they believe that North Korea’s goal is to prove to the world that it should be taken seriously.

“The whole purpose of the gestures they have made recently ... are to prove ... that they are following up with demonstrable action,” said Chun Yung Woo, a senior South Korean Foreign Ministry official.

The North Koreans’ larger goal is to restart negotiations with the United States, he said. The United States and key regional allies stopped delivery of oil to North Korea in October after the Stalinist country admitted that it had a secret uranium-enrichment program. Uranium, like plutonium, is used in nuclear bombs.

The United States had agreed to deliver oil to North Korea as part of the 1994 so-called framework agreement, under which North Korea eschewed a nuclear weapons program in exchange for energy assistance.

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Rubin reported from Vienna and Demick from Seoul. Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington and Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.