US urges tough N. Korea sanctions

UNITED NATIONS -- The United States proposed in emergency meetings yesterday that the UN Security Council employ a series of aggressive countermeasures against North Korea following Pyongyang's announcement that it had successfully conducted a nuclear test.

Diplomats who attended the closed-door meetings yesterday said US Ambassador John Bolton presented a list of suggestions that included international inspections of cargo coming to and from North Korea, a ban on all luxury items sent to the impoverished country, a freeze on some financial assets, and a total arms embargo.

But it was unclear whether the brazen nuclear test -- conducted in defiance of a Security Council warning last week -- will prompt China and South Korea to agree to a more hard-line policy that the United States is advocating. In the past, China and South Korea have sought to use incentives, not punishment, to coax the recalcitrant regime to give up its nuclear ambitions.

The test, announced yesterday morning in North Korea (late Sunday night in the United States), would make the secretive communist country the eighth proven nuclear power in the world. It presents a new crisis for the Bush administration, which has focused its diplomatic energies in recent months on containing the nuclear ambitions of Iran.

President Bush, in a televised address, said US intelligence agencies were still trying to verify that the blast was a nuclear explosion. But he said the announcement alone merited a tough response.

``Once again, North Korea has defied the will of the international community, and the international community will respond," Bush said.

Bush said the United States remains committed to resolving the issue through diplomacy, but also warned that Washington would protect its interests and its allies, specifically referring to South Korea and Japan.

Bush, who in 2002 called North Korea part of the ``axis of evil," also said that Pyongyang was ``one of the world's leading proliferators of missile technology" to other countries, including Iran and Syria.

Yesterday, Bolton told reporters that he would seek a resolution under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter -- enforceable with sanctions or military action. Although Bolton called for a swift decision, US officials said it could take days before a resolution is finalized and Security Council members receive instructions from their capitals on how to proceed.

Senior Bush administration officials, including Bolton, a former undersecretary for arms control, have long advocated vigorous inspections of ships traveling from North Korea to guard against the sale of nuclear technology to terrorist groups or other rogue governments.

In 2003, Bush launched the Proliferation Security Initiative, under which the United States and its allies inspect ships' cargo in international waters. But China and South Korea, North Korea's closest neighbors, have declined to sign on to the initiative.

Daryl Kimball , executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based group that advocates disarmament, said that the Security Council must be careful not to initiate actions that could be interpreted as a blockade, which is an act of war.

``This is a regime that is hypersensitive and paranoid, and for those reasons, dangerous, so countermeasures need to be carefully calibrated," he said.

North Korea had been threatening to conduct a nuclear test for the past two years. Analysts say the test could be an attempt to bolster domestic support for North Korea's dictatorial leader, Kim Jong Il , and elicit more fear and respect from the international community.

The North Korean government says that in the absence of a peace treaty in the Korean War and security guarantees from Washington, it needs nuclear weapons for self-defense.

``My view is that the main motivation is the security of the North Korean regime in the face of what they see as an increasingly hostile security environment, and one in which they have no reliable allies," said Avery Goldstein , a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based think tank, and a specialist on East Asian security at the University of Pennsylvania.

Goldstein said it was also possible that the North Korean government was trying to get the United States and its allies in Asia to sweeten an agreement struck last fall in which North Korea would be given energy assistance and economic aid in exchange for abandoning its nuclear program.

``They must have concluded that that wasn't a good enough deal for them," Goldstein said. ``Perhaps they thought that by turning up the heat, they might gain some leverage."

But others said the test would probably bring diplomatic efforts to a standstill, and instead usher in an era of sanctions and hostility.

Representative Tom Lantos of California, who is the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, urged the administration to convene a high-level meeting in Washington with North Korea's neighbors to agree on a package of multilateral sanctions.

``The leadership of North Korea must be made to understand that it cannot get away with this kind of dangerous and provocative behavior," said a statement from Lantos, who has met twice with senior North Korean officials over the past 2 1/2 years.

``The world just became a much more dangerous place," said Representative Edward J. Markey , a Malden Democrat who cochairs the House Bipartisan Task Force on Nonproliferation. ``Nuclear weapons are being treated as international currency for the purchase of respectability, when in fact they are the tools of the destruction of humankind."

US officials have long feared that North Korea was attempting to develop a nuclear weapon. In 1994, the Clinton administration agreed to provide light-water reactors to North Korea in exchange for an end to Pyongyang's uranium-enrichment program. But the agreement was never fully implemented, and the reactors were never built. In 2002, the Bush administration accused North Korea of cheating on the deal by secretly processing plutonium, an alternative method for creating fuel for a nuclear weapon.

North Korea responded by kicking international inspectors out of its facilities and pulling out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Since that time, the United States has dealt with the issue through six-nation talks with North Korea, China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia.

The talks achieved a breakthrough in September 2005 , when North Korea agreed in principle to give up its weapons in exchange for economic incentives. But since then, North Korea has refused to return for more talks, saying it was angry about a US crackdown on a North Korean counterfeiting operation.

Yesterday, the 15-member Security Council issued a presidential statement urging North Korea to return to the talks, and warned against any additional tests.

But North Korea's UN ambassador, Pak Gil Yon , told reporters at the UN that the Security Council should ``congratulate the [North Korean] scientists and researchers instead of doing such notorious, useless, and rigorous resolutions or whatever."

The North Korean announcement set off a flurry of activity at the State Department. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called China's foreign minister at 1 a.m. yesterday. By 5:45 a.m., she was on the phone with the foreign ministers of New Zealand and Australia. Around 8 a.m., she held a conference call with the foreign ministers of Japan, South Korea, Russia, and China.

Mohamed ElBaradei , head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, issued a statement yesterday calling the tests a threat to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, developed in 1968 to limit the number of countries with nuclear weapons to the five that already possessed them at the time. Under the treaty, the United States, France, Britain, Russia, and China pledge to work toward reducing their arsenals. The nations that did not possess nuclear weapons were given access to nuclear technology in exchange for a pledge not to develop nuclear weapons.

North Korea would be the first country to pull out of the treaty and conduct a nuclear test. India and Pakistan, which conducted tests in 1998, had never signed the treaty. Israel is believed to be a nuclear power, but it is not known to have conducted a test.