Iraq-style inspections appear unlikely in North Korea

SEOUL, South Korea -- In Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors race unannounced to ammunition depots, technical colleges and presidential palaces. Such a scenario is hard to picture in reclusive North Korea, even if it agrees to dismantle its nuclear programs.

As one of the world's most closed and militarized societies, North Korea is deeply suspicious of outsiders. Even international aid workers cannot move around freely.

Verification that the communist country is not developing nuclear weapons will lie at the heart of any agreement ending the crisis over the North's nuclear ambitions. But analysts believe it will be difficult to prove North Korea is free of nuclear weapons as long as it remains a totalitarian state.

'Level of intrusiveness'

"Verification would either require a level of intrusiveness far beyond anything that North Korea has hitherto agreed to, or a level of trust and tolerance for ambiguity that would go beyond anything that the U.S. government has been prepared to accept," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria, Va.-based research center on security issues.

U.S. officials have said North Korea, if it is approached in a way it deems acceptable, may be willing to make concessions, allow nuclear inspections, even renounce any intention to acquire nuclear weapons.

But any deal would require the North to declare its nuclear material and operations, and international inspectors would have to verify the data with onsite visits.

North Korea and the United States sides could compromise, but the situation now is more complex than it was in 1994, when North Korea froze its plutonium-based program and allowed U.N. inspectors to monitor nuclear facilities in a deal with Washington.

North Korea often delayed and blocked inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency before the 1994 suspension of nuclear activity at Yongbyon. The United States believes the North had extracted enough weapons-grade plutonium to make one or two bombs.

Those facilities, which include a 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon and two larger, unfinished reactors, are large, aboveground facilities that are clearly visible in satellite images.

The current dispute began in October with the U.S. revelation that North Korea had a second nuclear program based on uranium enrichment, a step toward making nuclear weapons. North Korea expelled U.N. inspectors and prepared to reactivate the Yongbyon site.

The uranium program would be much harder to detect because it requires hundreds and even thousands of uranium centrifuges, compact devices that can be hidden in the many caves and bunkers scattered across North Korea.

"There is much that we don't know about that program, which only makes us more concerned that it is broader and has been going on longer than what we do know and what we've shared with other countries around the world," U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said Wednesday in Seoul.

The United States is pushing to bring the nuclear crisis before the U.N. Security Council, which can authorize intrusive inspections of the type now under way in Iraq. North Korea had been subject to far more limited inspections under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, though it pulled out of the global arms control pact this month.

"Getting the kind of inspections now being conducted in Iraq isn't likely soon" in North Korea, said George Bunn, a nuclear expert at Stanford University.

Despite their distaste for North Korea, U.S. officials have said they are not interested in regime change, and will not invade.

One expert said Washington and its allies should ask nations that have contributed to North Korea's nuclear development to reveal all that they know. They include China, Russia and Pakistan, said Henry Sokolski, head of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, D.C.

Sokolski said countries that gave up nuclear weapons programs -- Argentina, South Africa, Ukraine, and Brazil -- moved closer to political openness while they did so.

"If we are serious about achieving the same results with North Korea, we need to understand that ultimately nothing less will be needed here as well," he said in a commentary released by the Nautilus Institute, a Berkeley, Calif.-based research group.