BEIJING -- Amid high tensions and low expectations, representatives of six nations will gather in China's capital Wednesday for three days of talks aimed as easing the nuclear standoff with North Korea.
While the outcome is uncertain, the stakes are clear. While much of the world recently has focused on Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terrorism, North Korea has emerged as the most dangerous diplomatic challenge facing President Bush and other world leaders.
"The North Korean nuclear threat is about as real and serious a threat as we could have anywhere in either the region or the world," Australian Prime Minister John Howard noted during a visit to Beijing last week.
North Korea is believed to already have at least one or two nuclear bombs, and has reactivated facilities that may soon provide it with more. Even without those weapons, it has the conventional military capability of devastating South Korea and destabilizing Northeast Asia.
Not wanting anyone to forget that, North Korea's government-controlled media last week issued a warning that the country was "ready for both dialogue and war."
Kenneth Lieberthal, the National Security Council's senior director for Asia during the Clinton administration, recently told reporters in Beijing that when the United States contemplated a military strike against North Korea's nuclear facilities in 1994, the Pentagon calculated that South Korea would suffer at least 500,000 casualties -- and maybe many more -- if war broke out.
"This is not Iraq," he said.
Lieberthal noted that North Korea's military leaders are "masters of concealment" who have hollowed out entire mountains to hide and protect their weapons, putting the outcome of surgical strikes in doubt.
Still, he and many others maintain that the United States can't tolerate a nuclear North Korea, in part because the regime of Kim Jong Il would have no moral restraints against selling nuclear materials to terrorists or states hostile to America.
Going into the talks, the Bush administration is sticking by its long-standing refusal to offer North Korea rewards for not abiding by past nuclear agreements.
The first U.S. goal is to get North Korea "to commit to the complete, verifiable and irreversible ending of its nuclear arms program," a senior State Department official said in Washington last week.
The official, briefing reporters on condition that he not be identified, said Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, who will lead the U.S. delegation, will not offer North Korea any sweeteners, at least up front.
"We are certainly not coming in with inducements to resume activity that had been previously committed," he said, referring to North Korea's 1994 pledge to terminate its nuclear weapons programs.
U.S. officials say that pledge was broken when North Korea secretly developed a uranium enrichment program that it admitted to last October.
When the United States cut off fuel shipments to North Korea in response, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, expelled United Nation's inspectors and reactivated its shuttered Yongbyon nuclear facility.
North Korea has since claimed to have completed reprocessing 8,000 stored spent fuel rods, enough to yield sufficient plutonium for five or six nuclear bombs, experts say. It probably already had extracted enough plutonium for one or two bombs before the facility was closed by the 1994 agreement, according to the CIA.
While the United States will not offer any up-front inducements, it will make clear that aid and other help will be forthcoming if North Korea abandons it nuclear ambitions, the senior State Department official said.
"Actions by North Korea that satisfactorily address concerns about its nuclear weapons program could open the door to a very new kind of relationship, certainly with the U.S., and with other countries as well," he said.
Joining the United States and North Korea at the bargaining table will be China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.
Each has its own stakes in the confrontation, and some -- particularly South Korea -- are more willing to offer the North a deal.
No one sees a quick end to the crisis, and some worry that the Bush administration may not have the patience to sit through long months, or years, of negotiations.
Washington's patience will be especially tested if North Korea doesn't agree to some kind of verifiable freeze of its nuclear programs while negotiations proceed.
Even the Chinese, who have pushed hard for dialogue and a peaceful resolution, worry that North Korea may drag out the talks while feverishly building nuclear bombs to create a stronger deterrent against a U.S. attack, according to Professor Shi Yinhong, a North Korea expert at Beijing's People's University.
"If it becomes a protracted crisis, then North Korea will have time to build a substantial nuclear arsenal, which will increase the danger of war," Shi said in an interview.
North Korea agreed to freeze it programs during the lengthy talks leading to the 1994 agreement. But it has given no indications it is willing to do so for the upcoming talks, at least in a verifiable way.
North Korea's official media have said repeatedly in recent days that no inspections are possible before the United States agrees to a legally binding non-aggression treaty and normalizes relations.
"The U.S. demand for an early inspection of the DPRK nuclear facilities is absolutely unacceptable as it is a blatant interference in its internal affairs and an infringement upon its sovereignty," said the official KCNA news service, referring to North Korea by the initials of its formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
"This is little short of demanding the DPRK to surrender to it," the commentary said. "Surrender means death."
The United States has been firm in its insistence that North Korea dismantle its nuclear weapons programs in a verifiable way as a pre-condition to negotiations about aid, normalizing relations and other matters.
Kelly will listen to the expected demands for security guarantees but will not agree to a formal non-aggression pact, said the senior State Department official.
As for normalizing relations with the bankrupt and isolated Stalinist regime, he said that "is certainly one possibility" somewhere down the road.
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