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American and Asian officials with access to the latest intelligence on North Korea (news - web sites) say strong evidence has emerged in recent weeks that the country has built a second, secret plant for producing weapons-grade plutonium, complicating both the diplomatic strategy for ending the program and the military options if that diplomacy fails.
The discovery of the new evidence, which one senior administration official cautioned was "very worrisome, but still not conclusive," came just as North Korea declared to the United States 11 days ago that it had completed reprocessing 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods, enough to make a half dozen or so nuclear weapons.
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American officials have long suspected that North Korea would try to build a second plant to protect itself against a pre-emptive strike by the United States. The United States even demanded an inspection of one underground site five years ago, only to find it empty, but this is the first time evidence has emerged that a second plant may be in operation.
"This takes a very hard problem and makes it infinitely more complicated," said one Asian official who has been briefed on the American intelligence. "How can you verify that they have stopped a program like this if you don't know where everything is?"
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If it turns out that the current evidence is being properly interpreted, and a second plutonium plant also exists, President Bush (news - web sites) may not even have the option that President Bill Clinton (news - web sites) briefly considered in 1994: using a military strike or sabotage to prevent North Korea from producing significant amounts of weapons-grade material. Still, Mr. Bush has vowed that he "will not tolerate" a nuclear North Korea.
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That issue has also put the White House at odds with George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, who knows that the White House is going to extraordinary lengths to avoid calling the nuclear confrontation with North Korea a crisis. So far, White House officials have been told only informally of the new evidence and have not been fully briefed about its potential implications, administration officials say.
But each week the White House's effort to sound low-key is being undercut by both North Korea's aggressive statements and new evidence that the country is now driving toward production. On Friday, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, who angered the White House by questioning its evidence about Iraq, expressed grave concerns about North Korea.
The situation in North Korea "is currently the most immediate and most serious threat to the nuclear nonproliferation regime," he said from his headquarters in Vienna. It is not clear if he was aware of the newest evidence when he spoke.
What does the President have in mind? "Tear down those nuclear facilities, Mr. Il."
The South Koreans have doubts about that second facility; they're also worried about the impact on their important tourist trade.
And North Korea is ready to deal; non-nuclear for non-aggression. Not enirely unreasonable a position.
This is not about how horrifyingly awful is Kim Jong Il's regime. North Korea is a nightmare, most of all for its own citizens, for the rest of Asia, and for the rest of the world. It will be no less a nightmare with a nuclear capacity.
Here's a not bad BBC Q&A about what the crises is about.
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What difference does the US see between North Korea and Iraq?
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Perhaps more importantly, North Korea is believed to have the bomb, while Iraq did not. The view in the Bush administration is that action has to be taken before a country gets a nuclear capability. With North Korea it is just too late, so Washington has to manage the consequences as best it can.
That, of course, is nonsense. But that's the stand the President took for himself and he's going to stick to it.
I suspect that what they have in mind is to let Korea go nuclear, and then warn them they'll blockade, and or/ attack any Korean ship that has nuclear material on it, and claim we are safe because of our own nuclear deterence. And I suspect they think they can get away with what should be considered a foreign policy and nuclear prolifferation disaster, because they really think they can blame it all on Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and the Agreed Framework.
More to come on this latter point.