Bush To Stop Oil To N. Korea

President Bush decided Wednesday to cut off U.S. oil shipments to North Korea after one more delivery unless the Communist regime dismantles its nuclear weapons program, administration officials said.

Bush forged the policy in a meeting with his national security team, striking a compromise between key U.S. allies who oppose a harsh punishment and hard-line administration officials who wanted North Korea to pay for developing deadly weapons behind Bush's back.

The shipments are part of a broader energy assistance package approved for North Korea in 1994. In return, the North promised to remain free of nuclear weapons but nullified the deal when it acknowledged to U.S. officials last month that it was developing a uranium bomb.

The fate of the shipments is in the hands of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, comprised of the United States, Japan, South Korea and the European Union.

KEDO's executive board is meeting in New York on Thursday. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said U.S. diplomats have been assured the EU and Japan will back Bush's plan, and South Korea will go along with some version of it.

A vessel carrying U.S. oil left Singapore on Nov. 6 and is expected to make delivery in North Korea in a few days. If Bush had ordered an immediate halt, the vessel would have been turned around.

The next shipment, due in another month, will be canceled unless North Korea gives way, which is highly unlikely.

South Korea and Japan had been recommending that the shipments continue because they are concerned that North Korea could retaliate by reviving a plutonium-based nuclear weapons program that it froze in 1994. The program has been under supervision by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

There is almost no support in the Congress for continuing the deliveries because of the North's violation of the 1994 agreement. Among those strongly opposed to the deliveries was Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, who soon will take over as House majority leader.

Meanwhile, North Korea has decided against returning the captured spy ship USS Pueblo after indicating last month that it might do so, according to a former American official who met with authorities last week in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.

Donald Gregg, president of the Korea Society and a former ambassador to South Korea, said in an interview Wednesday that a deal for the Pueblo was hinted at in an Oct. 3 letter in which Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan invited him to visit Pyongyang.

But when Gregg raised the issue during his Nov. 2-5 talks with Kim and others, he said he was told, "The climate has changed. It's no longer an option."

On the oil issue, the United States has been sending 500,000 metric tons of heavy fuel annually to North Korea. The objective was to help the country meet its energy needs while it phases out its plutonium-producing nuclear reactors.

As part of the deal, the reactors were to be replaced by two light-water reactors, which are far less useful for producing nuclear weapons than the graphite models the North has been using.

After long delays, ground was broken on the new reactors in August. South Korea and Japan are the primary financiers of the project, having invested an estimated $1 billion thus far.

North Korea has said it wants to open negotiations with the United States on a nonaggression pact. But the Bush administration has said it sees no point in holding substantive discussions until North Korea agrees to the prompt and verifiable dismantling of its nuclear program.