N. Korea May Nix Nuke Treaty

South Korea was assessing on Monday whether communist North Korea was preparing to withdraw from the international treaty that seeks to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.

A statement released by North Korea suggested it would do so.

Seeking to lower the tension over North Korea's nuclear moves, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday that the situation on the Korean peninsula hasn't reached the crisis stage.

But any move to pull out of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons would escalate tensions over the isolated nation's decision to restart its nuclear facilities and expel International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors.

"We're closely watching what North Korea's next step would be," said a South Korean Foreign Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity at a briefing for reporters. "It could be a withdrawal from the nonproliferation treaty."

The treaty, which was adopted in 1968 and ratified by 187 countries, seeks to confine nuclear weapons to the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China.
At least three countries known to possess nuclear weapons — India, Pakistan and Israel — are not members of the treaty.

North Korea signed the treaty in 1985, but U.S. authorities believe the communist nation has at least one or two bombs made from 1980s-vintage plutonium.

With the president out of sight at his ranch, reports CBS News White House Correspondent Mark Knoller, it fell to Powell to explain the situation with North Korea in appearances on all five network talk shows.

Powell said the United States was working with other countries to pressure North Korea into reversing its decision to restart its weapons program and expel U.N. inspectors monitoring its main nuclear complex.

Indeed, Powell objected to calling the North Korean problem a crisis.

"It's not a crisis because I believe there are still diplomatic tools that we can use to deal with it and because nobody is mobilizing armies, nobody's threatening each other yet," he said on CBS News' Face The Nation.

"What [North Korean president Kim Jong Il] wants is for us to believe we are in a state of panic and, therefore, we have to give him whatever he is demanding and have to appease his bad behavior," said Powell. "That's what we're not going to."

"I think it is a crisis," Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., disagreed, also on Face The Nation. "Look, I think it ought to be an unshakeable premise of our foreign policy that a nuclear North Korea is not acceptable.

"And thus far I'm afraid the Bush administration has taken a difficult situation and turned it into a dangerous one, because they have taken action which has encouraged the North Koreans to start up that nuclear plant they stopped in '94 as part of the agreement with the Clinton administration, and therefore made it more likely that they will have more nuclear weapons soon."

Powell insisted Saddam Hussein's regime posed the more immediate threat.

"I think the case has been made, maybe not to the satisfaction of all, that this is a regime that has pursued weapons of mass destruction in the past, has had weapons of mass destruction in the past, and we believe continues to have weapons of mass destruction and has lost none of its desire to produce them," he said.

Still, Powell said the United States has yet to decide whether to attack Iraq.

"The president has not made a decision yet with respect to the use of military force or with respect to going back to the United Nations," Powell said in another interview. "And of course, we are positioning ourselves and positioning our military forces for whatever might be required."

The administration and some senators also disagreed about how seriously the White House had pursued diplomatic options.

"I had a meeting with the foreign minister of North Korea [in July] and pointed out to him that the United States was prepared to assist his country in many ways, but not in the presence of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and not if they were participating in the kinds of programs that at that time I knew they were participating in," Powell said.

"We're not really even trying diplomacy," said Lieberman. "We're just hurling insults at them and removing the fuel shipments. I think they're ready to negotiate, and we ought to try it. We don't lose anything with North Korea if we sit down immediately with them and tell them, 'Stop your nuclear program, and let's see if we can negotiate a more normal relationship.'"

Powell said Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly will go to South Korea next month to talk to U.S. allies — but not to North Korea "at this time."

North Korean officials, for their part, urged the United States to negotiate.

"It is quite self-evident that dialogue is impossible without sitting face to face, and a peaceful settlement of the issue would be unthinkable without dialogue," said a government spokesman quoted on KCNA, the North's state-run news agency.