Tough Talk On North Korea

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned North Korea on Monday not to feel emboldened by the world's focus on Iraq. "If they do, it would be a mistake," he said.

Speaking at a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld repeated administration assertions that the United States can handle more than one major military conflict simultaneously. He said he didn't feel North Korea would try to exploit the fact that the Bush administration is paying closer attention to disarming Iraqi leader Saddam Huseein.

As CBS News Correspondent David Martin reports, a building crisis with North Korea threatens to complicate the Pentagon's plans for war with Iraq just as it is about to embark on a major buildup in the Persian Gulf.

North Korea has broken the seals U.N. inspectors placed on containers of spent uranium fuel. That fuel can now be reprocessed into weapons grade plutonium. The last time that happened -- in 1994 -- then President Clinton was prepared to risk war to prevent North Korea from going nuclear. Robert Galucci was the point man on North Korea.

"If intelligence had revealed that the North Koreans were moving the spent fuel, President Clinton would have decided to launch an air strike," he says.

Negotiations led by former President Carter averted the crisis but had the U.S. launched an air strike it could have triggered a major war.

"We would have had to prepare ourselves for the artillery barrage and a possible North Korean ground invasion of the south," explains Galucci.

"We are capable of fighting two major regional conflicts, we're capable of winning decisively in one and swiftly defeating in the case of the other and let there be no doubt about it," says Rumsfeld.

But, reports Martin, it would stretch the American military to its limit. For now at least the U.S. intends to apply only diplomatic pressure against North Korea -- although it's hard to decide which is the greater threat: North Korea with nuclear weapons or Iraq with chemical and biological weapons.

The administration, alarmed that North Korea is moving to build an atomic bomb, also called on Pyongyang Monday to replace U.N. surveillance gear it dismantled at a nuclear reactor and refrain from restarting the facility.

Moving ahead to restart the reactor will only deepen North Korea's isolation, a senior administration official said.

But a top Russian diplomat warned the United States that putting pressure on North Korea could heighten tensions.

"It is counterproductive and dangerous to blackmail North Korea, with its grave economic position," Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov was quoted as saying in the newspaper Vremya Novostei, for Monday's edition.

A senior Democratic senator said the United States faced more of a threat from communist North Korea than from Iraq's weapons programs.

"This is a greater danger immediately to U.S. interests at this very moment, in my view, than Saddam Hussein is," said Sen. Joseph Biden, outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"If they lift the seals on these canisters (at the plant), they're going to be able to build four to five additional nuclear weapons within months if they begin that reprocessing operation — that's within a year," Biden, D-Del., said during a broadcast interview.

Secretary of State Colin Powell discussed the situation in telephone conversations over the weekend with top officials of China, South Korea, Russia and Japan.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, charged Sunday that North Korea had broken seals at a spent-fuel facility near the same reactor, a chamber containing some 8,000 irradiated fuel rods.

That action "raises further serious concerns and belies North Korea's announced justification to produce electricity," State Department spokesman Lou Fintor said. "The 8,000-odd spent fuel rods are of particular concern because they could be reprocessed to recover plutonium for nuclear weapons. They have no relevance for the generation of electricity."

North Korea on Saturday disabled the equipment installed at a reactor in Yongbyon, said officials of IAEA, a U.N. agency.

Fintor urged North Korea to respond to repeated requests by the agency "to consult on arrangements for safeguarding" the facilities at Yongbyon and allow IAEA to replace or restore the seals and cameras.

"A move to restart them would fly in the face of the international consensus that the North Korean regime must fulfill all its commitments and in particular dismantle its covert nuclear weapons program," the spokesman said.

North Korea acknowledged on Oct. 4 that it had a uranium-enrichment program meant to develop a nuclear weapon.

President Bush later halted oil shipments the United States has provided the energy-poor country. In response, the North Koreans said they would restart nuclear energy facilities shut down as part of a 1994 disarmament pact.

North Korea's official news agency said Sunday the government began removing the equipment because the nuclear agency was "whiling away time after proposing what it called working negotiations."

Under the 1994 agreement, North Korea pledged to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear weapons program in exchange for international aid to build two power-producing nuclear reactors.

The United States "will not enter into dialogue in response to threats or broken commitments, and we will not bargain or offer inducements for North Korea to live up to the treaties and agreements it has signed," Fintor said.

Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., who is replacing Biden as Foreign Relations Committee chairman, said the administration must be firm in dealing with North Korea.

"We cannot take an attitude, I believe, in which we just simply say (the North Koreans) are wrong ... we're not going to talk until they do some things right," he said. "We're all going to have to talk, talk continuously to South Korea, to North Korea, to Japan, be heavily engaged."