World scrambles to find a response to North Korea

The major powers were last night scrambling to find a credible response to North Korea's increasingly brazen sabre rattling - one that would punish the renegade Communist regime without triggering a second all-out war on the Korean peninsula in little more than half a century.

A co-ordinated and effective response by the United Nations Security Council became even more urgent after Pyongyang threatened to launch an attack on South Korea, after Seoul announced that it would join an international effort to stop and search vessels leaving North Korean ports, which are suspected of carrying nuclear technology or materials.

In its shrillest language since Monday's nuclear test that triggered the confrontation, North Korea declared it was no longer bound by the terms of the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War, and that Seoul's participation in the naval cordon sanitaire would amount to a declaration of war.

"Now that the South Korean puppets were so ridiculous as to join in the said racket and dare declare a war against their compatriots," the North felt compelled to take "a decisive measure", the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said in a statement carried by the state media in North Korea.

This quasi-explicit threat of war underlines the dire state of relations between the two Korean states.

It was met by a warning from Seoul, which had previously refused to participate in the naval measures, that it would respond "sternly" to any provocation by its northern neighbour.

It was moreover the most ominous of a series of moves by the regime of Kim Jong-il.

These include a new batch of short-range missile firings - clearly intended to serve notice of the fate that awaited hostile ships and aircraft within striking distance of the coast - and an apparent partial restart of the North's main nuclear fuel re-processing plant at Yongbyon.

Chosun Ilbo, South Koreais biggest circulation newspaper, said there were "various indications" that Yongbyon had resumed operations, including steam coming out of the facility, detected by US surveillance satellites. There was no immediate confirmation of the report in Washington.

Pyongyang's escalating defiance only adds to the pressure on the Security Council to come up with a coherent response.

But familiar doubts were already emerging about how far Russia and China, two of the five permanent members of the Council with veto powers, were prepared to go in agreeing a resolution containing the tough sanctions the US seeks, that might detonate a hot war centred on a country with which both have land borders.

After speaking by phone with Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov summed up the dilemma in Moscow.

"I repeat again," he said, "we must stand up for the non-proliferation regime, but at the same time we must not forget that problems can be resolved only through talks."

In a further sign of the Kremlin's concerns, Russia announced that it was taking preventative measures "in case a military conflict, perhaps with the use of nuclear weapons, flares up on the Korean Peninsula" - in the words of a senior foreign ministry official.

Such concerns are, if anything, greater in China, North Korea's most important patron, which is ever fearful of chaos over the border that could spill on to its own territory.

These factors all limit the likelihood of really severe action by the UN.

Officials from the US Treasury Department raised the possibility of a tighter financial squeeze on the North but years of privation, poverty and sanctions have not prevented the country from developing the nuclear capacity Pyongyang sees as its one real bargaining chip with the US and its allies.

Indeed, the North's media have hailed this week's test - more powerful and apparently more successful than its first one in 2006 - as "a grand undertaking" to protect the supreme interests of the country and "defend its dignity and sovereignty".

Some Korea-watchers here maintain that the US has no real alternative but to restart the stalled six-nation talks that involve itself, Russia, China, Japan and the two Koreas.

In the meantime, the North - assuming its war rhetoric is no more than calculated brinkmanship - could take further provocative steps, including the launch of a long-range missile or a full resumption of operations at Yongbyon.

For the moment, another test is considered unlikely - if only because of the need to conserve stocks of weapons-grade material, currently estimated as sufficient for no more than half a dozen nuclear devices, Washington analysts say.

The main task now for the North, they argue, is to perfect the miniaturising technology needed to put a nuclear warhead on a missile.

But as the Western governments trying to contain North Korea readily admit, all this is basically guesswork.

Hard information about events taking place inside the hermetic regime, and its precise intentions, are next to impossible to come by.

Almost certainly though, Pyongyang's belligerency in part reflects a succession crisis for the regime.

Western analysts believe that Mr Kim is in poor and declining health after a reported stroke nine months ago and that his days in power are numbered.

He may now be trying to ensure power ultimately passes to his third and youngest son, Kim Jong-un, perhaps after caretaker rule by his brother-in-law, Jang Seong Taek.

For the Kim dynasty to survive into a third generation, the support of the armed forces leadership is essential. The nuclear test, and the missiles show of strength may be above all deliberate signals by Kim Jong-il of his commitment to the military.

The strategic realities of the Korean peninsula remain, scarcely less forbidding for the US than they were in the early 1950s.

Seoul and its 10 million people stand well within the North Korean artillery range, less than 40 miles south of a narrow demilitarised zone left by a war that no peace treaty has ever formally ended, and where nearly two million highly armed troops stand virtually face to face.

- INDEPENDENT