North Korea

WASHINGTON - The round of six-party talks this month will be the last chance before the U.S. elections to test whether diplomacy can roll back North Korea's nuclear programs. Few expect them to succeed. Meanwhile, North Korea is moving steadily toward a full-fledged nuclear arsenal, including long-range ballistic missiles. The Bush administration has chosen diplomacy, but the administration dithered for so long that its partners in the talks - China, Russia, Japan and South Korea - began to take matters into their own hands.

STOCKHOLM - In North Korea, history begins with Kim Il Sung, the late father of current ruler Kim Jong Il. Apart from arbitrary flashes of heroic resistance (purportedly performed by Mr. Kim's ancestors) against colonialists and capitalists (the United States and Japan), the nation has no conscious past. The result is a people in full armor of impregnable self-assurance as the possessors of morality, truth and the future. You can't argue with them because they don't bother to reply. They ignore your reasoning.

SEOUL, South Korea - The South Korean intelligence reports are ominous: North Korea appears to be preparing to test-launch a ballistic missile with sufficient range to strike Alaska and possibly the U.S. West Coast. A train transporting a large cylindrical object was recently spotted by a U.S. surveillance satellite chugging toward a new launch site west of Pyongyang, a South Korean government source said recently. Allegedly onboard was North Korea's most advanced missile, a Taepo-Dong 2, being readied for a potential liftoff within two months.

Few rising national leaders have acquired reputations on the way up that would match North Korea's 51-year-old Kim Jong Il.In the small community of diplomats who follow Asia's last bastion of unreconstructed Stalinism, the crown prince of the Marxist world's only dynastic succession plan gets credit as chief patron of stunning feats: the 1987 bombing that killed all 115 people aboard a South Korean jetliner and the 1983 Burmese Buddhist temple bombing that...

HONOLULU -- On a crisp day in the autumn of 1972, a South Korean diplomat named Lee Bum Suk was among those escorting a delegation of North Koreans on a stroll through the manicured Secret Garden of the Chang-Dok Palace in Seoul. The North Koreans, the first to come openly to Seoul since the end of the Korean War in 1953, were there to negotiate and had been greeted with applause and hopes for a cooling of tension. In the Secret Garden, as he came out of a pavilion, Mr. Lee was asked what had been accomplished.

TOKYO -- While North Korea's negotiators were dragging out the standoff over a nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the Communist government's engineers conducted what appears to be the first successful test of the country's home-grown mid-range missile. Japanese officials fear that the missile could travel as far as some of Japan's most populous cities.The tests, conducted on the Sea of Japan on May 29 and 30, are believed to have involved the Rodong 1, a missile North Korea has been developing for several years and is preparing to export to Iran in return for oil. U.S. intelligence officials have said that the missile is believed to be capable of carrying a payload of chemical weapons or perhaps a small nuclear device.

WASHINGTON -- NOW THAT high-level talks between the United States and North Korea are to resume soon, three myths that have haunted the U.S. debate over the nuclear crisis for two years need to be dispelled.But if three myths are not refuted, the administration will have difficulty winning congressional and public support for a realistic settlement.* Myth No. 1: North Korea is irrational and unpredictable, and no negotiated solution is possible.Pyongyang has pursued a consistent nuclear strategy since a showdown in 1991 between the moderates and hard-liners in the Central Committee of the ruling Workers Party.

Broadway, Virginia. -- Are North Korean nukes something we can live with or -- if all else fails -- are they worth going to war to prevent?This bottom-line question is not getting the attention it needs. Thousands of American lives may be at stake -- either way -- but the American public is not getting the necessary information to help make a judgment.The responsibility for this neglect does not lie with the administration. For diplomatic reasons, it may be required to keep hidden its own ultimate disposition.

WASHINGTON -- The pock-marked dirt road leading to North Korea's nuclear facilities at Yongbyon provides a fitting metaphor for that impoverished nation's efforts to develop a nuclear arsenal more appropriate for a superpower than a desperately poor country. But in the wake of the recent decision by the Bush administration not to certify North Korean compliance with a 1994 nuclear agreement, we should recall what Sept. 11 so tragically demonstrated -- that even adversaries with modest technological capabilities can inflict massive harm on the United States.

CHICAGO - It's only the third quarter, but right now the scoreboard reads: Axis of Evil 2, President Bush 1. While Saddam Hussein may be in jail, North Korea has announced it has nuclear weapons and Iran is moving briskly in that direction. The administration, which has all the trouble it can handle coping with its "catastrophic success" in Iraq, doesn't know what to do about either Kim Jong Il or the ayatollahs in Tehran. There may not be much anyone can do to stop or undo these nuclear programs.