Experts differ on significance of N. Korea missing nuclear deadline

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration was hoping to spend the early hours of 2008 poring over a new document from the North Koreans: a full list of its nuclear secrets. No such luck.

The North Koreans let the New Year's Eve deadline come and go without revealing anything.

The United States is now hoping the delay will only be temporary and that the official declaration will be sent along in the coming days. The U.S. goal is to press ahead with negotiations and achieve full denuclearization of the Korean peninsula by the end of the new year.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters in his office Monday morning that the delay in the declaration is unfortunate. "We want to see it provided as soon as possible," he said. "The important thing is not whether we have the declaration today. It is that it needs to be full and complete."

Meanwhile, an international team remains in North Korea overseeing the "disabling" of the country's reactor at Yongbyon. This will be followed by the "dismantling" phase, in which buildings will be destroyed and key facilities filled with cement or cut apart and shipped out of the country.

In exchange for its cooperation so far, North Korea has received food and fuel oil aid. It also wants to be removed from the list of terrorism-sponsoring countries.

President Bush, who once labeled North Korea as part of "the axis of evil," took the extremely rare step of writing to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in early December, urging him to meet the December 31 deadline. The "Dear Mr. Chairman" letter, signed by hand by Bush, said continued progress would be tied to a full declaration.

Bruce Klingner, senior research fellow in the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, said delays can now be traced back to negotiations earlier this year, and what he called "vague texts" about what North Korea is required to do. Klingner is a long-time observer of North Korea and a 20-year veteran of the CIA and intelligence community.

"I think the North Koreans are going to try to drag it out," he said by telephone from his Washington office. "Even more important is what's going to be in the declaration. Does it comply with what North Korea is required to do or is it just what North Korea wants to declare?"

Still unknown is just how much plutonium, the raw material of nuclear bombs, the North Koreans have. There are also big question marks over how much enriched uranium they have and how they shared or sold nuclear technology and expertise to other countries.

The still-mysterious bombing by Israel of an industrial installation in Syria raised questions about whether North Korea's proliferation activities have extended even further than realized. The Bush administration has ducked any questions about what the Syrians may have been doing, and whether North Korea was involved.

Joe Cirincione of the Center for American Progress downplayed the importance of North Korea missing the deadline for the declaration.

"This is not a big deal," Cirincione said in an e-mail to CNN. "The momentum is still very positive, the reactor has been shut down and disabled; the disablement will proceed over the next 100 days and could then move into permanent dismantlement." He is the author of "Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons."

And Cirincione predicts some hard bargaining ahead for the United States -- as well as its partners in the talks, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea -- to get North Korea to spill all its secrets. "The North Koreans see everything as negotiations. So the declaration itself will likely not be complete," he said in his e-mail. "They will see it as something else to negotiate over as we point out that it does not include, for example, a full description of the gas centrifuge equipment they bought from Pakistan, or details on whether or not they fashioned their plutonium into weapons."

And the Heritage Foundation's Klingner said the Bush administration may be tempted to ease up on North Korea, realizing the clock is running out on Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and their international policy team.

"The Bush administration is perhaps becoming increasingly desperate to secure a foreign policy legacy to counter the concern over the situation in Iraq," he said, "so may be more willing to accept a lower level of compliance by North Korea as to its data reporting as well as a verification regimen later." E-mail to a friend

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