N. Korean Admission Doesn't Stall Nuclear Talks

SEOUL — SEOUL -- This week, a North Korean team jetted to New York for three days of meetings in a Park Avenue high-rise on insurance and liability for a nuclear power system in North Korea. A week earlier, another delegation had traveled from Seoul to Pyongyang in the North to hash out the logistics of a satellite telephone system for the $4.6-billion project.

Given that the Bush administration has practically declared the nuclear project dead, it would seem like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

But the international consortium in charge of the power system has hardly missed a beat since the White House announced last month that North Korea had nullified a 1994 accord under which it promised to give up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for help with its dire energy shortage. The deal calls for the building of two light-water nuclear reactors.

"Obviously, I'm still here," said Chang Sun Sup, the South Korean representative to the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or KEDO, as the consortium is known. "Generally speaking, everybody is saying that the agreement is nullified. But until it is officially pronounced dead, we are alive and breathing."

"We are working until we are told otherwise," said another KEDO official, who asked not to be named.

North Korea, which only a few weeks ago looked as if it might be emerging from 50 years of isolation, reverted to its status of an international pariah when it admitted it had violated the 1994 agreement and, furthermore, felt it had every right to develop a nuclear bomb.

The admission came during a meeting last month in Pyongyang, the North's capital, with U.S. envoy James A. Kelly and has been followed by a series of increasingly belligerent pronouncements. In talks this week, the North Koreans refused to even discuss the nuclear issue with Japan, shutting the door on what had appeared to be promising normalization talks between the two nations.

Despite the soaring tensions, a large delegation of North Korean scientists is due to arrive in Seoul in a few weeks for on-the-job training in South Korean nuclear power plants.

"There is a certain surreality to this," said Peter Hayes, head of the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley, which studies nuclear issues involving North Korea. "But even if you are a conservative, you don't necessarily want to rupture relations with North Korea. Everybody is just holding their breath because the situation is so volatile."