Negotiations to make the Korean Peninsula permanently free of nuclear weapons are due to resume in Beijing in September. China, the United States, Japan, Russia, and North and South Korea will meet for the fourth round of the six-party talks, following recent calls from the US for Pyongyang to emulate Libya in dismantling its nuclear and chemical weapons programme under international supervision. After announcing that it would do so last December, Tripoli moved quickly to carry out its promise, and allowed outside verification to prove it. In a speech in Seoul last week, the US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, John Bolton, said that if North Korean leader Kim Jong-il followed the example of Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, it would mean improved relations with the US, and with the international community in general. 'By ending its pariah status, Libya is no longer shunned by the outside world,' Mr Bolton said. 'Economic and security benefits have been the natural and inevitable result.' The Bush administration has moved step by step to improve bilateral relations as Libya has proved by actions that it has given up weapons of mass destruction, renounced terrorism and actively supports the campaign against al-Qaeda. North Korea wants US recognition, security guarantees, and food, fuel and other aid for its ailing economy - the kind of rewards being given to Libya. Moreover, Libya is being offered reintegration with the world without a change of regime, or even domestic political reform as a precondition. But there are some important differences between Libya and North Korea. These suggest that Pyongyang will not follow Tripoli down the road to international acceptance very soon. Indeed, North Korea's Foreign Ministry in a statement last weekend dismissed the US call for it to follow Libya, saying it was 'a sham offer not worthy of further discussion'. First, North Korea, unlike Libya, shows no sign of coming clean on the full extent of its nuclear weapons programme. Pyongyang has offered to 'freeze' only the plutonium part of its programme in exchange for the benefits it wants. It refuses to acknowledge or discuss the second part of its programme - using highly enriched uranium to make nuclear bombs. Yet Libya's disclosures about its sources of supply helped uncover the nuclear black market masterminded by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan and provided more evidence that North Korea seeks a uranium enrichment route, in addition to a plutonium path, to bomb making. Second, North Korea's nuclear capability is much more advanced than Libya's was. The US believes the North has at least two - and up to eight - nuclear bombs. By contrast, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and other experts say Libya was several years away from producing a nuclear weapon. The US bombed Libya in 1986 for supporting terrorism and could have done so again using precision-strike conventional weapons to destroy weapons of mass destruction facilities. But the US does not know where in North Korea's mountainous terrain any nuclear weapons are stored. Libya concluded that it was likely to be more secure and have a stronger economy without such weapons. It has big oil and gas reserves to exploit; North Korea does not. Impoverished and reclusive, the North seems convinced that the only real assurance of regime survival is to have nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles to fire them, not just at Japan but at the US itself, as the ultimate checkmate. Michael Richardson, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. The views expressed in this article are those of the author
