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U.S. Is Warning North Koreans on Nuclear Test
WASHINGTON, May 15 - The Bush administration on Sunday warned North Korea for the first time that if it conducted a nuclear test, the United States and several Pacific powers would take punitive action, but officials stopped short of saying what kind of sanctions would result.

"Action would have to be taken," Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser, said on the CNN program "Late Edition." Asked earlier on "Fox News Sunday" about recent reports that intelligence agencies have warned that North Korea could conduct its first test, Mr. Hadley added: "We've seen some evidence that says that they may be preparing for a nuclear test. We have talked to our allies about that."

But he cautioned that North Korea was "a hard target" and that correctly assessing its intentions was nearly impossible.

Mr. Hadley's warnings represented the first time anyone in the Bush administration had approached drawing a "red line" that North Korea could not cross without prompting a reaction. The term red line was often used during the cold war to set the boundaries in confrontations, with perhaps the most extreme example President Kennedy's action in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis to curb a nuclear risk.

In the case of North Korea, the threat has risen incrementally over 15 years. Mr. Bush's aides have said in interviews over the past year that if they drew a clear line, they believed that the North Koreans would see it as a challenge and walk right up to it.

On Sunday afternoon, senior administration officials said that concerns about baiting North Korea helped to explain why Mr. Hadley did not specify what kind of penalty was possible. Instead, Mr. Hadley noted that "the Japanese are out today already saying that those steps would need to include going to the Security Council and, potentially, sanctions."
Or maybe the Japanese will decide to go nuclear. Your call, President Hu.
He appeared to be referring to comments by Shinzo Abe, the secretary general of Japan's governing Liberal Democratic Party. Returning to Japan from a recent trip to Washington - where he met Mr. Hadley, Vice President Dick Cheney and others - Mr. Abe said Japan faced the most direct threat if North Korea proved that it could detonate a nuclear weapon.

"If North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons becomes definite," Mr. Abe said on Asahi TV, and North Korea "conducts nuclear testing, for instance, Japan will naturally bring the issue to the U.N. and call for sanctions against North Korea." Mr. Abe also told Asahi TV that it was "unthinkable not to impose any sanctions in case of a nuclear testing."
Among other things.
In an interview with The New York Times during his visit to Washington, Mr. Abe acknowledged that making sanctions work would "depend on the cooperation of China," though he noted that Japan would be capable of cutting off a considerable flow of money into North Korea sent by ethnic Koreans living in Japan.

North Korea has repeatedly declared that it would consider any sanctions imposed through the United Nations as an act of war.

Mr. Hadley, known for his caution, appeared somewhat more tentative Sunday than Mr. Abe did in discussing sanctions. He offered no specifics. Nor did he mention the extensive studies under way at the State Department, and in his own National Security Council to come up with a range of options, either in the event of a nuclear test or North Korea's continued refusal to rejoin negotiations that it has boycotted for nearly a year with South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
Posted by: Steve White 2005-05-16
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=119269