Threat From N. Korea Is Growing, GOP Warns

WASHINGTON —  The security threat posed by North Korea has increased “considerably” in the years since President Clinton launched a policy of engagement with the Communist state, a task force of House Republicans charged in a report issued Wednesday.

The report, commissioned by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) in August, asserts that the United States is unable to defend itself adequately against the North Korean threat.

“First, the American people need to know that there is significant evidence that North Korea is continuing its activities to develop nuclear weapons,” said Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), chairman of the International Relations Committee. “Second, the American people need to know that North Korea can currently strike the United States [and is] capable of delivering a chemical, biological or possibly nuclear weapon.”

The report asserts that North Korea tested nuclear “triggers,” a key component of nuclear weapons, last November.

Gilman pledged to challenge the Clinton administration directly on the issue, promising extensive hearings that will produce an alternative, Republican policy in the form of legislation by April.

Among the report’s main assertions:

* Parts of the United States could be exposed to a North Korean long-range missile, one possibly tipped with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

* North Korea is less capable of successfully invading and occupying South Korea today than it was five years ago.

* The United States has replaced the Soviet Union as North Korea’s primary benefactor, providing the Communist state with $645 million worth of food, medicine and nuclear power assistance since 1995.

* The well-being of the North Korean people, both politically and physically, is worse than at any time in the country’s history.

Reaction to the report among nongovernmental specialists ranged from skeptical to sharply critical.

“I don’t think their conclusions on the nuclear program are supported by facts,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security. “They are taking worst-case scenarios and using them as fact.”

Patrick Cronin, director of research and studies at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, labeled the report “more of a litany than a strategy.”

Although the GOP report failed to sway administration officials and some experts, it seemed likely to provoke a rare, substantive foreign policy debate between the GOP-led Congress and the Clinton White House.

“There’s no political leverage in any of this North Korea debate; this is a question of good policy,” insisted Richard V. Allen, a former Reagan administration foreign policy advisor who worked with the GOP task force.

Senior Clinton administration officials said they plan to continue attempts to engage North Korea in a political dialogue built around a 1994 “framework” deal in which the government in Pyongyang agreed to give up its nuclear weapons program in return for two foreign-built nuclear reactors. Those reactors would be subject to stringent inspections to prevent diversion of nuclear materials.

The nuclear power plant deal remains at the heart of administration efforts to engage North Korea, a course reaffirmed in September after a nine-month review.

Within days of completing that review, the United States appeared to make diplomatic headway when North Korea agreed to suspend any tests of an advanced three-stage missile, called the Taepodong-2. A few days later, Clinton announced the first easing of U.S. commercial and trade sanctions against Pyongyang since the Korean War nearly half a century ago.