SINGAPORE: All seems quiet on the North Korean front. But any apparent reduction in tension on the last Cold War border is but a lull as protagonists Pyongyang and Washington assess their positions on the smouldering nuclear crisis.

The standoff over North Korea’s nuclear programme casts a shadow over the entire Northeast Asian region and offers an example to would-be nuclear states elsewhere in the world.

The crisis has faded from the limelight after six-country talks in Beijing in August looked to have taken the edge off the threat but analysts say anyone who thinks those negotiations offered an opportunity to put the issue on hold is playing with fire.

“Everyone seems to be resting easy, perhaps without real good cause, just because it appears the North Koreans have agreed to come to another meeting,” said Ralph Cossa, head of the Hawaii-based CSIS Pacific Forum think tank.

“Everyone agreed not to do anything nasty between now and the next meeting — but nasty has been left undefined.”

In fact, North Korea’s nearest friend, China, and closest neighbour, South Korea, have both shown signs they are very aware the August talks that also involved Japan, Russia and the United States were but the first step in a tortuous process.

With a flurry of diplomatic activity and leaders’ summits scheduled around Asia over the next few weeks, the likelihood of another round of talks before mid-November is slim.

“In the first round of the six-party talks, North Korea did not show anything positive while the US side did,” said Izumi Hajime, a Korea expert at Shizuoka Prefectural University near Tokyo.

“Therefore, the ball is in North Korea’s court. That is what the North is aware of,” he said.

China may send its parliamentary chief and Communist Party number two, Wu Bangguo, to Pyongyang as early as this week, becoming the highest-ranking official from Beijing to visit for several years as ties have cooled since Kim Jong-il assumed the leadership after the death of his father in 1994.

And South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, facing hostility at home to a US request for military help in Iraq, has linked the deployment of South Korean troops to progress on defusing the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

And the question, as ever, is whether North Korea will turn up. And if those delegates do fly once more to Beijing, just how much negotiating power will they bring?

“Diplomatic atmospherics are among the many scarce goods that Pyongyang presumes to regulate, and ration,” Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington wrote for the Nautilus Institute this week.

“But any genuine progress toward a diplomatic resolution of the nuclear impasse cannot be expected without fundamental — nay revolutionary — changes in outlook and policy on the part of the North Korean leadership,” he said.

So far, North Korea’s delegates have tended to turn up at the talks, read prepared statements, drop yet another bombshell with such threats as — in August in Beijing — to carry out a nuclear test and then go home and refuse to come back again.

This is the kind of behaviour trying China’s patience.

It may be why Beijing sent only a low-level apparatchik to North Korea’s 55th anniversary celebrations this month and why it may now be dispatching a senior leader to mend fences and make clear China is serious in its opposition to nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula.

North Korea may want something in return for turning up, just as the United States believes the North’s nuclear ambitions may be aimed at extracting rewards — anathema to US policymakers.

GETTING THE NORTH TO THE TABLE: “At some point the North Koreans are still going to balk and essentially wait — or hope — to be bribed by the South Koreans or Chinese to come to the meeting,” said Cossa.