SEOUL: For people with the unenviable task of deciphering what is regarded as one of the world’s most impenetrable countries, the question of the moment is: How far will North Korea go?

Until a few days ago, the conventional wisdom here was that the foundering Communist regime was engaged in elaborate bluff over its nuclear arms programme designed to pull the United States into a dialogue and extract more aid from Washington. After all, the North Koreans are famous for an idiosyncratic negotiating style in which they try to solve a crisis only by creating another one. But their decision on Friday to expel UN nuclear inspectors and their declaration that they intend to reopen a laboratory where plutonium can be reprocessed for use in weapons suggests that they are deadly serious about making an atomic bomb.

“They have a multi-pronged approach. Their initial hope is to negotiate with the United States, but if that doesn’t work or if the negotiations go badly and things escalate, they will become a nuclear power,” said Kim Tae Woo, an arms control expert with the Korea Institute for Defence Analyses in Seoul.

The speed at which the government in Pyongyang is plowing ahead with its nuclear programme at has astonished even veteran North Korea-watchers. From the time the North Koreans declared their intention to restart the programme, Dec 12, only 10 days elapsed before they removed UN seals and disabled surveillance cameras that had been in place to enforce a freeze agreed to eight years ago. Four days later, they were spotted loading fresh fuel rods into their only completed nuclear reactor, a 5- megawatt, Soviet-designed plant in Yongbyon, a secretive nuclear complex 55 miles north of Pyongyang.

On Friday, North Korea notified the UN International Atomic Energy Agency that it was booting out inspectors who have been monitoring the freeze, and on Saturday it declared the expulsion would take place on Tuesday — the earliest possible date, since there are only two flights weekly out of North Korea.

The North Koreans’ admission in October to Assistant Secretary of State Jim Kelly that they had a plan to secretly enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons was cause for consternation, but not undue alarm because uranium enrichment — which requires thousands of gas centrifuges — is a slow, painstaking process.

Their decision to reopen the 5-megawatt reactor was more troubling, but again not cause for panic because the reactor will take at least a few months to restart and at least another year before its fuel rods could be used for bombmaking.

The real crisis — and one which could be only a few days in the making — is the reopening of a chemical reprocessing plant whose sole function is to extract weapons-grade plutonium out of fuel rods from the reactor.

Given the rapid pace of recent weeks, it now appears likely that the North Koreans will go as far as they can to produce a nuclear bomb or perhaps to add to an existing arsenal. The CIA believes North Korea had already produced one or two nuclear weapons before the 1994 freeze, although it is unclear whether it has the technical knowhow to mount them on a missile.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service.