A short few weeks ago, it appeared that a new war might blow up in the spring of 1999-not in Kosovo, but in Korea. The ostensible causes wereP'yongyang's intransigence about opening up a mountain redoubt  that U.S.intelligence officials said was a surreptitious site of continuing nuclear weapons activity (a possibility thought to have disappeared with the 1994 Framework Agreement that froze North Korea's graphite reactor at Yongbyon), and its unwillingness to rein in a missile program that successfully tested
a three-stage rocket of potential intercontinental range last August.

    P'yongyang derailed this mounting crisis on March 16, when it made an unprecedented concession to allow multiple American inspections of the underground facility, and agreed to continue negotiations about its missiles.

    This must have discomfited hardliners in the Pentagon who have been provoking trouble over Korea policy for months, seeking to kill two birds with one stone: to destroy the 1994 agreement, and thereby stick another knife in the President. The leading malefactor is Gen. Patrick M. Hughes, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who likes to leak classified information to rightwing Republicans.  One key leak led to David Sanger's sensational New York Times article (August 17, 1998), revealing alleged nuclear activity inside a mountain northwest of P'yongyang; readers were led to believe that the site had just been discovered, when in fact it had been the object of American surveillance for at least six years. Nor were we told that fully 8,200 underground installations exist in the North, many of them connected to the security of a country that has never been able to control the prying eyes of satellites and U-2 aircraft.

    Readers of the North Korean press at the time, however, learned that it would agree to
an American inspection of the facility-for a price of $300 million, since the site would be useless to its security after the inspection. Two weeks after Sanger's story appeared, a hailstorm of hysterical press reports claimed that P'yongyang sent a two-stage missile arcing over Japan, leading to virtual panic in Tokyo-as if the missile had barely cleared the treetops.

    North Korea's press, however, had spoken for weeks of little else but preparations for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the regime (on September 9). Shortly P'yongyang announced that its three-stage rocket had put a satellite in orbit singing the "Song of Kim Il Sung" rather than "The East is Red." Weeks later our vaunted intelligence community concluded that it was indeed an anniversary
fireworks display, but that the satellite had failed to reach orbit. This was a major intelligence failure, needlessly inflaming Japanese opinion about a rocket that entered the stratosphere over the northern tip of the country (they rely on us for monitoring missile firings). But that did nothing to stop hardliners from plying their friends with privileged information. By mid-autumn rightwing Republicans were screaming about Clinton's North Korea policies, and moderate insiders in Washington were convinced that they were going to kill the 1994 agreement.

    Soon the Pentagon leaked a new U.S. war plan that would take advantage of prevalent
North Korean infirmities to wipe out the entire regime, should the North attack: to "abolish North Korea as a state and ﾖ 'reorganize' it under South Korean control." "We will kill them all," a Pentagon insider told veteran East Asia correspondent Richard Halloran.   Predictably, P'yongyang retorted with unprecedented propaganda broadsides about taking any new war
directly to U.S. territory-and erasing us instead.  That kind of fiery rhetoric, combined with the rocket launch, succeeded only in vastly enhancing the chances that Japan will finally agree to deploy the theater missile defense system that the U.S. has been pushing on them since John
Deutsch ran the CIA. It was a perfect illustration of the tit-for-tat minuet between their hardliners and ours, to justify their budgets-and in both cases to undercut Seoul's new North Korea policies.

    With his persistent and patient "sunshine policy," President Kim Dae Jung has done more to change policy toward the North than any South Korean or American president going back to the end of the Korean War, and has not allowed provocations by hardliners in P'yongyang to derail his new initiatives. During a visit to Washington last June, Kim urged President Clinton to lift the 50-year-old economic embargo on North Korea, arguing that one could hardly expect the regime to change its economic policies and open up if the embargo continued. His efforts met indifference from the White House (underlining the daylight that has opened up between Seoul and Washington since he was elected), and ill-concealed contempt from the
national security mandarins.

    In the vintage film The Mouse That Roared, a small country declares war on the U.S., announces its surrender, and then petitions for aid. That is the essence of P'yongyang's strategy today: bellow that a new war is around the corner, display the biggest stick in your arsenal, and then hope that the U.S. will buy you out. Its missile program is currently for sale at half a billion dollars per annum.  Here's the problem: Pentagon high rollers need a North Korea "ten feet tall" instead of falling apart as it is now, with mass starvation just around the corner this spring as state grain coffers empty out.  So here's the solution: Kim Jong Il should get together with General Hughes and make this buyout a new line item in our defense budget. Even better, though, would be for Bill Clinton to hearken to President Kim, and to the mid-level State Department officials who have patiently negotiated one agreement after another with P'yongyang in spite of a phalanx of noisy Beltway opposition.

Bruce Cumings teaches at the University of Chicago. His new book, Parallax
Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the
Century, will appear this soon from Duke University Press.