
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 3, 1994                   TAG: 9406030124
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: ROME                                LENGTH: Medium

N. KOREA PENALTY SOUGHT

The United States will seek U.N. economic sanctions against North Korea because it has refused to permit inspections of its nuclear operations, a senior White House official traveling with President Clinton said Thursday.

North Korea has said it would view economic sanctions as an act of war and has threatened to quit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if they were imposed.

President Clinton said North Korea is forcing the consideration of sanctions. ``This is about North Korea's conduct, not about the United States or Britain or France or Russia or China. They have triggered these events, not the United States or anyone else.''

In a letter Thursday to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said North Korea has made it impossible for inspectors to determine whether it is diverting plutonium to make atomic bombs.

For more than a year, inspectors have been trying to assess North Korea's nuclear program, only to be turned away or kept from key sites.

The IAEA says North Korea's refueling of a small nuclear reactor has gone so far that it is no longer possible to determine whether plutonium was diverted five years ago for a weapons program.

Pyongyang insists its nuclear program is peaceful, but there is widespread fear that the North Koreans are building nuclear weapons,

Clinton did not say directly whether the United States would seek an all-out trade embargo. He indicated the country's repeated attempts to block nuclear inspectors was forcing the United States to pursue economic sanctions.

Sanctions would have to be approved by all five U.N. Security Council members: the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and China.

Clinton said he believed France and Great Britain would support sanctions. He also noted that Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who is meeting in Moscow with South Korean President Kim Young Sam, acknowledged for the first time publicly that he would support sanctions if negotiations failed.

The trump card is China.

China, North Korea's largest trading partner, has been unwilling to support sanctions against a neighboring Communist nation. China also supplies North Korea with vast amounts of oil and consumer goods.

``It's premature now to reach a conclusion as to what the Chinese government would do,'' said a senior administration official in Rome.

Keywords:
INFOLINE

by CNB