US May Put Naval Blockade on North Korea

The US has always had three main options for dealing with North Korea's nuclear weapons programme: negotiations, military attack or economic pressure.

President George W. Bush's administration has never been keen on the first two. Negotiations would reward Pyongyang's bad behaviour and war would risk huge loss of life and economic chaos in the region.

But it is only in the past few weeks that Washington has started to lay the foundations for its preferred option: strangulation of North Korea's crumbling communist economy.

John Bolton, US undersecretary of state for arms control, said last week that Washington was discussing with its allies a plan to interdict ships carrying goods to and from North Korea and other rogue states suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction.

The main objective, he said, was to halt supplies to North Korea's nuclear programme and prevent the state exporting weapons technology to other countries or terrorist groups.

But the interdictions would also seek to deprive North Korea of revenue from arms sales and target the lucrative exports of narcotics and other illegal goods that help keep North Korea's economy afloat.

"As we close off proliferation networks, we will inevitably intercept related criminal activity and overlapping smuggling rings," said Mr Bolton.

Australia's recent raid of a North Korean ship carrying heroin was cited as an example. South Korea's seizure last week of drugs suspected to have come from the North could also be part of an international crackdown.

Washington hopes that by starving North Korea of cash, Pyongyang will be forced to abandon its nuclear ambitions to save the regime from collapse.

However, the US attempt to tighten the noose around Kim Jong-il's Stalinist dictatorship raises many questions.

With no United Nations resolution to back the policy, critics doubt the legality of a naval blockade of North Korea. They forecast repeats of the fiasco last December when Spanish forces had to release a North Korean ship carrying Scud missiles to Yemen because there is no law to stop Pyongyang selling arms.

There are fears that North Korea might respond with force to raids on its ships, escalating the nuclear crisis to more dangerous levels. Pyongyang has already warned that it would consider economic sanctions an "act of war".

One diplomat in Seoul dismissed naval interdictions as a "gimmick" designed to disguise the lack of a serious US policy for dealing with Pyongyang. He said economic pressure would only be effective if backed by North Korea's closest neighbours - China, Russia, South Korea and Japan - which all have trade links to the state.

These countries are reluctant to support any policy that might bring about North Korea's collapse because of the economic chaos, political instability and refugee crisis that such an outcome would unleash on the region. But there are signs that North Korea's neighbours could be succumbing to US pressure to get tough.

Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese prime minister, signalled his readiness over the weekend to clamp down on the flow of illegal goods and cash from the 600,000-strong North Korean community in Japan. Seoul wants more dialogue before economic sanctions are considered but has hinted that cross-border ties could be cut if the North escalated tensions further. Beijing has sharply reduced fuel and grain supplies to its neighbour over the past year.

However, some North Korea-watchers say the US may be underestimating the resilience of a regime that survived the death of 2m-3m people through famine in the mid-1990s. Richard Bridle, Pyongyang representative of Unicef, the UN children's fund, says North Korea's economy is already so isolated that sanctions might not make much difference. "We're not in an Iraq situation here. It's not as if North Korea is being prevented from exporting vast amounts of oil," he says.

William Perry, former US defence secretary, says the threat posed by North Korea's nuclear programme is too urgent to tackle through the lengthy process of economic pressure. If the US does not negotiate an immediate freeze, Pyongyang could produce half a dozen bombs by the end of this year, he says.