The White House insists that Iraq remains a greater menace than North Korea, in part because Saddam has already shown he is willing to use weapons of mass destruction. But some foreign-policy veterans, including Christopher, think North Korea poses the bigger strategic threat, given its more advanced nuclear program, its long-range delivery systems and its propensity to sell weapons to anyone who will buy them.

Yet even if the White House didn't have the added complication of organizing a war against Iraq, its options for confronting North Korea would be limited. In 1994, when the Clinton Administration demanded that North Korea shut down the Yongbyon reactor, the Pentagon drafted plans for strikes to take out North Korea's key nuclear-production sites. Pentagon officials say the plan has recently been reviewed and modified, but few believe any American President would ever authorize it. An attack on Pyongyang's nuclear facilities could spread lethal radiation over China, Japan and South Korea and trigger a hellacious North Korean counterattack. The regime boasts a standing army of 1 million troops—the world's fourth largest—with an estimated 4.7 million more in reserve. It also keeps a massive store of artillery shells and hundreds of Scud missiles that it could load with biological and chemical agents and rain down on South Korea and the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed there. Some U.S. military officials believe that a conventional exchange with North Korea could result in as many as 1 million South Korean casualties. Even so, a senior Bush Administration official says, the chief impediment to U.S. military action is the possibility, however remote, that Pyongyang might try to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield. Says the official: "You can't ignore the fact that nuclear weapons are a game changer."

The Administration's attempts to ratchet up the pressure diplomatically have not produced much benefit. Last month the U.S. began circulating proposals for a policy of "tailored containment," under which U.S. naval ships would block North Korean missile exports—depriving the regime of one of its only sources of income—and the U.N. would impose economic sanctions against North Korea. Winning support for the idea will require high-level arm twisting. China, which supplies the bulk of North Korea's oil, is wary of exacerbating the privations that have already sent thousands of North Korean refugees across the border. U.S. officials think, however, that China's leaders can be swayed to squeeze North Korea, given Beijing's concern that if Pyongyang definitively crosses the nuclear threshold, Japan and South Korea will be provoked to follow. The bigger headache for the U.S. has turned out to be its longtime ally the South Koreans, who have no interest in making life worse for their North Korean kin. The South's President-elect, Roh Moo Hyun, has irritated Washington by vowing to renew Seoul's policy of "sunshine" engagement with the North. Last week Roh publicly criticized the U.S. containment strategy. "I am skeptical it will make North Korea surrender," he said.

In any case, putting in place sanctions tough enough to inflict persuasive pain on North Korea would take months, giving Pyongyang time to successfully extract new nuclear-weapons material. So is there another way out? South Korean officials are pushing the U.S. to negotiate a climb-down with Pyongyang; Kim, they believe, is desperate to end his country's isolation and would agree to give up his nuclear ambitions if the U.S. dangled the promise of normalized relations and pledged not to attack him. But so far, the Administration has refused to negotiate until Pyongyang disarms. Hawks in Washington warn that Kim may try to blackmail the U.S. into another agreement he has no intention of keeping.

So, how dangerous is North Korea? The answer has long been difficult to divine, given the insularity of the Hermit Kingdom and the erratic behavior of its leaders, first Kim Il Sung and now his son Kim Jong Il. At every turn since the beginning of the crisis last October, Kim Jong Il has repeatedly called Washington's bluff, ignoring warnings and raising the stakes. Kim chose not to buy more time by denying the U.S.'s evidence that he had started a secret uranium-enrichment program. The U.S. and its allies halted fuel-oil deliveries to North Korea; at that point, instead of agreeing to abandon the uranium project, Kim got ready to fire up the Yongbyon complex, which the regime had mothballed under the terms of the 1994 Agreed Framework negotiated by the Clinton Administration. And by removing the spent-fuel seals, opening the reprocessing plant and expelling inspectors, Kim has gone even further than anticipated toward building new bombs—and at a more terrifyingly rapid pace.

The quest for a nuclear weapon has obsessed the Pyongyang regime since the 1950s, when Kim Il Sung began working to amass an arsenal potent enough to deter a feared U.S. attack. Though Pyongyang has made gestures suggesting it was ready to make concessions in exchange for aid and security guarantees, neither Kim Il Sung nor his son gave up the raw material for bombmaking or renounced the desire to obtain the Bomb; in their mind, doing so would sap the country's bargaining strength and make the regime's survival dependent on its neighbors' goodwill.

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