Pyongyang's Dangerous Game

Sitting in the conference room of Peace House on the South Korean side of the line in the truce village of Panmunjom, Seoul's diplomats were shocked by the steamy rhetoric from their Northern counterparts. "Seoul is not far from here," warned the North's Park Yong Su, reading a prepared text to the South's Song Yong Dae. "Should a war break out, Seoul will be a sea of flames, and you, Mr. Song, will find it difficult to survive."

The grisly threat, replayed over and over on South Korean television, was a sharp reminder of the acrimony growing between North Korea and most of the world after Pyongyang once again refused to submit to international nuclear inspection. The North cranked up its noisy propaganda machine to proclaim the Korean peninsula on "the brink of war" and pointedly reminded the U.S. not to forget that 54,246 American soldiers died in the Korean War.

The West spoke back last week in a quieter but no less assertive tone. A third and supposedly climactic round of high-level talks between North Korea and the U.S., to discuss trading diplomatic recognition and economic aid for the North's full compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and other Western demands, was scratched. South Korea put its 633,000 troops on alert. Seoul also accepted an American offer to deploy 48 Patriot missile launchers to defend against North Korean Scud missiles and announced that it had resumed planning for the Team Spirit military exercises with the U.S., suspended in February to placate the North. Washington weighed whether to supplement its 34,830 troops in South Korea and beef up their equipment. All the military talk sparked fears that the yearlong diplomatic campaign to haul Pyongyang back inside the safeguards of the nonproliferation treaty had collapsed. Given the touchy unpredictability of the Kim Il Sung regime, Seoul and Washington were worried that even small military signals could escalate toward a catastrophic war.

"I do not want to be an alarmist on North Korea," Secretary of Defense William Perry told TIME last week, "but I take the threat of military action very seriously." Two-thirds of Pyongyang's army is stationed within 100 miles of the border and could march to the demilitarized zone in an hour and to Seoul in two. The North, he says, is "persisting in the development of a nuclear-weapons program." And, adds Perry, "it's a very erratic regime. I don't know of anybody anywhere who can predict with confidence what philosophical views the North Korean leadership has about war and peace." But, he concludes, "I see no imminent danger of military actitivies." Nevertheless, the Pentagon is re-examining its contingency plans for South Korea, and it plans what Perry called "further moves that strengthen our + defensive forces" -- even though the U.S. realizes Pyongyang will regard those actions as provocative.