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In Setback for Bush, Korea Nuclear Talks Collapse

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — A final push by President Bush to complete an agreement to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons program collapsed Thursday, leaving the confrontation with one of the world’s most isolated and intractable nations to the administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Four days of negotiations in Beijing ended in an impasse after North Korea refused to agree to a system of verifying that it had ended all nuclear activity, which it had pledged to do. Among other things, the North Koreans have objected to allowing soil and air samples to be taken near nuclear facilities and sent overseas for testing.

North Korea could still return to the bargaining table, as it has after previous rifts. Officials, however, indicated that any talks were unlikely to resume before Mr. Bush stepped down in less than six weeks, depriving him of the chance for the breakthrough that the White House had hoped to reach with the North Koreans in the sunset of his presidency.

“What’s unfortunate is that the North Koreans had an opportunity here,” the White House press secretary, Dana M. Perino, said Thursday. “There was an open door, and all they had to do was walk through it.”

The collapse of talks is reminiscent of a similar breakdown at the end of 2000, when President Clinton gave up on a plan to travel to North Korea in the waning days of his presidency as it became clear that a deal over eliminating North Korea’s medium- and long-range missiles was out of reach.

During Mr. Bush’s presidency, North Korea has tested its first nuclear weapon and has accumulated enough nuclear fuel to build eight more weapons, according to American estimates.

The deal in which North Korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons program was first struck in February 2007, but it has been fragile from the outset. Only two months ago, the administration officially removed North Korea from a list of state sponsors of terrorism in a bid to salvage the deal.

Michael J. Green, a former National Security Council adviser under President Bush who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the administration had erred in removing North Korea from the list without extracting a more concrete step on verification.

“The United States expended its carrots, including delisting North Korea from the terrorist list, in exchange for a verbal promise that Pyongyang would sign on to these verifications,” he said. “We now know the North Koreans tricked us.”

A State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said the administration would not restore North Korea to the list because the decision to remove it had been made “based on the law and the facts.”

But at the White House, Ms. Perino suggested that the United States would reconsider some of the assistance it had provided under carefully calibrated agreements over the past two years. The aid includes fuel oil that the United States — along with China, Russia, South Korea and Japan, who are the other parties in the talks — had offered in exchange for North Korea’s steps toward dismantlement, but she emphasized that no decisions had been made yet.

Even as the administration pushed to conclude a final deal, it had appeared that North Korea wanted to stall, perhaps to seek different terms from Mr. Obama’s administration.

As a candidate and president-elect, Mr. Obama has pledged to take aggressive steps to halt nuclear proliferation by North Korea, criticizing Mr. Bush’s handling of the confrontation with North Korea as unnecessarily belligerent in the beginning and ad hoc later on.

At the same time, Mr. Obama has not proposed a radically different approach to North Korea than the one Mr. Bush has pursued for the past two years.

In a debate against Senator John McCain in September, Mr. Obama criticized Mr. Bush’s initial hostility toward North Korea, saying it resulted in that country’s decision to abandon the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and to test a nuclear weapon in 2006, but he also acknowledged the diplomatic effort that has since followed.

“When we re-engaged — because, again, the Bush administration reversed course on this — then we have at least made some progress, although right now, because of the problems in North Korea, we are seeing it on shaky ground,” Mr. Obama said at the time.

Mr. Obama’s transition office declined to comment on the latest breakdown in talks over the North Korean nuclear program.

North Korea’s hard-line posture in recent talks has prompted some officials to question whether its reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il, was fully in charge after a stroke in August, creating a leadership vacuum that made North Korean negotiators unwilling to complete an agreement. A French doctor who treated him, François-Xavier Roux, confirmed in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro that Mr. Kim had a stroke but that his condition had since improved.

Dr. Roux, a neurosurgeon based in Paris, told the newspaper that Mr. Kim had undergone treatment but not an operation; he last treated him in late October, he told the newspaper.

Mr. Green, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said North Korea might be balking at vigorous verification measures because it was not forthcoming in its declaration of nuclear activities this summer. He said the uncertainty surrounding the country’s intentions posed an enormous challenge for the incoming administration. He advocated a “very carefully calibrated” balance between incentives and punitive actions, like halting fuel oil shipments.

The latest breakdown in talks came after American and North Korean negotiators had reached what officials described as a verbal agreement on the conditions for inspections of the North’s nuclear facilities, including its main plutonium reactor at Yongbyon.

The United States also wanted measures to verify North Korea’s proliferation and other nuclear activities.

Administration officials said that the other nations in the talks had agreed on a written proposal, presented by the Chinese this week, but that North Korea continued to object to some of the verification measures.

“Well, it’s the same old problem,” the American negotiator, Christopher R. Hill, said in Beijing, according to a State Department transcript. “The North Koreans don’t want to put into writing what they are willing to put into words.”

Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Paris.

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