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Others believed, even at the time of the crisis, that the U.S. intelligence estimate was, in the words of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a "worst-case scare-nario"-that it was highly unlikely that North Korea could have unloaded so many rods so quickly and successfully, or that the rods could have been so well made or fully irradiated, or that the reprocessing operation could have worked so effectively that Pyongyang had the plutonium for one or two bombs. Even in the worst case, skeptics pointed out, possession of the plutonium was several key steps away from having an explodable and deliverable nuclear weapon. There was so much disagreement within the administration, Clinton's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, told me, that the president often received diametrically opposite estimates on North Korea from the CIA and the State Department on the same day.

Unloading the reactor in 1994 was of great importance for two reasons, one having to do with the past and the other with the future. Regarding the past, IAEA experts believed that systematic sampling and careful segregation of rods from particular parts of the reactor's core under its supervision would disclose how long the fuel had been burned and at what intensity. In this way, they could compile a verifiable record of the operating history of the reactor, confirming how many fuel rods had been previously removed, and therefore identify the outer limit of the plutonium that might have been produced.

Such a disclosure would be a major step toward eliminating the ambiguity about the DPRK's past acquisition of nuclear weapons material. From Pyongyang's viewpoint, however, this was a no-win proposition: if it was established that Pyongyang had not diverted nuclear fuel clandestinely to manufacture plutonium in the past, its nuclear threat would diminish and with it the country's bargaining power; but if the supervised unloading established that Pyongyang had lied and produced more plutonium than it had admitted, it would lose face and the hunt would be on for the missing nuclear material.

The future of the eight thousand fuel rods that would now be unloaded from the reactor was of even greater importance. Secretary of Defense Perry estimated that this entire load of rods could be converted into enough plutonium for four or five nuclear weapons. While the United States was not prepared to go to war to clarify the past, it was determined to do so, if necessary, to prevent North Korea from converting these and future irradiated fuel rods into plutonium for nuclear weapons. Nearing completion at Yongbyon was a much larger 50-megawatt reactor that potentially could produce much more plutonium, and an even larger 200-megawatt reactor was under construction nearby. The North Koreans had promised to place the unloaded fuel from these facilities under the inspection of the IAEA, but like everything else, this was subject to agreement, and that seemed increasingly doubtful.

North Korean negotiator Kang Sok Ju had been warned repeatedly, during talks with Gallucci, that if the refueling of the 5-megawatt reactor took place without IAEA supervision, negotiations with the United States would be terminated, even though such action would be within North Korea's rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. However, a U.S. official familiar with the contents of the meetings said, "We didn't lay down with great force and clarity that this was a drop-dead issue." Moreover, this official said, most of the U.S.-North Korean discussion before the spring of 1994 had been about the refueling of the reactor, not about defueling, or unloading the current stock of irradiated fuel rods. "If North Korea understood, they chose to ignore it," he added.

On April 19, Pyongyang notified the IAEA of its intention to defuel the reactor "at an early date," and it invited agency inspectors to witness the unloading operations-but without specifying what procedures would be followed or what the inspectors would be able to see and do. There followed