Nukes across the DMZ.

ON A crisp fall day, even the demilitarized zone has its moments. Alongside Old Highway 1--the only road connecting North and South Korea--the autumn colors of the fir trees and fallen yellow gingko leaves mitigate the harsher effects of the barbed wire, and the crewcut young men playing ball in sweatsuits have an almost New Englandish look to them, calling to mind college football games and pumpkin pie. The North Koreans too are doing their part today. For once the speakers set up to blare forth their propaganda lie blessedly silent.

Still, the DMZ's inherent ugliness has a way of breaking through even the brightest of days. For as Army Specialist Kirk Oswald rattles off the names of various sites we pass, I realize that the names tend to come from U.S. servicemen who have paid for the honor with their lives: Ballinger Hall, for Commander Robert M. Ballinger, killed while inspecting one of the huge tunnels the North Koreans have dug under the DMZ; Camp Bonifas, for Captain Arthur G. Bonifas, axed to death by North Korean soldiers while on a routine operation to trim a poplar tree obstructing the view from a nearby observation post; Barret Readiness Facility, for 1st Lieutenant Mark Barret, killed with Captain Bonifas; and so on. It is the same story indoors. The walls have an almost sacramental quality to them, covered with grainy photographs memorializing some of the more notorious incidents, and there are relics such as the stump from the aforementioned poplar tree.

Perhaps it was this gritty reality that moved Bill Clinton to issue his famous end-of-their-country warning to Pyongyang while staring across the border in full view of North Korean gunposts. Only a year or so ago, the DMZ was something of an anachronism. But today this last outpost of the Cold War has become the biggest burr on the underside of the New World Order. For the threat of North Korea's nuclear ambitions extends far beyond South Korea to the entire Asia Pacific, with the potential to upset the security and stability of what is today the world's most dynamic region and reverse the hard-won achievements of the Gulf War. The nervousness with which Asian leaders watch Clinton's moves attests to a central truth: even the perception of American weakness is dangerously destabilizing to the entire region.

"In America there are many critics of the imperial Presidency," says Park Soo-gil, chancelor of the Institute for Foreign Affairs and National Security in Seoul. "But sometimes you need an imperial Presidency. The American President must carry with him some authority."

The current problem began in March, when North Korea announced its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In the thick of warnings about not doing anything to provoke Pyongyang, it's worth recalling that the March announcement came less than two years after George Bush announced the withdrawal of all American nuclear weapons from South Korea and little more than a year after a North-South agreement on the denuclearization of the peninsula. The announcement was in response to the statement by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency that Pyongyang had processed more plutonium than it said it had. Although the North agreed in June to suspend its withdrawal from the treaty, it refused, and continues to refuse, any IAEA inspections of its facilities. In the meantime the batteries in the IAEA's surveillance cameras have run down, and although intelligence officials say they still have other ways to follow what North Korea is doing, among their worries is that the plant being built at Yongbyon may not be the only one; it may be based on a pilot plant they have not yet found.

The dilemma for President Clinton and his South Korean counterpart, Kim Young Sam, is how to bring North Korea back into the NPT fold without granting any concessions that would encourage future blackmail. And they must do so soon, before the rest of Asia is spooked. For if North Korea appeared likely to get the bomb, that would very probably set off a similar effort not only in Seoul but also in Tokyo. Already annoyed by Clinton's badgering over the economy, the Japanese are nervous about the strength of America's commitment to an Asian security umbrella and were shocked by North Korea's successful test of its new medium-range missile, the Rodong-1, whose range includes Japan.

At the G-7 meeting in Tokyo this summer, while the White House's attention was on computer chips, the Japanese indicated their fears by demurring on an otherwise routine motion to extend the NPT indefinitely--on the eminently sensible grounds that they cannot promise to abjure nuclear weapons indefinitely unless they know that their security is taken care of. And were Japan to develop (or seek to develop) nuclear weapons, it would probably set off a race with a China determined not to cede supremacy, which would in turn destabilize almost all the smaller nations of the region. The point is that everyone in Asia except North Korea wants America to be number one, because America is the only country without territorial ambitions.

Clinton obviously appreciates the problem and appears determined not to become another Jimmy Carter. His statements have all been proper and to the point, and his visit here this summer sent all the right signals. The problem is that the President sometimes gives the impression that he thinks words are enough (perhaps falling for the myth that Ronald Reagan was so successful because he was a good actor). In private, many South Korean officials will cite the Clinton Administration's failures in Haiti, Bosnia, and Somalia--especially the White House decision to cut and run after an American GI was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Even Saddam Hussein is acting up again.

It is ludicrous to think that Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il, are not drawing conclusions from this as well. While everyone understood that the post-Cold War period would see the threat of Soviet aggression replaced by the smaller aggressions of rogue regimes, few appreciated how smaller nations could hold the rest of the world hostage. The North Korean regime is the archetype of this new threat, drawing its strength from its reputation for willingness to resort to the most outrageous provocations. And it is scarcely dissuaded from this path when Administration officials leak that they have given up the option of a first strike. As former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney put it recently, "If you're in North Korea today and you're told by the President of the United States that developing a nuclear weapon is unacceptable, and then you watch the performance in Haiti, you have to wonder whether or not you have to pay any attention to what he says."

That is Clinton's challenge, and unfortunately he is likely to get little help from President Kim Young Sam. For while President Clinton must rightly worry about the effect of a nuclear North on the NPT and the entire Asia Pacific, President Kim's first concern naturally is the safety of his countrymen; although the South would emerge triumphant from any confrontation, the minimum price would almost certainly be tens of thousands dead in crowded Seoul, only 38 miles from the troops massed along the border. Anything less than absolute confidence in America's commitment could mean that Seoul would split from Washington, a key goal of North Korean policy.

Right now the Clinton and Kim administrations have apparently agreed that no policy is better than any policy, lest anyone panic. Obviously military force must be a last resort, especially given the carnage even an unsuccessful North Korean attack could wreak on the South. Just as obviously, however, Clinton's warnings are far more persuasive so long as the two Kims know that it remains a possibility. For power abhors a vacuum. As one longtime American resident in Korea told me, "The longer this goes on, the greater the likelihood that someone is going to end up dead."

Mr. McGurn, NR's former Washington bureau chief, is senior editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, based in Hong Kong.