Within a day of Monday's historic announcement of a breakthrough at least in the six-party talks in Beijing over North Korea's nuclear program, Pyongyang Tuesday already appeared to be backtracking and laying tough, if not impossible new demands that threatened to undercut the commitment it made Monday to agreeing to scrap its nuclear program.

In Beijing, North Korea announced that it would not give up its current nuclear program, which is believed by U.S. analysts to have produced at least eight nuclear weapons. But within a day it followed up that huge concession by demanding a light-water civilian nuclear reactor right after the United States and Japan had ruled out giving it one right away. Washington and Tokyo immediately rejected the demand.

"The U.S. should not even dream of the issue of the DPRK (Democratic Republic of Korea's) dismantlement of its nuclear deterrent before providing light-water reactors," the North Korean Foreign Ministry announced in a statement Tuesday. "This is our just and consistent stand as solid as a deep-rooted rock."

At issue is not the providing of a new LWR to the so-called "Hermit Kingdom." The Bush administration is ready to approve that -- but only after the current reactor program has been dismantled. The North Korean demand is to have the new reactor before it has started to give up the old one. Washington won't budge on that.

And as so often has been the case, the North Korean nuclear issue has become the center of a complicated minuet of policy dances by the other great powers involved in Northeast Asia.

For the issue is drawing Japan and the United States closer together. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, America's most loyal and committed ally in Asia, has just been reelected with an unexpectedly increased parliamentary majority, and a Liberal Democratic Party rank and file in the Diet, the main chamber of the Japanese parliament, far more in sympathy with his domestic economic reform agenda.

Koizumi is, therefore, free to push ahead energetically with his policy of closer coordination and alliance with the United States, and enthusiastic Japanese involvement in the development of Ballistic Missile Defense programs specifically designed to protect Japan's tightly packed islands, as well as American cities, from a possible nuclear missile launch at some point by North Korea's still largely unknown and certainly unpredictable leaders.

The North's wavering and retreats on its latest nuclear offer also has alarmed South Korean leaders and political commentators. The South has seen itself as a bridge between the North and the United States on the nuclear issue.

South Koreans have been taking the issue less seriously than the Bush administration and Japan, and South Koreans in general feel more suspicion, if not fear, of peaceful democratic Japan because of their 50-year experience of defeat, subjugation and eventual colonization by Japan in the half century up to 1945 than they do of the heavily armed North that fought the ferocious 1950-1953 war against them.

For its part, the Bush administration in its second term has been strikingly more soft-spoken and conciliatory towards the North than it was in President George W. Bush's first term.

This appears in very significant partly due to the strong influence over the president of his most trusted foreign policy adviser, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Her predecessor, Colin Powell, enjoyed no such personal clout in the White House.

But also, Bush and Rice are treading softly because the curse of strategic overextension has caught up with them. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and their policy planners never expected the Sunni Muslim revolt in Iraq to last more than a few weeks, let alone threaten to metastasize to far greater levels after two years. Yet 140,000 American troops remain bogged down in Iraq with no end in sight.

Also, the administration appears to have put a possible confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program as a higher priority than continuing to butt heads with North Korea. And U.S. rhetoric in Bush's second term towards Iran has certainly not mellowed the way it did towards Pyongyang.

All this means that the Bush administration is not spoiling for a fight with North Korea when it already has its hands full with Iraq and it may soon have them even fuller with Iran.

Therefore, even if North Korea persists in undercutting the concessions it appeared to make on Monday, the Bush administration will probably try and at least give the appearance of continuing to try to breathe life into them.

But it still shows no signs of the one kind of purely diplomatic initiative that might cut more ice with Pyongyang: offering to open up bilateral ties with the North even before the nuclear issue has been resolved.

Therefore, the hosannas of praise and joy that greeted Monday's apparent breakthrough appear to be premature, to say the least. Nevertheless, that breakthrough is not wholly dead and both North Korea and the U.S. government, for their different reasons, have an interest in not seeing it totally die. The ominous clouds are still filling the sky, but they are at least a little less dark than they were before Monday.

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