Pat Dollard | Young Americans

WASHINGTON — A debate is under way within the Bush administration over how long it can exercise patience with North Korea without jeopardizing the fulfillment of a nuclear agreement that President Bush has claimed as a foreign policy victory.

With North Korea sending signals that it may be trying to wait out Mr. Bush’s time in office before making any more concessions, administration officials are grappling with how the United States should react.

The debate has fractured along familiar lines, with a handful of national security hawks in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and at the State Department arguing for a more confrontational approach with Pyongyang.

On the other side, Mr. Bush’s lead North Korea nuclear negotiator, Christopher R. Hill, has argued that the United States should continue a more restrained approach, one that is widely credited with bringing about an agreement last year that is intended eventually to lead to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

While the restrained stance still appears to have support from Mr. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, it is coming under fire from conservative critics, both in and out of the administration.

In a public departure from administration policy, Jay Lefkowitz, a conservative lawyer who is Mr. Bush’s envoy on North Korean human rights, said this week the North would likely “remain in its present nuclear status” when the next president took over in January 2009.

“North Korea is not serious about disarming in a timely manner,” Mr. Lefkowitz told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “We should consider a new approach to North Korea.”

At issue is a declaration that North Korea was supposed to make by the end of last year formally stating everything in its nuclear inventory. When the North missed that deadline, administration officials initially sought to minimize the significance of the lapse, but they have expressed increasing concern in the wake of a North Korean statement on Jan. 4, in which the North insisted that it had already disclosed everything that it needed to.

The North has cited a list of nuclear programs that it provided in November, but the United States has rejected the list as incomplete.

“Some people make the argument that we’re just pursuing a policy of talks that go nowhere,” said one administration official with knowledge of the debate within the administration.

John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article last week that the Bush administration should dump the nuclear pact with North Korea because, he said, Pyongyang was not interested in giving up its nuclear program. “They’re in the classic North Korean role of deception,” Mr. Bolton said in an interview. “It’s like groundhog day; we’ve lived through this before.”

Mr. Bush said the two countries needed to resolve three sticking points: the number of warheads that North Korea has built; the amount of weapons-grade nuclear material produced by North Korea; and the need for North Korea to disclose that it has passed nuclear material to others.

The proliferation issue has taken on new importance after an Israeli strike in Syria in September, which American and Israeli officials said was conducted against a nuclear facility near the Euphrates River that was supplied with material from North Korea. Administration officials want North Korea to disclose what help it may have given Syria, although they also say that the help came before the North agreed to dismantle its nuclear reactor and disclose its nuclear programs.

Mr. Bolton and other critics of the agreement, including the officials in Mr. Cheney’s office, never liked the pact to begin with, and advocates of the deal with North Korea say their second-guessing is expected.

They argue that the Bush administration’s previous confrontational strategy with North Korea is part of what led to the North’s detonation of a nuclear device in October 2006.

Besides the United States and North Korea, the other parties to the nuclear pact include China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.

“People lambaste the six-party process, and sure, it offers no refuge for those in need of instant gratification,” Mr. Hill, the negotiator, said in an interview. “But when asked for alternatives” to the nuclear pact, Mr. Hill said, “even the noisiest critics fall silent.”

Administration officials say that the North has remained true to one part of the October agreement: It has made great strides in disabling and dismantling its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. “Bush can say, with credit, that he has achieved more than any other administration as far as dismantlement,” said Gary Samore, a vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations who helped negotiate the Clinton administration’s 1994 agreement with North Korea. “He can say that he managed to freeze further production, and handed the next administration a diplomatic process.”

But Bush administration officials say that they want more than just dismantlement on their record, and insist that they have not written off their chances of getting North Korea to make a complete declaration of its nuclear programs before the end of the administration.

Bush officials say they will not ultimately be able to verify that North Korea has got rid of its nuclear weapons program unless they first know what is in the program.

“The issue of the declaration is important because that which they declare must later be abandoned,” a senior administration official said.

The official, who asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue, said that the administration really wanted North Korea to provide an explanation for purchasing aluminum tubes that could be used to convert uranium gas into nuclear fuel.

In its Jan. 4 statement, North Korea accused the United States and the other countries in the six-party talks of reneging on promises made under an October deal, including the shipment of one million tons of fuel and the removal of North Korea from the United States’ list of states that sponsored terrorism.

So far, North Korea has received about 150,000 tons of fuel, and Bush administration officials say the removal of the North from the terrorism list will depend on whether it meets the requirements of the October deal.

North Korea agreed in October to dismantle its nuclear facilities and to disclose all of its past and present nuclear programs by the end of 2007 in return for 950,000 metric tons of fuel oil or its equivalent in economic aid. Last month, Mr. Bush reached out directly for the first time to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, holding out the prospect of normalized relations with the United States if North Korea fully disclosed all nuclear programs and got rid of its nuclear weapons.