By JAMES DAO, NY TIMES

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — American officials opened a diplomatic drive across Asia and Europe today to build international pressure on North Korea to abandon its recently revealed nuclear weapons program.

Bush administration officials said they were looking particularly to China, one of North Korea's oldest allies and largest trading partners, to play a role in urging Pyongyang to dismantle its program to enrich uranium for weapons. North Korean officials acknowledged the program in a meeting with American diplomats two weeks ago.

On the first stop of a multination sweep through Asia and Europe, James A. Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, and John R. Bolton, under secretary for arms control and international security, met with senior Foreign Ministry officials in Beijing, urging China to join Japan and South Korea in trying to influence Pyongyang.

"North Korea needs to feel the pressure across the board, from the people who have supported it in the past and those they want to improve relations with it in the future," said a senior administration official. "China is both."

From Beijing, Mr. Kelly will travel on Saturday to Seoul and Tokyo, while Mr. Bolton will press the United States' case in Moscow, London and Paris early next week.

President Bush will be host to the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Friday. On Saturday, he is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan and President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea at an international economic conference in Mexico. High on the agenda will be whether to continue the construction of a light-water nuclear reactor in North Korea that is being financed mainly by Japan and South Korea, American officials said.

[South Korean officials were set to fly to Pyongyang on Saturday for four days of talks, and they planned to urge North Korea to scrap any nuclear weapons program it might have, Reuters reported. The talks were scheduled before news of the nuclear program emerged.]

Mr. Bush maintained his public silence on the North Korean weapons program today as he campaigned for Republican Senate candidates in Minnesota and Missouri. Mr. Bush has yet to make a statement on the program since news of it broke Wednesday, which administration officials say is meant to underscore a quiet, diplomatic approach, in contrast to the more belligerent denunciations of Iraq's programs.

But other senior officials used public events today to explain why the administration believed diplomacy could work in containing North Korea while military action might be required to disarm Iraq.

At a town hall meeting at Atlantic State University in Savannah, Ga., Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage argued that there had been 50 years of relative peace on the Korean Peninsula while Iraq had gone to war twice with its neighbors and used chemical weapons on its own people. "The fact that Saddam Hussein has used these weapons against his neighbors and his own people make him quite a bit more urgent of a problem," Mr. Armitage said in an interview.

The administration has had strong evidence of North Korean's uranium-enrichment program for several months, and made some of that intelligence known to a small, bipartisan group of senior lawmakers and their aides three weeks ago. But it told only a small number of Republican lawmakers about North Korea's admission of its nuclear weapons program before it publicly made the disclosure on Wednesday.

Today, some Democrats complained that if lawmakers had known about the program last week, it might have complicated Mr. Bush's efforts to win support for a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. The resolution passed overwhelmingly in both houses.

"If Congress had known, I think it would have made a real difference in some people's votes," said Representative Chaka Fattah, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, who voted against the Iraq resolution. "You're talking about a real threat of nuclear weapons in North Korea versus a perceived threat in Iraq, in the distant future. And the beauty of the White House misleading people is that it's difficult to change our policy now that he has the vote in hand."

Administration officials said they wanted to keep North Korea's admission secret until they had consulted with Japan, South Korea, China and other nations.

Some Democrats agreed with that stand. "The administration appears to be dealing with this in a responsible way, first going to our allies, South Korea and Japan, and even engaging China," said Representative Ellen O. Tauscher, a Democrat from California, who voted to support the president on Iraq. "This is the model we should have applied to Iraq."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/19/international/asia/19KORE.html