"Yes, we have slain a large dragon," CIA Director James Woolsey said in his Senate confirmation hearing last year, "but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes."

       Woolsey singled out North Korea as a prime example of the malignant forces that confront the United States in the aftermath of the Cold War. In the black-and-white world that he described, countries are inherently good or evil. The Kim Il Sung regime is by its nature evil, a monolithic polity in which there are no policy struggles within the leadership over what the country should do and no rivalries among competing interest groups and power elites.

       Is this a realistic way of looking at Pyongyang? Such a grossly oversimplified approach would make it impossible for South Korea, the United States, and Japan to achieve the goal of a nuclear-free Korea or promote economic and political liberalization in the North. Although the power structure in Pyongyang is indeed monolithic, an increasingly sharp policy conflict within the ruling Workers Party has become apparent during the past five years, especially over the issue of whether the North should continue to pursue the nuclear option. Pyongyang's strategy in negotiations with the United States over the nuclear issue can only be understood in the context of this conflict.

       On one side in the Pyongyang debate are pragmatists and technocrats with some experience of the outside world who have long argued that a changing international environment requires major changes in North Korean policy. These leaders have recognized that the end of Soviet and Chinese subsidies would bring economic hardship with potentially destabilizing political consequences.