from today's Times


At a private Washington dinner for the South Korean visitors last week, which was intended as a frank, off-the-record exchange, several American participants said mouths dropped open when a senior South Korean envoy said that if it had to choose, the incoming government would prefer that North Korea had nuclear weapons to seeing it collapse. "Their responses were so far out that all the other planets were all closer to each other than they were to any of the Koreans," said one participant in the dinner. "I sense major trouble ahead in the relationship. The impression I got is that for Roh and his generation, the ultimate goal is to reunite their country and get us off the peninsula."