The date that the six-party talks hosted by China were to resume in Beijing last week has come and gone, with the North Koreans hinting they might be willing to meet during the week of Sept. 12. It really doesn't matter much because, even if they do show up, they can be expected to throw one obstacle after another into the talks that also include the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Russia.

Pyongyang's drumroll in its official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) for the past few days is a good indicator of the thinking of Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader. KCNA accused the United States "of spitting at the DPRK," referring to its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "It has seriously insulted its dialogue partner and broken faith with the DPRK."

Pointing to a routine military exercise that the United States and South Koreans have mounted annually for years, KCNA said: "It is unimaginable for the DPRK to sit at the negotiating table with the U.S. at a time when the powder-reeking war exercises targeted against it are under way."

Noting that President George W. Bush, following a congressional mandate, has appointed an official to monitor human rights in North Korea, KCNA said: "We regard this as an absurd and foolish attempt to 'overthrow the system' of the DPRK at any cost by adding the 'human rights' racket to the nuclear issue."

Back to the issue of the military drill: "It is intolerable as it is an undisguised military blackmail against the DPRK. Dialogue and war exercises can never go together."

Altogether, none of this suggests a North Korea that is genuinely interested in negotiating with the United States and the other four nations in the Beijing talks. It conjures up memories of the many months that American and North Vietnamese officials spent bickering over the shape of the negotiating table in Paris in the early 1970s.

The reason: Kim Jong Il plans to keep his weapons of mass destruction, no matter what he is offered to shed them. A research analyst at the U.S. Army War College, Andrew Scobell, has concluded: "One point does seem very clear: [Pyongyang has] an unrelenting focus on maintaining a robust conventional national defense capability and building a nuclear capacity."

"According to Pyongyang's propaganda," Scobell wrote after nearly a year of research into the secretive regime's plans, "maintaining its military strength is the regime's foremost priority. This is borne out by examinations of implemented policy, planning, and ruminations about the future."

That conclusion should send policy planners in the White House national security staff, the State Department, and the Pentagon scurrying for clean sheets of paper on which to draft a new strategy. They would appear to have four choices:

An unspoken stipulation to the Chinese and South Koreans: It would now be up to Beijing and Seoul to resolve this issue — or see North Korean nuclear arms deployed just across the Yalu River from China and across the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea.

Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia.