WASHINGTON - The Bush administration played down yesterday the tense standoff with North Korea over its decision to finish work on three nuclear power plants, calling for a "peaceful solution" to the crisis. But analysts said the public stance hides deep U.S. apprehension of a national security threat that might loom larger than any other - including Iraq.

President Bush spoke with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung yesterday, and the two put new rhetorical pressure on North Korea to abandon its plans. Kim said North Korea's decision was "unacceptable," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

'Continue to work'

"We will continue to work with the international community to seek a peaceful resolution to the situation in North Korea," Fleischer said.

Many analysts said the situation, which flared up this week when Spanish vessels intercepted a North Korean ship carrying 15 Scud missiles in the Arabian Sea, could deteriorate until war becomes an option.

"I think this is a huge threat to the U.S. and its allies," said Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "We could very quickly find ourself as we were in 1994 - moving Patriot missile batteries, shaking out our war plans."

North Korea's decision to restart its nuclear plants, announced Wednesday, could produce fuel for atomic bombs.

But it was unclear whether North Korea will begin repairs at the plants to begin the job, or whether it was a tactic to restart negotiations with the United States, South Korea, and Japan, analysts said.

Many analysts are raising questions about the administration's different approaches in addressing the separate proliferation threats.

Greater threat

Asked about this yesterday, Fleischer said Iraq posed a greater threat than North Korea because Iraq has used weapons of mass destruction and invaded its neighbors.

"That is not the history of North Korea for the last 50 years," he said. "And so, it's not exactly analogous. The world ... cannot just be treated as a photocopy machine; the policies in one part of the world need to be identically copied through another. It's a much more complicated endeavor than that."

Victor D. Cha, who has advised the Bush administration on Korea policy, also said that a diplomatic approach is likely to be more effective with North Korea than Iraq.

"Assuming the first choice is always diplomacy, the argument is that diplomatic isolation and pressure is much more effective in the North Korea case," Cha said. "It's not effective in Iraq because you can't isolate Iraq. They have self-sustaining resources. North Korea doesn't have anything to sustain itself."

But Stephen Costello, the director of the Program on Korea in Transition at the Atlantic Council of the United States, a Washington think tank, said the U.S.-North Korea standoff could worsen because both countries are striving not to lose face.

"It would be wise and prudent of us to focus back on our strategy for capturing weapons and delivery systems, rather than who backs down first," Costello said.