WASHINGTON – Kim Jong Il runs every aspect of society in North Korea. His portrait watches over every building, every streetcar, every home in Pyongyang. And the so-called Dear Leader has been the undisputed power behind negotiations with the U.S. over the North’s nuclear arsenal.

So what happens when he’s gone? U.S. officials said Tuesday that they believe Kim suffered a stroke, and while his condition is unclear – as so many things in that closed society are – they are scrambling to figure out what is actually going on there, to make contingency plans.

Pyongyang began adopting a hard-line stance toward the nuclear negotiations in mid-August, just as rumors about the 66-year-old Kim’s health began circulating. But the nuclear talks may be the least of American worries if Kim lets go of the reins. There is no clear line of succession. Most Korea-watchers agree some sort of collective leadership, involving family members and the military, would take over, but no one knows who, or for how long.

“The bottom line is, if Kim dies, we potentially have a serious problem,” said Joel Wit, a former U.S. diplomat and one of the authors of the 1994 nuclear agreement with Pyongyang. “There could be the collapse of the central government, civil war between different factions, large-scale refugee flows, increasing instability of the security of weapons of mass destruction and pressures on all surrounding countries to intervene.”

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said Tuesday that U.S. officials believe Kim had a stroke. Early Wednesday, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that, according to an unnamed South Korean government official, Kim had suffered a collapse but was still alive.

And while the U.S. has had a contingency plan for Kim’s departure, there has been little coordination over the years with South Korea and China, North Korea’s two most influential neighbors.

Victor Cha, director of Asian Affairs at the National Security Council until 2007, said, “There is no agreed upon plan for how to deal with a collapsing North Korea.”

In a June editorial in the South Korean daily Chosun Ilbo titled “We Have No Plan,” Cha lists some questions that have yet to be answered by the three countries: “Who determines when to intervene? … Who is responsible for securing borders? … Who is responsible for securing nuclear and missile sites?”

The biggest worry for the U.S. if the North Korean government were to collapse is what would happen to the hermit kingdom’s cache of weapons of mass destruction. Pyongyang, which test-fired a nuclear weapon in October 2006, is believed by American intelligence agencies to have enough fuel for several nuclear weapons and is also thought to have an arsenal of chemical weapons.

Wendy Sherman, who met Kim in 2000 as President Bill Clinton’s point person on North Korea and now sits on Congress’ new Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, said, “It is of considerable concern to everyone that with any kind of leadership vacuum, control over the nuclear weapons is not lost. But we don’t know what’s happening behind the curtain, and sometimes we don’t even know what’s going on in front of the curtain and that is a serious issue.”

Many Korea-watchers believe that Pyongyang’s stance on its nuclear program could only harden under a new regime. Gary Samore, former senior director for nonproliferation at the National Security Council, said, “Pyongyang’s strategy of extracting the benefits of engagement with the outside world without sacrificing its nuclear weapons program is unlikely to change. Any new government will still need food, fertilizer, cash and cheap oil in order to survive.”

In August, around the time rumors of Kim’s ill health began surfacing, Pyongyang stopped disabling its nuclear plant, as it had promised to do under an agreement last November, complaining that Washington had not yet removed it from the U.S. terrorism blacklist.

The U.S. negotiating team has kept its response to recent actions muted, assuming Pyongyang is in disarray.

The U.S. is also concerned about antagonizing China over North Korea. The U.S. has supported the South Korean vision of reuniting the Korean peninsula, and Seoul may see a collapse of the government in Pyongyang as an opportunity to start setting the stage for that.

China, meanwhile, which would suffer the most from refugee streams in the event of Pyongyang’s collapse, could also move in.

“We have been through this once before in the 1950s,” said Wit, referring to the Korean War, which saw the U.S. facing off militarily against China on the Korean peninsula in a bloody three-year war. “No one wants to see it happen again.”

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