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In North Korea, bright floodlights shine all night on the monuments to Kim Jong Il and his family. But the rest of the energy-starved country is lucky to get a few hours of juice a day. So when South Korean Minister of Unification Chung Dong Young traveled to Pyongyang last month to outline a secret offer of massive energy aid, he seemed to have caught the Dear Leader's attention. If Kim scraps his nuclear weapons program, Chung told him, South Korea will provide 2 million kilowatts of electricity each year, nearly doubling the North's power supply. Making details of the plan public last week, Seoul insisted Kim had promised to look at the offer "seriously."

Kim hasn't responded yet. But the hope is that his envoys will do so next week, when six-party talks over North Korea's nuclear program are expected to reconvene in Beijing after a 13-month hiatus. Nobody is sure if it's the South Korean offer that has brought the North back to the bargaining table; nor is it certain that Kim will accept a deal that could effectively give Seoul the power to turn off the lights in Pyongyang. More important, nobody knows if Kim has decided to come back to the table to negotiate away his nukes, or to extract more concessions and sidestep the risk of sanctions if he hangs on to them. "That's the $20,000 question," says Gordon Flake, a North Korea expert at the Washington, D.C.-based Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs.

A crippling energy shortage could be the regime's Achilles heel. North Korea currently generates 2.3 million kilowatts annually, about half of what it needs to keep its trains and factories running and cities lit at night. As much as a third of that is believed to leak during transmission. Some power equipment is more than 60 years old. Theft of copper and aluminum transmission lines for sale as scrap in China is rampant, even though it's a capital offense. Says Han Young Jin, who worked as an electrical engineer in Pyongyang before defecting to Seoul in 2002: "The grid is a mess." Seoul estimates that building the extra generating capacity and lines needed would cost $1.7 billion, but the final price could be many times higher. Turning on the power could cause the North's dilapidated grid to melt down, so South Korea might have to rebuild that as well, at a cost of billions more.

Despite vowing that it wouldn't offer Kim sweeteners to return to the bargaining table, Washington has reacted with cautious praise—in Seoul last week, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the South Korean plan "a very creative idea." It's not clear, though, what penalties Kim might face if he doesn't take the deal, or pushes for more baubles, such as new power plants. Rice asserted that the North must make "a strategic decision" to give up its nuclear weapons. But, asks Balbina Hwang, a North Korea expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., "What if they have—and their strategic decision is not to give up their nukes?" In that case, prospects for settlement of this crisis will remain as dim as the lights in Kim's benighted kingdom.

• Donald Macintyre
• South Korea's offers to fix the North's electricity woes if Kim Jong Il gives up his weapons program