WASHINGTON -- The accord that Washington signed with North Korea last week, broadly endorsed Tuesday by the International Atomic Energy Agency, is not only meant to alter the communist country's threatening nuclear program but also to improve its relations with neighboring Asian states and help change its political system, according to some U.S. officials who worked on the deal.


Washington began negotiations with North Korea last year primarily because of the danger created by Korea's alleged possession of at least one nuclear bomb and its evident aspirations to make dozens more by the end of the decade.


But a less obvious U.S. aim was to open the isolated, xenophobic nation to outside ideas, move its economy toward capitalism and encourage it to develop stable economic and political relations with South Korea and Japan -- neighbors with which it has little trade or direct contact.


"It will allow us to step into a new political era -- a policy that will pull us into the next century -- not only with North Korea but with all of Northeast Asia,'' a U.S. official said of the nuclear deal. "As people get enmeshed in ... the realities of working together (to implement the deal) it will accelerate a series of political changes there that are already under way.''


The deal includes what one U.S. official referred to as an important "crowbar'' to break open the reclusive nation's economy: The agreement that South Korea, Japan and perhaps China would help it build two advanced nuclear reactors over the next decade. The novelty of conducting such a massive foreign-run construction project in a nation with an almost religious commitment to self-reliance can hardly be overstated, U.S. officials say.


Despite its often bitter denunciations of foreign interference in its domestic affairs, North Korea's regime finally seems to have embraced the idea that it can no longer pursue its policy of "chuche,'' or isolation, the officials add.


It transparently sought to revive its declining economy by using its nuclear program as leverage to win the reactor project and other new economic and political ties with Washington.


The move raises question over whether North Korea's decision to accept an influx of foreigners and unfamiliar ideas will also chip away at the dominance of its hard-line communist political system, or whether North Korea's leaders will seek to transform their system in the pattern of China and Vietnam, embracing a mixture of both communism and capitalism that tries to keep to foreign political ideas at arm's length.


Critics have charged that hopes of radical political change in the repressive Pyongyang regime are naive and U.S. analysts concede any transformations are unlikely to occur overnight.


But several U.S. officials who participated in the negotiations were cautiously hopeful, saying they sensed a significant change of heart by the North Korea government, or at least a victory by moderates in the leadership who support a more pragmatic foreign policy.