US claims of international support for the move have also raised eyebrows here and in Vienna, where UN officials denied a consensus existed to refer the matter to the UN Security Council.
North Korea has vilified the Vienna-based UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as a US stooge in official media dispatches and has said it would consider UN-imposed sanctions an act of war.
The United States has been careful to draw a distinction between referring the nuclear crisis to the UN Security Council and the actual imposition of sanctions on the Stalinist state.
South Korean officials acknowledged the referral of the matter to the world body was only a matter of time.
US arms control chief John Bolton, on a visit to Seoul, on Wednesday injected new urgency into the crisis by saying the UN Security Council could be involved within days.
The US goal, explained a State Department official, was not to seek sanctions but "to make clear to the North Koreans in many different ways that this is an international problem that they have created." Bolton's assessment that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council backed the US drive to bring North Korea to book at the world body appeared exaggerated, however.
"There are conflicting reports about China, some saying it supports Pyongyang, others saying it is backing the United States," said Yoon Young-O of Seoul's Koomin University.
"If China is backing the US, then North Korea is in trouble," he said.
Western diplomats said they believed Russia was not yet ready to abandon its own diplomatic efforts to broker the crisis, while some officials and analysts here said South Korea also saw UN involvement as premature and possibly counter-productive.
Lim Chae-Jung, who heads the transition team of South Korean president-elect Roh Moo-Hyun, has been openly critical of the rush to the UN, urging diplomacy be given time to work.
Roh is a committed supporter of President Kim Dae-Jung's signature "sunshine" policy of engagement with North Korea and both men are fundamentally opposed to imposing sanctions on the impoverished state.
Before he takes office February 25, Roh will send a special envoy to Washington to reaffirm that message.
"South Korea clearly does not want the matter to go to the United Nations," said Yu Suk-Ryul of the foreign ministry-affiliated Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security here.
But UN deliberations on North Korea, which will take time, will also take the pressure off the United States, he said, as Washington tussles with its options in dealing with the Iraqi crisis.
"The UN process will take time, and that is what Washington needs," he said - Sapa-AFP.
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