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Now that those cuts are imminent — because compromise is not — they have created one of Washington's odder blame games over just whose bad idea this was.

The battle lines over cuts that are scheduled to begin on Friday, known in budget parlance as sequestration, were evident on Saturday in President Obama's weekly address and the Republican response, by Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota.

"Unfortunately, it appears that Republicans in Congress have decided that instead of compromising, instead of asking anything of the wealthiest Americans, they would rather let these cuts fall squarely on the middle class," said Mr. Obama, who proposed a substitute mix of spending cuts and revenues from repealing some tax breaks for wealthy people and corporations.

He added: "Are Republicans in Congress really willing to let these cuts fall on our kids' schools and mental health care just to protect tax loopholes for corporate jet owners? Are they really willing to slash military health care and the Border Patrol just because they refuse to eliminate tax breaks for big oil companies?"

For Republicans, who oppose any tax increases, Mr. Hoeven countered: "He blames Congress for the sequester, but Bob Woodward, in his book 'The Price of Politics' sets the record straight. Woodward says it was President Obama who proposed — and promoted — the sequester."

What makes this debate over blame so odd is that both sides' fingerprints — and votes — are all over the sequestration concept. The point of sequestration, in fact, was to define cuts that were so arbitrary and widespread that they would be unpalatable to both sides and force a deal.

That won Republicans' support for increasing the government's debt limit in 2011, and averted the nation's first default. The Republican-led House and Democratic-led Senate each passed the accord overwhelmingly, and Mr. Obama gladly signed it.

The idea for sequestration did come from the White House, as news accounts made clear at the time. Jacob J. Lew, then Mr. Obama's budget director and now his nominee for Treasury secretary, was the main proponent.

Mr. Lew, who was a senior adviser to the House speaker in the 1980s, lifted language from a 1985 law he helped negotiate, the Gramm-Rudman law. It was conceived by two Republican senators to be "a sword of Damocles," poised to strike both parties unless they compromised on deficit reduction.

The law was ruled unconstitutional, and afterward, the Democratic-controlled Congress and President Ronald Reagan enacted a modified version, which resulted in relatively minor cuts until 1990. That year, the law's call for much larger cuts in the face of growing deficits helped force Congress and President George Bush to negotiate spending cuts and tax increases widely credited with contributing to balanced budgets later that decade.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2011. Mr. Obama and Congressional Republicans, once again facing deficits, were able to agree to nearly $1 trillion in reductions over a decade in "discretionary" spending programs, which cover just about everything the government does except the entitlement benefit programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

But they could not agree on the final $1.2 trillion. The president demanded that that amount come from higher taxes on the wealthy and some reductions in entitlement spending. Republicans insisted on entitlement cuts only.

So both parties started negotiating for a trigger, as they called it — an undesirable, automatic action that would slash deficits if Democrats and Republicans could not. Mr. Obama and Democrats wanted a trigger mandating automatic spending cuts and tax increases; Republicans insisted on spending cuts only.

Democrats conceded, and that is when Mr. Lew — along with Gene Sperling, director of Mr. Obama's National Economic Council — proposed the Gramm-Rudman sequestration. Given that law's Republican parentage, the Obama advisers figured this kind of trigger would appeal to Republicans, and it did.

Speaker John A. Boehner and three-quarters of House Republicans voted for the agreement. To use Mr. Hoeven's word, both parties "promoted" their compromise, including sequestration. Mr. Boehner said he had gotten "98 percent" of what he wanted.

Their bipartisan thinking was this: Republicans would so badly want to avoid cutting military spending that they would accept some tax increases. And Democrats would be so eager to avoid cuts in domestic programs, they would drop their opposition to reductions in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. 

It has not worked out that way.

The blame game actually started last year. Republicans, including their presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, blamed Mr. Obama for the looming military cuts. The president typically described sequestration as easily avoidable with compromise, but in a debate with Mr. Romney he seemed to disown the idea altogether.

"The sequester is not something that I've proposed," he said. "It is something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen."

At that time, Republicans and Democrats generally assumed that sequestration would not happen because they would reach a compromise. But that was before Republicans angered their conservative base in January, by acquiescing to a tax law that raised rates on high incomes. Now they refuse to consider further revenue increases, and many want the sequestration cuts to take effect.

As this weekend arrived, Republicans were circulating a column by Mr. Woodward published online by The Washington Post on Friday, in which he wrote that Mr. Obama was "moving the goal posts" from what he had agreed to in the summer of 2011 by insisting that a sequestration substitute have tax increases as well as entitlement-spending reductions.

"What goal posts is Woodward referring to?" Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, wrote on Twitter late Friday. The White House, he added, "always wanted more revenue to avoid sequestration, not just cuts." He suggested later that Mr. Woodward was "willfully wrong."

Mr. Obama vowed from the day he announced the agreement 19 months ago that he would insist on "a balanced approach" that cut entitlement spending and raised revenues by overhauling tax breaks. "Everything will be on the table," he said.

The 2011 agreement left unspecified how to achieve the additional $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. That fall a so-called supercommittee considered revenue increases totaling $300 billion in a Republican plan, $800 billion in Democrats' offer. With the super-committee's failure, Mr. Obama and Congress had a year to seek the elusive "grand bargain."

They worked by dim portable electric lights. Dusty statues of Tibetan Buddhist deities gazed on. From openings in the roof, a few shafts of sunlight fell through the 35 wooden pillars in the main chamber of the enormous Thubchen Monastery, the same edifice that had awed Michel Peissel, the explorer of Tibet, when he visited a half-century ago.

"In Nepal, no one knows how to do this, so we have to learn," said Tashi Gurung, 34, a painter participating in what is one of the most ambitious Tibetan art projects in the Himalayas.

Financed by the American Himalayan Foundation, the project is aimed at restoring to a vibrant state the artwork of two of the three main monasteries and temples in Lo Manthang, the walled capital of the once-forbidden kingdom of Mustang. Bordering Tibet in the remote trans-Himalayan desert, Mustang is an important enclave of Tibetan Buddhist culture.

Tibetan leaders, including the Dalai Lama, say their culture is under assault in the vast Tibetan regions ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, which occupied central Tibet in 1951. That, along with the encroachment of modernity, means that the act of preserving or reviving Tibetan art is arguably more important than at any time since China's devastating Cultural Revolution.

The project in Lo Manthang has stirred debate. Some scholars of Tibetan art assert that the painters in Lo Manthang are altering important historical murals and jeopardizing scholarship by painting new images atop sections of walls where the original images have been destroyed. Those involved in the project argue that residents want complete artwork in their houses of worship.

The project's director is Luigi Fieni, 39, an Italian who first came to work here after graduating from an art conservation program in Rome. Mr. Fieni and other Westerners have trained local residents to work on the art, creating a 35-member team that includes 20 women and one monk (though there was initial reluctance from local men to tolerate the women's participation).

There are three major religious buildings in Lo Manthang. Two of them are monasteries, and one is a temple traditionally used for ceremonies by the royal family. Their thick, red walls rise among alleyways that wind past whitewashed mud-brick homes. An 80-year-old king and his family reside in a palace in the town center. The town was founded in the 14th century, and the oldest religious buildings date to the 15th century.

Much of the Tibetan art here reflects a Newari influence, which comes from the Katmandu Valley. Centuries ago, Newari artisans were welcomed by some Tibetan rulers, especially those who followed the Sakya branch of Tibetan Buddhism, which is common throughout Mustang.

The art project began in 1999 with the cleaning of murals in Thubchen Monastery, after an initial round of architectural reconstruction. Then the painters moved on to Jampa Temple, where the dark main chamber has a towering statue of Maitreya, the future Buddha.

The walls on the first floor are adorned with remarkably detailed mandalas, a form of geometric art considered a representation of the cosmos. Here, Mr. Fieni decided to deviate from the initial approach taken at Thubchen. He wanted his team, rather than do purely restoration, to paint sections of the walls where an original mural had disappeared or been destroyed.

The painters would then try to recreate those pictures based on tradition and on what had been painted elsewhere in the chamber. Mr. Fieni also consulted with monks to ask what pictures they wanted on the walls. In 2010, the team returned to Thubchen to adopt the new approach and paint large sections.

"Call this painting, not restoration or conservation," Mr. Fieni said. He added that this method helped restore the living nature of the artwork, as opposed to what he called the Western "colonialism" approach of preserving the old above all else.

"When we arrived, we started working following the Westerners' theories of conservation," Mr. Fieni said. "Then, while working and living within the community, I changed my point of view, and I decided to follow the needs of the culture I was working for. So I decided to start reconstructing the missing areas."

Once taught how to paint, local residents decide how they want to decorate the monasteries, Mr. Fieni said.

"All the other conservation projects I've seen are Westerners doing the artwork, locals fetching clay," he said. "This is the first one where we train the locals."

There were challenges. Painters in higher castes initially did not want artists in lower castes sitting on the scaffolding above them. And there were religious beliefs to accommodate. At the buildings, an abbot used a mirror to absorb the spirits of the gods in the statues and murals before the painting began; after the project is completed, the abbot is expected to release the spirits from the mirror so they can return.

Mr. Fieni's approach to restoring the temples and monasteries has been contested. Christian Luczanits, a senior curator at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, which displays Himalayan art, said he blanched at what he saw when he traveled to Mustang in 2010 and 2012. Mr. Luczanits said that sufficient scholarship had not been done into the original paintings. Now, because of the new painting, any scholar wanting to study the originals must look at photographs rather than rely on what is present in the temple, he said.

"The temple now after restoration cannot be understood anymore without the previous documentation," Mr. Luczanits said in an interview.

Last year, he made his opinion known at a contentious meeting at the palace in Lo Manthang. Among those present were Mr. Fieni, an abbot, the prince of Mustang and representatives of the American Himalayan Foundation, which gives financial support to many development projects in Mustang. (The foundation's president, Erica Stone, said the total being spent on the building renovations in Lo Manthang alone was $2.58 million. An additional $768,000 had been spent for restoring the town wall and constructing drainage.)

There was vigorous debate, and the royal family and the abbot both backed Mr. Fieni. The ceremonial prince, Jigme Singi Palbar Bista, said in an interview that the buildings "are renovated very well."

Thoroughly painting Thubchen Monastery would take another three to four years, but the project's budget will run out this year. Mr. Fieni estimated there was a total of about 3,660 square feet of wall space to paint.

He said he was thinking about moving on to restoration projects in India or Myanmar with some of the painters he had trained here. In 2006 and 2007, he took five of them to work with him at a Tibetan monastery in Sichuan Province, in western China, a project that was never completed because the Chinese authorities shut down access to the area after a Tibetan uprising in 2008.

The exact number of injuries was not immediately known, but multiple stretchers were seen removing injured spectators from the stands. The Volusia County Fire Department said in a statement that at least 15 people were injured in the crash. A spokesman at Halifax Medical Center, where 11 of the injured were being treated, said that one person had sustained life-threatening injuries. A spokeswoman at Florida Hospital Oceanside, where the other patients were being treated, would give no information on the extent of the injuries.

The injuries occurred after a 12-car crash as racecars approached the checkered flag at the end of the race won by Tony Stewart. The No. 32 car driven by the rookie Kyle Larson went airborne during the wreck. His racecar hit the catch fence that surrounds the track and is designed to protect fans. Debris from the car, including two tires and the engine, went into the stands.

"What we know right now is there obviously was some intrusion into the fence," Nascar's president, Mike Helton, said, "and fortunately with the way the event's equipped up, there were plenty of emergency workers ready to go. They all jumped in on it pretty quickly.

"Right now, it's just a function of determining what all damage is done. They're moving folks, as we've seen, to care centers and taking some folks over to Halifax Medical. "There were no injuries among the 12 drivers involved in the crash, including Dale Earnhardt Jr. and the 2012 Sprint Cup champion Brad Keselowski. All were examined at the infield care center and released.

The accident occurred at the front of the pack of cars as they rounded Turn 4 and headed toward the finish line. Regan Smith was leading the race and was being pushed by Keselowski, who tried to pass Smith. But Smith blocked him from getting to the outside. That led to the crash at the front of the pack that collected 12 racecars in all.

"We made a move to try and win the race," Keselowski said. "I kind of had the run and the move to win the race, and Regan obviously tried to block it and that's understandable. He wants to win, too, and at the end it just caused chaos. There was obviously a big wreck with a lot of debris and cars torn up. I really hope everyone in the grandstands is O.K. I think that's the most important thing right now."

There was a brief, muted celebration in victory lane as emergency workers continued to tend to the injured.

The governors, arriving here for the winter meeting of the National Governors Association, said that the automatic across-the-board cuts in federal spending that are scheduled to begin at the end of the week, were creating havoc, threatening jobs and sapping economic growth in their states.

They urged the president and Congress to strike a deal that would allow state officials to set priorities and prune spending in a more selective way. They said the cuts would be easier to cope with if they had more freedom to decide how to allocate the savings in education, health care and public safety programs.

"We are just saying — as you identify the federal cuts and savings — give us flexibility to make the cuts where they will do the least harm to our citizens," said Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, a Republican and the vice chairwoman of the association. "Don't balance the federal budget on the backs of state governments."

Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware, a Democrat and the chairman of the association, said: "Deficit reduction should not be accomplished simply by shifting costs from the federal government to the states or by imposing unfunded mandates. States should be given increased flexibility to create efficiencies and to achieve results."

With more discretion, Mr. Markell said, governors could moderate the effects of the looming cuts.

"We know that cuts are coming, but we don't want to suffer disproportionately," Mr. Markell said. "We want to have some input. We want a seat at the table."

If the stalemate between Mr. Obama and Congress continues, the across-the-board cuts will begin to take effect Friday under a budget procedure known as sequestration.

"The uncertainty of sequestration is really harming our states and the national economy," Ms. Fallin said. "I've already had several companies in Oklahoma tell me they are not going to expand because there's so much uncertainty, especially around our military installations. It's projected that we could lose up to 8,000 military jobs, with a multiplier effect on up to 20,000 jobs in Oklahoma's economy."

Mr. Markell said: "The uncertainty of how much will be cut, from where and when, can undermine our budget. It can also slow the economic growth in our states. State economies are slowly recovering and just returning now to the level of revenues we collected back in 2008."

The governors put aside their partisan disagreements and united in sending an urgent message to Congress.

"We do need to get our national deficit down," Ms. Fallin said, "but give us flexibility. Relax those mandates. Give us some leeway."

Gov. John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado, a Democrat, agreed that the federal deficit and debt were "a serious risk," saying, "We recognize that we will have to be part of the solution and share the pain."

But Mr. Hickenlooper said the across-the-board cuts were a blunt instrument. "Sequestration was originally designed by both the administration and Congress as something so odious, so repellent, that it would force both sides to a compromise," he said.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican, said Congress should be "more strategic" in making cuts.

"I think there should be limited government, but I don't like random changes," Mr. Walker said. "If you look at my budget, I did not do across-the-board cuts."

Gov. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, a Democrat, said the automatic cuts could force layoffs of 19,000 workers at the Pacific Command and Pearl Harbor.

"That will undermine our capacity for readiness at Pearl Harbor," Mr. Abercrombie said, and it symbolizes what happens when Congress fails to meet its responsibilities.

"Sequestration," that arcane budget term consuming Washington in recent weeks, is about to move from political abstraction to objective reality for tens of millions of Americans. Barring an extremely unlikely last-minute deal, about $85 billion is set to be cut from military, domestic and certain health care programs beginning Friday.

Much of the government will be immune, only magnifying the cuts for the rest. If they are not reversed, federal spending at the discretion of Congress will eventually fall to a new five-decade low. Cuts of even larger size are scheduled to take effect every year over the next 10, signaling an era of government austerity.

By the end of this week, federal agencies will notify governors, private contractors, grant recipients and other stakeholders of the dollars they would be about to lose. As of March 1, the Treasury Department will immediately trim subsidies for clean energy projects, school construction, state and local infrastructure projects and some small-business health insurance subsidies.

Nearly two million people who have been out of work for more than six months could see unemployment payments drop by 11 percent in checks that arrive in late March or the first days of April, according to the White House budget office, an average of $132 a month. Doctors who treat Medicare patients will see cuts to their reimbursements.

If the stalemate in Washington continues, furloughs and layoffs will probably begin in April, starting largely in the 800,000-member civilian work force of the Defense Department and then rippling across the country, from meat inspectors in Iowa to teachers in rural New Mexico.

"If they hit me with a $3 million cut in March, I'm not sure what I'm going to do," said Raymond R. Arsenault, the superintendent of the Gallup-McKinley County Schools, a district that serves primarily Navajo students on the Arizona-New Mexico border.

Mr. Arsenault's school system would be hit much harder than most because 35 percent of his $100 million annual budget comes from federal education "impact aid" to offset the large tracts of land that are owned by Washington and therefore not subject to taxation. Of that, $3 million may be about to disappear.

The sequester involves trimming $85 billion from a $3.6 trillion annual federal budget, or about 2.4 percent. But the cuts will not affect Social Security or Medicaid, and the Medicare cuts total only about $11 billion in the 2013 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, according to calculations by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Thus, entitlement spending, which poses the biggest long-term challenge to the federal budget, accounts for only a sliver of the cuts. That leaves more than $70 billion in cuts to be applied over the next seven months to the roughly two-fifths of the budget that is devoted to discretionary spending, including the military, education and dozens of other categories.

In a matter of weeks the cuts would cascade through the government, delaying snow removal on the Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park, for example, and keeping an aircraft carrier battle group docked in Norfolk, Va., rather than steaming through the Persian Gulf.

"The cut is so big and over such a short period of time that there's no way to avoid all the operational and program harms," said Daniel I. Werfel, controller of the White House budget office.

These cuts would probably not be confined to 2013. Even if President Obama manages to persuade Congress to raise new revenue, he has said he would replace only half of the spending cuts with tax increases, in essence accepting a half-trillion dollars in cuts over 10 years. That would be on top of more than $1 trillion in cuts already enacted by the Budget Control Act, which created the sequester in 2011 as part of a deal to raise the country's statutory borrowing limit.

A comprehensive deficit-reduction deal, which is currently moribund but is still both Congress and the White House's stated goal, might mitigate the impact by including fast-growing programs like Medicare and Medicaid in the cuts. But belt-tightening, for now, appears to be the new normal.

In private, Capitol Hill staff members and members of Congress have admitted that there are no viable plans on the horizon to delay or offset the cuts. At best, Congress might be able to pass a bill giving agencies more discretion in carrying out the budget cuts. But that is opposed by the White House because officials fear that such a change would give lawmakers a false sense that they had done much to ease the pain of the cuts, when in fact, budget officials say, little would have changed.

That means that as of Friday, dozens of federal agencies must start bringing their budgets down to reduced levels by the end of the fiscal year. Given how much they have to cut, White House budget officials said, they will have no choice but to start the reductions immediately.

The worst hit by far would be the Defense Department, which is already absorbing a $500 billion budget cut over 10 years agreed to in 2011 and is operating under a temporary spending agreement even as it draws down the war in Afghanistan. Military personnel are exempted from furloughs, but civilian personnel are not, so the Pentagon is preparing to put hundreds of thousands of civilian workers on notice that they might lose 22 days of work this year.

"We have long argued that the responsible way to implement reductions in defense spending is to formulate a strategy first and then develop a budget that supports the strategy," Ashton B. Carter, the deputy secretary of defense, told Congress this month. Sequestration "would achieve precisely the opposite effect by imposing arbitrary budget cuts that then drive changes in national security strategy."

Throughout the government, the cuts would hit certain programs particularly hard without touching others. The National Institutes of Health, for instance, would need to cut about 5 percent of its annual budget in just seven months, meaning hundreds fewer research grants, said Kathleen Sebelius, the health secretary. Money for food safety inspection and air traffic controllers would also be cut.

Roughly 600,000 low-income women and children would stop receiving food aid. The Interior Department would issue 300 fewer leases for oil and gas production in Western states. NASA plans to cancel six technology development projects, including deep-space communications. National parks would close or curtail operations in their visitor centers, affecting hundreds of thousands of travelers.

The transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, said on Friday that flights to major cities like New York and Chicago could be delayed by as much as 90 minutes during peak travel periods because fewer air traffic controllers would be on the job.

Most Education Department programs are already fully financed for the current school year, so the big cuts would not occur until next September. But "impact aid," which goes to school districts like Mr. Arsenault's with untaxed federal lands, is paid during the school year and will be affected immediately.

Budget experts said the dollar amount of the cuts might not be devastating to government operations or to the economy, particularly if agencies had discretion in how they carried them out.

"Can we survive this? Of course we can. It's a $16 trillion economy," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "Cutting wisely, not stupidly, is a good idea. We've got what everybody thinks is a stupid way to cut."

In some cases, small cuts can take big tolls. Because meat and poultry plants cannot operate without federal inspectors on site at all times, one furloughed inspector would shut down an entire plant. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack estimated that the cuts would mean 15 unpaid stay-at-home days for every employee of the Food Safety and Inspection Service, cutting meat and poultry production by five billion pounds, costing the industry more than $10 billion and cutting worker wages by $400 million.

Alarmed, J. Patrick Boyle, the president of the American Meat Institute, sent a letter on Feb. 11 to Mr. Obama asserting that keeping inspectors home would violate federal law. "I respectfully request that, in the event of sequestration, U.S.D.A. meat and poultry inspectors not be furloughed so that the secretary of agriculture can fulfill his statutory obligations," he wrote.

But the request, Mr. Vilsack replied, would run counter to the legal requirement he faces under sequestration.

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard says it has captured a foreign unmanned aircraft during a military exercise in southern Iran.

The official IRNA news agency on Saturday quoted Gen. Hamid Sarkheili as saying that the Guard's electronic warfare unit spotted signals indicating that foreign drones were trying to enter Iranian airspace. Sarkheili, a spokesman for the military exercise, says Guard experts took control of one drone and brought it down near the city of Sirjan where the exercise is being held.

Sarkheili didn't say if the drone was American. He referred to it only as a "foreign enemy drone."

Iran has claimed to have captured several U.S. drones, including a RQ-170 Sentinel advanced drone in December 2011 and at least three ScanEagle aircraft.

The warning came as the United States and South Korean militaries planned to kick off their Key Resolve and Foal Eagle joint war games, beginning early next month. The allies regularly conduct such joint military drills, and whenever they happen, North Korea warns of war and threatens to deliver a devastating blow to American and South Korean troops.

North Korea's harsh reaction, though not unusual, came amid heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula after the North's third nuclear test on Feb. 12. Washington and its allies are pushing for more sanctions against North Korea while the North vows to take unspecified steps to retaliate against such sanctions.

"If your side ignites a war of aggression by staging the reckless joint military exercises Key Resolve and Foal Eagle again under the cover of 'defensive and annual ones' at this dangerous time, from that moment your fate will be hung by a thread with every hour," Pak Rim-su, chief delegate of the North Korean military mission to the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjom, said Saturday in a message to Gen. James D. Thurman, the American commander in South Korea. "You had better bear in mind that those igniting a war are destined to meet a miserable destruction."

The text of the message, dictated through the telephone at Panmunjom, was carried by the North's state-run Korean Central News Agency. There was no immediate reaction from the United States military.

Panmunjom, a village straddling the western border between the Koreas, remains the sole contact point between North Korea and the United States military. The United States fought on South Korea's side during the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, leaving the peninsula technically at war. About 28,500 American troops are stationed in South Korea.

North Korea and the United States military exchange messages through Panmunjom, established at the time of the Korean War armistice. The United States military uses the Panmunjom channel to inform North Korea of its planned annual military drills with South Korea, which it says are for defensive purposes.

Although North Korea's state-run news media have always carried official statements condemning the exercises as rehearsals for invasion, it was unclear how often the North has also responded directly through Panmunjom. The last time it did so was in August, when the United States and South Korea conducted a joint military exercise.

After its December satellite launching and its subsequent nuclear test, North Korea has stepped up its bellicose language. In past three days, North Korean news media have reported that the country's leader, Kim Jong-un, has been making a round of visits to military units. During one of those visits, Mr. Kim vowed that if war broke out, his troops would "blow away the bastion of aggression without a trace," K.C.N.A. reported Saturday.

When the United States and South Korea conduct joint military drills, North Korea counters with its own military exercises. Anti-American messages, already a daily fare in the North, increase at those times as the leadership uses a sense of crisis to strengthen popular support.

A lawyer briefed on those talks said that the Justice Department and the five states — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — have prepared an offer to resolve the two biggest issues central to series of trials against BP starting Monday.

Those issues are the fines that the company would pay for violations of the Clean Water Act related to the four million gallons of oil spilled after the rig, which it leased from Transocean, exploded. The primary issue is how much the company will have to pay for environmental damage caused by the oil to area, beaches, marshes, wildlife and fisheries.

The Wall Street Journal reported late Friday that federal and state officials were preparing a $16 billion settlement offer. "The ball is on BP's side of the table," said the lawyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to do so.

Both Justice Department officials and state officials could not be reached Saturday to comment on any possible offer.

A spokesman for BP, Geoff Morrell, said that the idea that the oil giant would accept a settlement demand of $16 billion was "far-fetched." The most BP is liable for under the Clean Water Act is about $17.5 billion and the company is subject to billions more in other environmental damage penalties.

"It wouldn't surprise me if they put something on the table at the 11th hour," Mr. Morrell said. "But we're going to trial Monday even if they put something on the table."

The lawyer briefed on the talks said that one problem with the current proposal by federal and state officials was that it did not resolve economic damages claimed by the states related to the spill. Such claims could still leave BP on the hook for billons more, in addition to the environmental damages.

One of the major stumbling blocks in reaching a settlement has been differences among the five states about how much BP should pay and how billions of dollars in potential settlement funds should be divided.

Officials in Louisiana believe it deserves the bulk of any settlement since that state's coastal waters, fisheries and businesses suffered the most. Florida and other states that escaped serious coastal damage instead want money earmarked for economic losses that those states sustained.

"There are a lot of moving parts," said Luther Strange, the attorney general of Alabama. "Personalities aside, the issues are so complex."

Also, billions of dollars could be assessed against BP in several ways, either through fines, or through penalties to redress environmental damage and payments to cover economic losses. And each of those methods represents a different set of stakes and consequences for each of the states and for BP.

For instance, BP would prefer to limit the fines, and make more payments through environmental damage penalties, because those penalties can be written off as tax deductions while fines cannot. But the states have more flexibility in spending money derived from fines.

To date, BP has agreed to pay an estimated $30 billion in fines, settlement payments and cleanup costs related to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 workers aboard the rig. And so far, company officials have said that they have no intention of acceding to what BP estimates are demands from the states for tens of billons of dollars more in damages.

Still, the stakes for BP in the trial are high. If the company is found in this first phrase of the trial to have acted with gross negligence, BP could face up to $17.5 billion in penalties, much of that in fines that would hit the bottom line hardest because those fines do not qualify as tax deductions.

The lack of a unified strategy to date among the states has also posed another problem for BP; companies are less likely to settle a major lawsuit if they know another one is waiting.

"There is no question that a settlement has been made more challenging because the states have competing interests," said David Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former head of the Justice Department's environmental crimes division.

Efforts to resolve the case through settlement were also inadvertently complicated by Congress when it passed a law in 2012 known as the Restore Act.

Essentially, the law was an effort by Congressional lawmakers from the Gulf Coast states to make sure that the bulk of fines and penalities paid by BP for violations of federal pollution laws ended up with the states rather than the federal government

Senator Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said that she and other lawmakers from the region were involved in intense negotiations giving each state the freedom to use much of the funding in whatever ways it wants, whether it would be for environmental or economic purposes.

The law "was an attempt to distribute the money fairly," Senator Landrieu said in an interview.

But the statue's potential impacts exacerbated what were already growing tensions among the states over how they would like to see any funds allocated, say between environmental damage and economic losses. "Up until last year, all the states were rowing together," said one lawyer who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The split between the Gulf Coast states surfaced again in November when the Justice Department announced the $4.5 billion settlement of criminal charges against BP. At the time, federal and state officials were also seeking to resolve the civil damage claims.

But those talks failed largely because of disagreements between Louisiana and other states on issues like the size of the settlement that BP was offering, said people briefed on the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

These days, three Gulf Coast states — Florida, Mississipi and Texas — are not even parties in the lawsuit set to start Monday. That, however, would not preclude them from being involved in a settlement.

Mississippi officials are apparently seeking to bring a separate action against BP in state court, a forum that can be favorable to plaintiffs. Jan Schaefer, a spokesman for Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, said he declined comment.

Mr. Uhlmann of the University of Michigan, said the BP case could be resolved, but at this moment it might be more up to the states than the company.

"A settlement is still possible, but not if the states demand more in a settlement than BP is likely to pay even if it loses on every single issue at trial," he said.