US Nuclear Envoy Due in Beijing on Verification of North Korea Programmes
Text of report in English by South Korean news agency Yonhap
[Yonhap headline: "(LEAD) Hill Due in Beijing on Verification of N Korean Nuclear Programmes: Officials " by Hwang Doo-hyong]
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 (Yonhap) – US chief nuclear envoy Christopher Hill will fly to Beijing Thursday to meet with South Korean and Chinese officials on ways to break the deadlock over a verification protocol for North Korea’s nuclear weapons programmes, a senior South Korean official said Wednesday.
“Christopher Hill will meet with South Korea’s nuclear envoy, Kim Suk [Kim Sook], in Beijing Friday,” the official said, adding Hill will also meet with Chinese officials Saturday. The official is here for a policy consultation session.
Hill will be accompanied by Sung Kim, US President George W. Bush’s special envoy to the six-party talks on ending North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. The talks involve the two Koreas, the US, China, Japan and Russia.
Hill’s visit comes amid allegations that North Korea has begun restoring its nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, which had been disabled under an aid-for-denuclearization deal.
North Korea last week announced that it had stopped dismantling its nuclear facilities and will consider restoring them, reneging on the second phase of the nuclear deal, which would have provided heavy fuel oil by the end of October.
The announcement was in reaction to Washington’s failure to remove Pyongyang from its list of state sponsors of terrorism on Aug. 11, with the US citing a lack of the verification plans for North Korea’s nuclear programmes.
In Seoul, a South Korean official confirmed a Fox News report earlier in the day that North Korea has begun restoring the reactor north of its capital, Pyongyang.
US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, however, told a daily briefing that he was not sure if North Korea has actually begun the reverse process.
“Our understanding is that the North Koreans are moving some equipment around that they had previously put into storage,” McCormack said. “I don’t have a whole lot of details beyond that.”
He said officials of the US State Department and the International Atomic Energy Agency “are still on the ground” to monitor the reactor. “That’s why we have some real-time insight as to actually what it is that they’re doing.”
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters that the Bush administration “will be taking an assessment along with our international partners,” although she said the US was “obviously troubled by it.”
“And once North Korea simply agrees to a verification protocol, then the United States would take them off of our state sponsor of terrorism list,” she said. “But we’re not going to do it without it.”
McCormack would not discuss what the US and other partners in the six-party talks might do in response to the North’s move to restore its nuclear reactor.
“Nobody’s talking at this point about any punitive steps beyond those that are already in place,” he said. “We’re focused on the positive aspect of this, the positive pathway of trying to get North Korea, along with our partners in the process, to engage North Korea, get them to fulfil their obligations.”
The senior South Korean official visiting here also said, “We are trying to resolve it through dialogue without overreacting to it, although now is a tough time.”
“What we aim is allowing China to exercise its influence to persuade North Korea to continue the disabling of its nuclear reactor,” said the official, asking not to be identified.
The official said the North’s move to restore the reactor might be an attempt to pressure the US to expedite the process to delist the North.
David Straub, associate director of Korean studies at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Centre at Stanford University, said he does not expect the current situation to lead to a crisis.
“But the latest DPRK move means that the United States will not remove the DPRK from the terrorism list,” said Straub, former head of the Korea Desk at the State Department. “It also makes it even less likely that there will be significant diplomatic progress in talks between the DPRK and the United States next year, whoever becomes the next US president.” DPRK stands for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name.
He said he was not surprised by the North’s recent move because “the DPRK almost certainly has no intention of giving up its entire nuclear weapons programme for many years, at least.”
“It intends to obtain as many concessions and as much aid as possible from the United States and other members of the six-party talks,” he said. “From the perspective of the DPRK regime, this approach has been successful for many decades.”
The multilateral talks have been intermittent since their inception in 2003, and Bush said in early August that he was not sure if North Korea really intends to abandon its nuclear weapons and programmes.
Pessimists say North Korea is using the six-party talks as a means to buy time until it is eventually recognized as a nuclear weapons state, much like India and Pakistan, which normalized ties with the US after years of sanctions following their nuclear detonations in the late 1990s.
North Korea considers its nuclear arsenal the only working deterrent against a possible invasion from the US, and says Saddam Husayn [Saddam Hussein] of Irag [Iraq] fell due to a lack of nuclear warheads.
North Korea detonated its first nuclear device in 2006, and reports said it might conduct another nuclear test in the coming months to take advantage of the power transition in Washington.
The nuclear detonation in 2006 was widely accepted as successful though on a small scale, but some called it a dud, spawning speculation that the North needs to conduct another test to dispel such misgivings. It took several detonations for India, Pakistan and other nuclear powers to get stable technology.
Originally published by Yonhap news agency, Seoul, in English 2124 3 Sep 08.
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