N.Korea offered not to test nuclear arms – Seoul

By Jack Kim

SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea offered during talks last
week to put off testing atomic weapons as a first step in a
phased dismantling of its nuclear programs, South Korea’s
unification minister said on Monday.

The six parties involved in the negotiations — the two
Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and China — broke for
recess on Friday after three days of talks in Beijing aimed at
scrapping Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programs in return for
aid and better relations.

The United States has rejected anything short of an
immediate and irreversible dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear
programs before it will offer compensation to the reclusive
state.

South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young told a
televised panel discussion that the North presented its own
road map of five steps toward dismantling its nuclear programs.

“It is meaningful that North Korea presented a road map,
which it calls an action table, of five items on nuclear
dismantling,” Chung said during the panel discussion.

The North also offered to stop the production and transfer
of nuclear material, to freeze its nuclear facility and to
eventually dismantle its nuclear programs and return to
international non-proliferation agreements, Chung said.

North Korea declared for the first time in February that it
had nuclear weapons. There has never been clear evidence that
the North has tested weapons and Western experts question
whether the weapons have actually been deployed.

The so-called six-party talks have frequently been dogged
by wide divisions and friction between Washington and
Pyongyang.

In what appeared to be a breakthrough deal in September,
North Korea said it would disarm in exchange for aid and
security guarantees. It is also demanding a light-water reactor
for civilian use.

But the United States said on Friday that any full
agreement depended on North Korea shutting down its nuclear
activities and accounting for its nuclear stockpiles, including
uranium enrichment activities that Pyongyang has never formally
acknowledged.

At the latest round of discussions that ended on Friday,
North Korea demanded talks on ending action by Washington to
freeze the communist state’s overseas financial assets, saying
the measures were hostile.

Visiting Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who
has visited Pyongyang twice and met senior officials there,
said the North must immediately abandon its nuclear ambitions
and strike a deal with the five countries that will stick.

“They have spectacularly failed over a long period of
time,” he said of the North’s negotiating strategy at a forum
in Seoul when asked whether Pyongyang was using its nuclear
weapons to gain political leverage.

He said Australia was prepared to provide “significant
development aid, energy assistance and nuclear safeguards
expertise” once the North verifiably abandoned its nuclear
programs.