January 6, 2003	Monday	Ziqa’ad 2, 1423

WASHINGTON, Jan 5: North Korea’s nuclear threat needs to be tackled, US lawmakers and experts said on Sunday, despite President George Bush’s determination to focus on Iraq.

“I think there’s crisis in both places, and suddenly now the administration says there’s no crisis in North Korea,” senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee Carl Levin told Fox News Sunday.

“Well, there is a crisis in North Korea,” he said.

Bush placed North Korea, Iran and Iraq on the same “axis of evil” in his State of the Union speech nearly one year ago.

But he more recently announced a policy of “tailored containment” for North Korea while threatening Iraq with war.

“The North Korean situation is one that can be resolved peacefully through diplomacy,” Bush said at his ranch in Crawford, Texas last week.

However, Warren Christopher, who served as under secretary of state under president Bill Clinton, said that Bush’s priorities are wrong.

The United States “cannot mount a war against Iraq and still maintain the necessary policy focus on North Korea and international terrorism,” he said in a letter to The New York Times.

Such statements have undermined Bush’s attempts to play down the North Korean threat, said author Don Oberdorfer, an expert on the Korean peninsula.

“It is already an issue ... you can’t listen to a broadcast without hearing something about it,” said the author of “The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History.”

Senator Harry Reid said the administration needs to face North Korea as well as Iraq.

“We have to focus on both of them,” Reid said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

“We’ve been told by Secretary (of Defence Donald) Rumsfeld we can handle both.”

“This administration has had a hands-off attitude,” when it comes to North Korea, the Democrat added.

“We’re facing a dire threat to the United States’ national security and that of our allies,” Senate Armed Services Committee member John McCain told CBS’ Face the Nation, noting that North Korea’s missile capability surpasses Iraq’s.

“They have developed nuclear weapons with the capability to deliver them to Tokyo, are progressing towards ... missiles that can deliver the weapons to the United States of America,” the Republican said on Sunday.

“This is of the most serious consequences.”

SECOND CHANCE: North Korea may get a second chance to stop its nuclear programme when the UN nuclear watchdog meets on Monday, before the IAEA hands the matter to the UN Security Council.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors could decide to directly appeal to the Security Council at its meeting in Vienna, but as urgent diplomatic talks to calm the crisis surrounding Pyongyang gear up a notch worldwide it is not likely to do so.

“They are not going to use this card at this point in time,” a diplomatic source close to the agency said.

“It seems that they will be giving North Korea a chance to come into compliance, to come back, giving them a period of time to change their mind,” the source said.

In late December IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei threatened to hand the matter to the Security Council if North Korea did not allow inspectors back into a nuclear plant mothballed under a 1994 accord with the US and which it has decided to reactivate.

But intense diplomatic contacts are underway to defuse the crisis, which US President George Bush has called a diplomatic, not a military confrontation.

Russia on Sunday pledged to join China, Pyongyang’s closest ally, and use their combined influence to help resolve the crisis over the state’s suspected nuclear weapons plans.

Russia and China are seen to be among the few powers with any leverage with North Korean ruler Kim Jong-Il.

Other talks involving top officials from South Korea, Japan and the United States are to be held in Washington from Monday, while on Sunday a senior South Korean official met with Russian government representatives in Moscow.

Washington on Friday rejected North Korea’s call for a non-aggression pact, warning Pyongyang that it must renounce its nuclear programme to defuse the crisis.

North Korea shot back a day later, charging that the United States was “entirely to blame” for the current crisis.

North Korea last month announced it was resuming its nuclear programme, which had been frozen under the 1994 accord.

Several days ago, Pyongyang expelled the last IAEA inspectors who had been monitoring a nuclear complex north of Pyongyang believed to be capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.

It also suggested it would no longer consider itself bound by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The IAEA board has once before handed the North Korean nuclear issue to the UN Security Council, when in 1993 it said Pyongyang was not allowing IAEA inspectors to monitor its nuclear facilities as it had officially agreed to.

The crisis escalated in 1994 with Pyongyang threatening to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, until former US President Jimmy Carter travelled to North Korea and negotiated the Agreed Framework.

Under the Framework accord the US provided North Korea with fuel and helped it to build nuclear power plants less likely to produce weapons-grade nuclear fuel in return for Pyongyang freezing its graphite-moderated plutonium reactors.

Last October, North Korea admitted it had started a clandestine uranium nuclear programme, prompting the United States to stop fuel deliveries.—AFP