January 23, 2003	Thursday	Ziqa’ad 19, 1423

SEOUL/TOKYO, Jan 22: With Pyongyang’s nuclear ambition casting a shadow over the Korean peninsula, the top US arms control diplomat said on Wednesday North Korea’s decision to quit a treaty curbing the spread of atomic arms could be taken to the UN Security Council this week.

US Undersecretary of State John Bolton was speaking just hours after a North Korean official repeated that Pyongyang had no intention of developing nuclear weapons.

“I don’t think that it’s a question of ‘if’ it goes to the Security Council... It’s a matter of time,” Bolton told a news conference after talks on the issue with South Korean Foreign Minister Choi Song-hong.

“We are confident it will get there by the end of this week.”

All of the United States’ fellow permanent Security Council members — Britain, France, China and Russia — opposed North Korea having nuclear weapons and should have no objection to the issue being taken to the council, he said.

Asked about the reluctance of some countries to move swiftly to the council, Bolton said: “There is complete agreement that the end result has to be the elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.”

The crisis was sparked in October when the United States said the communist North had admitted to developing nuclear arms. Pyongyang last month ejected UN nuclear inspectors, removed the seals from a mothballed reactor and then pulled out of a global treaty to prevent the spread of atomic weapons.

North Korea has said any move by the United Nations to impose sanctions would escalate the crisis and could even trigger war.

It has insisted the only solution to the impasse is to hold direct talks with the United States, which a year ago grouped the North with Iraq and Iran in an “axis of evil”, and for Washington to sign a non-aggression treaty.

A response to Bolton’s remarks was swift.

North Korea would resume tests of ballistic missiles if the Security Council begins discussions on the crisis, diplomatic sources close to North Korea said in Tokyo.

“The North would lift its self-imposed moratorium on missile launches if and when the issue is referred to the Security Council,” said a source, adding that an actual test launch would follow soon.

“Pyongyang will never cave in to threats and will respond with an even harder line,” he said. “But we have to see the true intention behind Bolton’s remarks.”

North Korea stunned its neighbours in 1998 by firing a medium-range ballistic missile over Japan. The following year, it announced a self-imposed moratorium on missile test flights to last until the beginning of this year and said last September it would extend the moratorium indefinitely.

This month it said it was free to resume firing tests.

MANY OPTIONS: Bolton said taking North Korea to the Security Council and imposing sanctions on it were “two entirely different matters” and Washington wanted a multinational approach to Pyongyang’s nuclear brinkmanship.

“The Security Council has a broad range of options open to it,” Bolton added without elaborating.

The impasse has sparked a series of diplomatic initiatives and US officials have cited some progress, an indication that Washington has shifted from its hard line of “no negotiations” now that the standoff has become a distraction to its preparations for war against Iraq.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, adding his voice to mounting international concern, urged North Korea on Tuesday to reconsider its withdrawal from the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear arms and return to dialogue.

The North Korea issue can be brought straight to the UN Security Council by a member without a resolution from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has no emergency meeting scheduled, officials in Vienna said.

UN officials said it was looking less and less likely that the IAEA board could be summoned before Friday and the IAEA director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, would be busy after that with briefing the council on Iraq weapons inspections.

Bolton said any resolution of the crisis would not involve the Agreed Framework reached in 1994 and under which Pyongyang froze its nuclear programme in return for light water reactors.

“You can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” Bolton said. “It is nearly impossible to believe that we would trust them with any form of fissile material in the future. —Reuters