North Korea agrees to consider US plan: End to nuclear row
PHUKET (Thailand), July 11: North Korea has agreed to give a detailed response to a US-led aid-for-disarmament proposal when it returns to nuclear talks later this month, senior US administration officials said. The one-year-old proposal, which Washington says is comprehensive but Pyongyang sees as too stringent, is key to the success of the six-party talks comprising the United States, the two Koreas, Japan, Russia and China.
North Korea’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan agreed in a surprise move on Saturday that Pyongyang would return to the negotiations on July 25, after the talks were stalled for more than a year.
At a dinner meeting, Mr Kim also told US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs Christopher Hill that Pyongyang would respond to the US plan at the talks in Beijing, said the officials accompanying Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her four-nation Asian trip.
Mr Hill had asked Mr Kim whether North Korea was prepared to give a detailed response to the US proposal ‘and he said they would’, one of the officials told reporters on the plane taking Ms Rice to Thailand from her first stop, China.
The North Koreans claimed they have responded to the proposal using their state media, but Mr Hill told Mr Kim: “It would be fair to do it in a meeting and he said, ‘yes’,” the official said.
At the last round of talks in June last year, the United States tabled a proposal at the six-party talks offering Pyongyang three months to shut down and seal its nuclear weapons facilities in return for economic and diplomatic rewards and multilateral security guarantees.
It was seen as the first significant overture to Pyongyang since Mr Bush took office in early 2001 and branded the North part of an ‘axis of evil’ alongside Iran and Iraq.
But the North Koreans rejected the proposal, according to official media, because there were excessive upfront obligations by Pyongyang and highly intrusive inspections as well as an agreement for complete dismantling of all of its nuclear facilities.
Pyongyang instead wanted a step-by-step approach to weaning away from its nuclear program.
“That is why we need to hear from them in a comprehensive way what their concerns are,” the US official said, citing the need for a written North Korean response to the proposal.
“If they have concerns about the sequencing and the frontloading, they need to tell us that in a fairly systematic way what precisely is so frontloaded.”
The nuclear standoff flared in Oct 2002 when Washington accused Pyongyang of operating a nuclear weapons programme based on enriched uranium in violation of a 1994 agreement.
On Feb 10 this year, North Korea announced it had nuclear weapons, a move analysts warn could set the pace for a nuclear arms race in the Korean peninsula.—AFP
