February 14, 2007	Wednesday	Muharram 25, 1428

SEOUL: The North Korean nuclear deal announced on Tuesday would not immediately stop it from launching an atomic bomb, and experts believe it has enough plutonium to build new such weapons.

But analysts in South Korea say it is a hopeful first step, and that it is now up to the secretive North to hold to its end of the agreement.

At the end of marathon six-nation talks in Beijing, the North agreed to dismantle its nuclear facilities over an unspecified period in return for up to one million tonnes of heavy fuel oil and other benefits.

A joint statement calls for Pyongyang to shut down its nuclear-related facilities at Yongbyon within 60 days and invite back inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency within that period.

The Yongbyon shutdown will be rewarded with an initial shipment of 50,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil. Within 60 days the United States will begin removing the North from its list of terrorist states. The two countries have also agreed to begin direct talks on establishing diplomatic ties.

Even permanently disabling the Yongbyon reactor would still leave the North -- which tested its first nuclear weapon last October -- with enough plutonium previously extracted from fuel rods to make six to eight bombs, experts believe.

They said the key question is whether the communist state is genuinely willing to eventually scrap its entire nuclear weapons programme -- as the United States insists it must do.

Even before the deal was announced, Washington’s hardline former UN envoy John Bolton urged US President George W. Bush to reject it.

“To the Boltons of this world, I say show me a better strategy -- the fact is that neither the Bush administration or anyone else has found a better alternative than talking to the North,” said Peter Beck, East Asia director of the International Crisis Group.

“It’s a hopeful first step. You have to tell the critics to hold fire for 60 days to see if the North really has any intention of cooperating.”Apart from the Yongbyon plutonium processing operation, Washington in 2002 accused the North of operating a secret programme to produce highly enriched uranium.

The accusation led to the collapse of a similar 1994 deal.

Beck told AFP he has no doubt that some such programme, possibly a very rudimentary one, exists. “There is enough circumstantial evidence from Pakistan alone that the North Koreans are up to no good -- the real test is, are they ready to come clean on that?” Professor Koh Yu-Hwan of Dongguk University called the Beijing deal “a good step forward for the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.” The first stage, he said, is to “disable nuclear facilities and the second is to dismantle nuclear weapons. The agreement only covers the first stage.

“For the second-stage steps, North Korea will demand more in the form of diplomatic and economic gains, including security guarantees and provision of light-water reactors,” he said.

The two proliferation-resistant, light-water reactors were promised as part of the 1994 deal, and were partly built -- mainly with funds from South Korea.

Work stopped after that deal fell apart.

Koh said the Bush administration had raised the uranium programme as “a strategy aimed to push North Korea toward an implosion. But obviously, that did not work.

“The issue remains an unsolved mystery as the US failed to present any concrete evidence to pin the North down,” he said.

Analyst Scott Snyder, in an article anticipating Tuesday’s deal, said a Yongbyon shutdown would halt North Korea’s ability to produce more plutonium.

But on its own it did not prevent Pyongyang from continuing to develop delivery capacity or roll back its proven nuclear status, said Snyder, a senior associate with The Asia Foundation and Pacific Forum CSIS.

“All parties must remember that while North Korea’s nuclear production capacity might be contained, the nuclear crisis itself will remain unresolved until the North fully implements its denuclearisation pledges,” he cautioned.—AFP