SEOUL, Feb 5: North Korea warned on Wednesday it would no longer recognize the UN Security Council should it not take the United States to task for its “wrong Korean policy”.
The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is to meet on Feb 12 to consider asking the UN Security Council to act against North Korea for violating nuclear non-proliferation agreements.
“If the UN Security Council responsible for the issue of world peace and security does not call the US wrong Korean policy to task, this organisation will turn out to be partial and the DPRK (North Korea) will, accordingly, not recognise it,” a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said.
“The DPRK does not care about whether the UN Security Council discusses the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula or not,” he said in a statement on Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency.
“But if it wants to handle this issue, it should fairly call into question the responsibility of the US which is chiefly to blame for the outbreak of this issue and for the strained situation.”
The nuclear crisis began in October with US allegations that North Korea was pursuing a nuclear weapons programme in violation of a 1994 deal that ended a previous nuclear showdown. Pyongyang denied the allegations.
The United States cut off fuel aid to North Korea, which moved in December to restart its nuclear facilities frozen under the 1994 accord, saying it needed them to produce electricity.
Pyongyang expelled IAEA inspectors and withdrew from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in December.
The spokesman said on Wednesday that North Korea was “now putting the operation of its nuclear facilities for the production of electricity on a normal footing after their restart”.
The spokesman said that the United States, by including UN members Iraq and Iran as well as North Korea in an “axis of evil” was slanderous and had “wantonly violated the principle and spirit of the UN charter.”
The United States has also breached the fundamental principle of the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty “which bans nuclear threat to the non-nuclear states by listing non-nuclear countries as targets of its preemptive nuclear attacks,” he said.
North Korea accuses Washington of planning an invasion, reinforcing its 37,000 troops already in South Korea with B-1 and B-52 bombers that have been ordered to prepare for deployment to the Korean peninsula.
No deployment orders have yet been given.
RUSSIA’S ADMISSION: Russia’s Nuclear Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev for the first time admitted that Russia was selling uranium fuel to South Korea, the Vremya Novostei daily reported Wednesday.
Russia “supplies uranium to South Korea for nuclear fuel,” Rumyantsev said in an interview, adding assurances that Russia “has no information that Seoul is working to use nuclear energy for military purposes.”
However, “that country’s potential would allow it to create a nuclear bomb within a couple of years,” the minister added.
Neither Iran nor North Korea, which Washington branded as the “axis of evil” with Iraq, “possesses enough capabilities to produce nuclear weapons,” Rumyantsev said.
Washington has long made the case that Iran is building the light-water reactor in Bushehr for nefarious purposes and has frequently called on Moscow, publicly and privately, to halt all of its nuclear cooperation with Tehran. —AFP