WASHINGTON (AP) - Suddenly, the Bush administration is giving North Korea at least a passing grade in negotiations to stop its nuclear weapons program and suggesting the slow-moving talks to denuclearize the Korean peninsula may be making headway. With Iran causing concern about its nuclear programs, the United States is eager to put out the fire on the Korean peninsula and may have found a way with economic inducements. Both countries have been branded part of an "axis of evil" by President Bush.
A team of American academics and diplomats returned to Beijing yesterday after visiting North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facility, carrying a message from Pyongyang that China, South Korea and the United States still have promises to fulfill before denuclearization of the peninsula proceeds. Officials in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital city, told the visitors that the dismantling of the nuclear reactor is almost complete, but the U.S. and other parties to the six-nation talks have yet to provide promised economic aid and fuel. North Korea also insists Washington remove it from the list of terrorism sponsors.
S. officials also want to make additional progress on dismantling North Korea's known plutonium-based nuclear weapons program but highlight that the terms of an October 2007 agreement must be completed first. South Korean Unification Minister Kim Ha-joong said March 19 that Seoul would continue to maintain the landmark development zone it established at Kaesong to provide economic aid to Pyongyang, but "it would be difficult to expand (the complex) unless North Korea's nuclear issue is resolved.
BEIJING -- The top U.S. envoy at the North Korean nuclear talks urged delegates Wednesday to start hashing out details of a disarmament deal, warning that the latest round of negotiations could end with no real progress. China's foreign minister echoed the call, urging all sides to live up to promises made in a September 2005 agreement for North Korea to disarm in exchange for economic aid and security guarantees. The six-nation talks started Monday after Pyongyang ended a 13-month boycott during which it tested its first nuclear bomb.
So now it's North Korea's turn to feed at the trough of U.S. economic aid, as if exploding a nuclear weapon is all that's needed to prove a nation's peaceful intentions. Of course, there is nothing wrong with negotiating with our enemies rather than weakly blustering at cartoon images of them - I wish we would do the same in our dealings with Iran - but it would be nice if we would stop shooting ourselves in the foot first. Five years and an outlaw nuke test after President George W. Bush blew up the peace process with Pyongyang so he could look tougher than his predecessor, he capitulated completely earlier this month in accepting a negotiating framework that tacitly accepts the huge surge in the communist state's estimated nuclear arsenal.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - South Korea's demand that North Korea renew its commitment to dismantle its nuclear weapons program forced economic aid talks between the neighbors into overtime on Saturday. The impoverished North's priority at the talks was to receive food shipments from South Korea, but Seoul has sought to use the talks to persuade the North to implement a February promise to shut down its nuclear reactor.
The top U.S. negotiator for talks on North Korea's nuclear program will make a rare visit to that country Monday to inspect ongoing work to disable its main nuclear reactor, a senior State Department official said Tuesday. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill will be the highest- level U.S. official to check on the work to make North Korea's Yongbyon reactor unusable, a key milestone in the international bargain that North Korea made to eliminate its weapons in exchange for economic aid and other perks.
PANMUNJOM, Korea North Korea agreed Tuesday to accept half of the economic aid it has been promised for disabling its nuclear reactor in energy-related equipment and other materials, a South Korean official said. The chief U.S. nuclear envoy said a team of experts would go to the North this week to disable the reactor, which produces plutonium for bombs.
Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions are likely to figure in any negotiations North Korean leader Kim Jong-il holds in China this week, but Asian analysts see little chance that Beijing will use its growing economic clout to bring its neighbor to heel. Analysts say China has become virtually the sole provider of consumer goods to North Korea, as well as a conduit for most foreign aid, giving it substantial economic leverage over the North.
In 1947, THE BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, a magazine founded by nuclear scientists based in Chicago who had worked on the first atomic bomb, created a Doomsday Clock to signal, in their view, how close the world had come to nuclear catastrophe. In 2006, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists still publishes and its editors still set the Doomsday Clock, whose minute hand has, over time, moved closer to or further away from midnight depending on their assessment of the current nuclear danger--for 2006, as in 1947, the clock stands at seven minutes to midnight. Here, Bee discusses various issues about the future of nuclear weapons, whether and how they might get used in anger, by design or by accident.
...The cold-war nuclear crises of Korea, Quemoy and Matsu, Suez, Berlin, and above all, Cu... how the unfriendly states of Iraq, Iran and North Korea were continuing to develop them in defiance ... security Council, which could recommend economic sanctions against the DPRK. Both countries provide...
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