"The next steps, as outlined in the accord, would be for
North Korea to permanently disable the reactor..."
If Washington was really worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and
the dangers of a war breaking out, then its attention would be more on India and
Pakistan than on N Korea and Iran. Iran doesn't even have nuclear weapons.
Instead, Washington's attention is on nations that have the capability to enrich
nuclear fuels.
The real goal here is to monopolize the sources of enriched fuels, in order to
maximize profits as the world turns more and more to nuclear power as a
'solution' to peak oil and global warming. We haven't seen a lot of publicity
yet about going nuclear for power, but we will once an effective fuel cartel has
been established.
rkm
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Original source URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/14/AR2007071400293.html
N. Korea Shutters Nuclear Facility
Move Follows Delivery of Oil; U.N. Team to Verify Shutdown
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 15, 2007; A01
BEIJING, July 15 -- After four years of off-and-on negotiations, North Korea
said it began closing down its main nuclear reactor Saturday, shortly after
receiving a first boatload of fuel oil aid.
The closure, if confirmed by U.N. inspectors, would mark the first concrete step
in a carefully orchestrated denuclearization schedule that was agreed on in
February, with the ultimate goal of dismantling North Korea's nuclear weapons
program in exchange for fuel and other economic aid, and increased diplomatic
recognition.
More broadly, it constituted the first on-the-ground accomplishment of
six-nation negotiations that have been grinding away with little progress since
2003 under Chinese sponsorship. The talks -- including North and South Korea,
Russia, Japan, the United States and China -- are likely to resume next week in
Beijing to emphasize the parties' resolve to carry out the rest of the February
agreement and eventually create a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
"We welcome this development and look forward to the verification and monitoring
of this shutdown by the International Atomic Energy Agency team," said State
Department spokesman Sean McCormack, referring to a 10-member team of U.N.
inspectors who flew into North Korea earlier Saturday.
Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator,
warned reporters in Japan, where he was visiting in anticipation of the new
talks, that moving forward into further denuclearization would probably prove as
difficult as the previous four years of discussions. Given the track record,
which includes several North Korean walkouts and long standoffs, some Asian and
U.S. analysts have questioned whether North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, has
genuinely made the strategic decision to give up nuclear weapons after so many
years devoted to developing them.
The next steps, as outlined in the accord, would be for North Korea to
permanently disable the reactor, a plutonium facility at Yongbyon, 60 miles
northeast of Pyongyang, the capital, and to reveal the full extent of the
nuclear weapons, nuclear processing plants and stored nuclear material it has
accumulated. That would include an accounting of any uranium enrichment efforts,
which North Korea denies it has undertaken but which the Bush administration
says have been part of the country's nuclear research.
Uranium aside, U.S. intelligence estimates have said North Korea has extracted
enough plutonium from the Yongbyon facility to build as many as a dozen bombs,
although it is not known how many weapons the reclusive Stalinist nation's
military has put together. Last October, while the talks were again stalled,
North Korea announced it had conducted its first underground nuclear test and
henceforth should be considered a nuclear-armed state.
Kim's government has based much of its power on the military, and possession of
nuclear weapons has been described in North Korean propaganda as a matter of
national pride. But the thought of nuclear weapons in the hands of Kim and his
aides has unsettled his Asian neighbors, including China. As a result, they have
persisted in the six-party negotiations despite repeated delays and abrupt
changes of position by North Korean diplomats.
North Korea's decision to go ahead with the Yongbyon closure, for instance, came
only after nearly two years of wrangling over about $25 million in North Korean
accounts blocked in a Macau bank.
The funds were frozen because of U.S. Treasury Department allegations in
September 2005 that they were tainted by money laundering and counterfeiting.
After months of insisting the Treasury accusations were a law enforcement matter
separate from the nuclear talks, the Bush administration switched positions and
promised to get the money liberated, leading to February's milestone agreement.
But several months more passed while Hill struggled to find a banking system
that would handle the allegedly tainted money. Ultimately, the funds were
transferred out of Macau via the Federal Reserve Bank of New York into the
Russian banking system and, from there, transferred into North Korean accounts
in a Russian trading bank near the border with North Korea
Diplomats from the six nations have suggested that, should they be successful,
the North Korean nuclear negotiations could eventually evolve into a permanent
forum for East Asian security cooperation, bringing North Korea into a closer
relationship with its neighbors. But as Hill did in Japan on Saturday, they
acknowledge they have a long road ahead before anything like that is possible.
Saturday's announcement, while widely applauded, essentially returned the East
Asian landscape to what it was in 2002, when operations had been suspended at
the Yongbyon reactor under an earlier deal put together in 1994 under the
Clinton administration.
U.S. diplomats said in 2002 that North Korean representatives acknowledged a
secret uranium enrichment program -- something North Korea has steadfastly
denied since then -- and the Bush administration stopped the oil shipments that
were part of the 1994 deal. In return, North Korea expelled U.N. weapons
inspectors, quit the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and restarted operations
at Yongbyon.
The North Korean government had made no formal announcement by early Sunday. But
a diplomat at the North Korean U.N. mission, Kim Myon Gil, told the Associated
Press that the reactor was shut down Saturday and its closure would soon be
verified by the U.N. inspectors. The State Department said in Washington that it
got official word from North Korea shortly after a South Korean ship pulled into
Sonbong, a port in northeast North Korea, with a cargo of 6,200 tons of heavy
fuel oil to power generators in the rickety North Korean electricity grid."
The delivery represented a down payment on a scheduled 50,000 tons of fuel oil
aid in return for shutting down the reactor. In all, the February accord
promised North Korea up to 1 million tons of oil and other economic aid as it
takes further denuclearization steps over the months ahead.
The accord also held out the prospect of improved relations with the United
States, which has long been a goal of North Korea. In signing the accord, for
instance, the Bush administration undertook to review whether it could remove
North Korea from the list of countries said to sponsor terrorism and to engage
in diplomatic discussions aimed at dissipating the hostility that remains more
than half a century after the Korean War.
© 2007 The Washington Post Company
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