North Korea Criticizes Military Exercise

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Monday that annual American-South Korean military exercises that began over the weekend could further delay progress on ending the North’s nuclear weapons programs.

Although such criticism from the Communist country is routine, it dampened hopes for warmer ties between the United States and North Korea — hopes that had been raised after the New York Philharmonic’s concert last week in the North Korean capital., Pyongyang.

News also emerged from Pyongyang over the weekend that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, who did not attend the Philharmonic’s concert, paid a rare visit to the Chinese Embassy on Saturday for “cordial talks” — a move that suggested that Mr. Kim was striking a delicate diplomatic balance between the big powers.

The military exercise, which involves tens of thousands of United States and South Korean troops and the Nimitz, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was “an exercise for invasion to trigger a nuclear war,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

“This nuclear threat won’t work with us, but will only put the brakes on the denuclearization process on the Korean peninsula,” the unnamed spokesman was quoted as saying.

He said North Korea would “further bolster all its deterrent forces,” a term the country often uses to refer to its nuclear arsenal.

The United States and South Korea have been staging annual joint war games for years, and each year North Korea criticizes them.

This year’s weeklong drill, which started Sunday, comes at a delicate time for North Korea.

Frustration in Washington is rising over North Korea’s delays in giving a full accounting of its nuclear programs. In Seoul, Lee Myung-bak, a conservative politician who has championed a tougher stance toward the North, was sworn in as president on Feb. 25.

On Sunday, a North Korean military official was quoted by the official news media as saying that the country was ready to strike back against the military exercises, using “all our means we have prepared at a high cost.”

Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, the top American negotiator on North Korea, flew to Beijing on Saturday and met with Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei of China to discuss how to restart the stalled nuclear disarmament talks with Pyongyang. But he was stood up by North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator, Kim Kye-gwan.

Still, Mr. Hill held out hope for resuming the so-called six-party talks, which involve North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia. “Time is short so I hope we can get on with that this month,” Mr. Hill, who is on a 16-day trip to Asia, said Monday at a news conference in Hanoi, Reuters reported.

The disarmament talks are bogged down over Pyongyang’s failure to meet the agreed-upon deadline of Dec. 31 to make a complete declaration of its nuclear programs.

Analysts say the main sticking point is North Korea’s reluctance to state whether it tried to enrich uranium or to transfer nuclear technology to Syria.

North Korea nuclear talks shift focus to energy

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - Talks on ending North Korea's nuclear ambitions shifted focus on Saturday to U.S. energy aid for the impoverished state as delegates circulated a text of a proposed joint statement.

U.S. President George W. Bush on Friday authorized $25 million in aid for the North, which would provide up to 50,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil, as a reward for Pyongyang's commitment to disable its nuclear facilities by the end of the year.

U.S. envoy Christopher Hill said he had seen the draft text which Kyodo news agency reported include steps North Korea must take by the end of the year.

"It's a pretty complete draft and we made some comments, but I don't know what the others think about it," he told reporters. "So I don't know if we will have a joint statement or not."

North Korea, which tested a nuclear device last year, shut down and sealed its Yongbyon nuclear plant and allowed U.N. monitors back to the site in July.

Those were its first steps in carrying out a breakthrough agreement reached in February at the six-party talks, which group the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and China.

But it must now disable its atomic facilities and make a declaration of all of its nuclear programs, in return for a huge injection of fuel aid and an end to diplomatic isolation.

China and South Korea have delivered initial fuel shipments and Russia is expected to do so too, but Japan has indicated it will not participate unless North Korea addresses the issue of Japanese citizens the North abducted in the 1970s and 1980s.

"The issue of abductions by the DPRK poses a serious challenge to human dignity," Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura told reporters at the United Nations on Friday.

ROAD MAP

Hill had initially said this round of talks would aim to set targets for disablement to the end of the year. He later scaled back expectations, saying negotiators hoped to agree to a "road map".

Hill stressed that disablement of the nuclear facilities, a step towards complete dismantling, had to mean that it would be a long and costly process for Pyongyang to restart its reactors.

"We have a common definition, which is the idea that if there were a return -- and of course we're not planning a return -- to plutonium production, that it should be made difficult by process of disablement," Hill said.

"Our definition of difficult is several months and we would argue it should be 12 months."

In 2002, North Korea was able to restart the Yongbyon reactor in two months, after a previous disarmament agreement fell apart.

South Korea said the issue of North Korea's nuclear ambitions should not be allowed to drag on.

"This problem, if not resolved soon, will seriously undermine the NPT regime," said South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min-soon, referring to the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

"It also has significant implications for peace and security in Northeast Asia and beyond," he told the U.N. General Assembly.

(Additional reporting by Paul Eckert in New York)

U.S. and North Korea Reach Nuclear Deal

By DAVID E. SANGER

The top American negotiator with North Korea said yesterday that the country had agreed to disable its main nuclear fuel production plant by the end of the year and to account to international monitors for all of its nuclear programs, including what American intelligence agencies say they believe was a second, secret program purchased from Pakistan.

At the end of a two-day meeting in Geneva — exactly the kind of one-on-one session that the Bush administration had refused to hold in recent years — Christopher R. Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said the two sides had agreed on what would be a speedy next step, following action by North Korea this summer to turn off its main nuclear reactor.

“One thing that we agreed on is that the D.P.R.K. will provide a full declaration of all of their nuclear programs and will disable their nuclear programs by the end of this year, 2007,” Mr. Hill told reporters in Geneva, according to The Associated Press. He was using the initials for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s formal name.

But in a separate news conference, his counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan, who heads the North Korean negotiating team, made no mention of an end-of-the-year deadline. He spoke instead of an accord to disable North Korea’s equipment and provide an accounting of its facilities, fuel and weapons in return for what he called “political and economic compensation.”

If the North Koreans meet the schedule and disable their equipment, it would be a major victory for the Bush administration, at a time when it is eager to claim progress on some diplomatic front to offset its problems in Iraq. Whether to offer the North rewards, including oil and, eventually, removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and diplomatic recognition, has been the subject of a six-year struggle within the Bush administration.

But most of the hawks who have opposed such offers are now gone, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has given Mr. Hill far more latitude to strike a deal, and to meet the North Koreans outside of “six party talks” — the discussions that have also included Russia, China, Japan and South Korea. Those talks are expected to resume in mid-September, and the weekend meeting was cast as a prelude to any agreement reached there.

The hawks are still unhappy, and have suggested that Mr. Hill is giving away too much.

“There is still simply no evidence that Pyongyang has made a decision to abandon its long-held strategic objective to have a credible nuclear-weapons capability,” John R. Bolton, the former American ambassador to the United Nations and, in President Bush’s first term, the top State Department official on counterproliferation, wrote in The Asian Wall Street Journal this weekend.

“This inconvenient fact should make it impossible for the State Department to concede on other issues, even if it were inclined to do so,” he said. “Creative minds are therefore working on ways to explain that any forthcoming North Korean declaration of its nuclear capabilities is ‘full and complete,’ thus eliminating the remaining troubling obstacles to full normalization of relations.”

When the Bush administration came into office, North Korea was still appearing to abide by a nuclear freeze that it had negotiated in 1994 with the Clinton administration. But that deal fell apart after the Bush administration accused the North of cheating on the agreement, purchasing uranium enrichment equipment from Abdul Qadeer Khan’s nuclear network, based in Pakistan.

While Mr. Khan and his associates have confirmed they made such sales, it is unclear what, if anything, the North did with the equipment. Mr. Hill said yesterday that that question would have to be answered as part of any full declaration. American intelligence agencies said earlier this year that they were uncertain what progress the North had made with that program, if any.

The North Koreans conducted a nuclear test last October, though it was not entirely successful. It is unclear how many other nuclear devices they have produced, though intelligence agencies have estimated that they may have the material for between eight and a dozen. The administration’s critics, including Mr. Bolton, have said it is almost impossible to imagine that the North would say how many weapons it had or where those weapons, or the fuel to manufacture new ones, were situated. So far, there is no agreement for an intrusive inspection system.

Still, if the facilities at the Yongbyon nuclear plant are truly “disabled,” a term no one has yet defined, it would probably prevent the North from manufacturing new weapons and expanding its arsenal. Mr. Kim said yesterday that “we made it clear, we showed clear willingness to declare and dismantle all nuclear facilities.”

Mr. Hill said that “we have to work out some of the details” on exactly what facilities would be disabled. “We will have a declaration in time to disable what needs to be disabled,” he said, adding that “for example, the Yongbyon reactor would have to be included.”

North Korea agrees to declare, disable nuclear programs by end of year

From the Associated Press

9:07 AM PDT, September 2, 2007

GENEVA — North Korea has agreed to declare and disable all its nuclear facilities by the end of this year, the chief U.S. negotiator said today.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said two days of talks between the United States and North Korea in Geneva had been "very good and very substantive" and would help improve chances of a successful meeting later this month with Japan, Russia, South Korea and China in six-nation talks aimed at ending the North's nuclear weapons program and improving relations between North Korea and other countries.

"One thing that we agreed on is that the DPRK will provide a full declaration of all of their nuclear programs and will disable their nuclear programs by the end of this year, 2007," Hill told reporters, using the initials for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Hill said the declaration will also include uranium enrichment programs, which the United States fears could be used to make nuclear weapons.

Kim Gye Gwan, the head of the North Korean delegation, did not comment immediately to reporters outside the North Korean mission.

Hill said earlier Sunday that improving U.S. relations with North Korea will depend on other progress in the talks, saying it "is a relationship that we will continue to try to build step by step with the understanding that we're not going to have a normalized relationship until we have a denuclearized North Korea."

"To the extent that we can move quickly to denuclearization, we can move quickly to normalization," he added.

Hill said both sides also discussed what needs to be done for North Korea to be removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

He said they also had a good discussion of what North Korea wants to achieve and how it can improve relations with Japan.

He said he expected the next full session of the six-nation talks would be held in mid-September and that it would produce a "more detailed implementation plan for 'disablement"' of North Korea's nuclear facilities.

The meeting in Geneva was part of a flurry of "working group" sessions called for in February's six-nation accord in which North Korea agreed to disable its plutonium-producing nuclear reactor and declare and eventually dismantle all its nuclear activities.

In exchange, the economically struggling North will receive oil and other aid. The U.S., as part of the agreement, promised to begin the process of removing the country from the terrorism list and work toward full diplomatic relations.

North Korea has already received 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil from Seoul in return for the shutdown of its plutonium reactor in July. The energy-starved country will eventually get further energy or other aid equivalent to 950,000 tons of heavy fuel oil in return for irreversibly disabling the reactor and ending all its nuclear programs, but has yet to set a date by when it will disable its nuclear facilities.

Another point of disagreement has been over allegations that North Korea has a second, undeclared nuclear weapons program using enriched uranium. North Korea said recently it was willing to discuss the issue, although it did not acknowledge having such a program.

Years of tension and deadlock over North Korea's nuclear program -- which peaked with the country's nuclear test last October -- have started to ease in recent months as the talks have made progress.

N. Korea Talks Fizzle With No Disarmament Timetable

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 21, 2007; A08

BEIJING, July 20 -- After three days of upbeat talks, negotiators from six nations announced Friday that they had failed to agree on a schedule for North Korea to take the next steps toward nuclear disarmament. They plan to meet again in September.

The United States and other countries pressed North Korea to accept a year-end deadline for fully disclosing all its nuclear activities and permanently disabling its main reactor, key moves toward the goal of the eventual complete dismantlement of its nuclear program.

But the North Koreans insisted on tighter coordination for what they would get in return for such steps, including 950,000 tons more fuel oil and progress toward better diplomatic relations, according to the chief U.S. negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill.

The outcome was another setback for the Chinese-sponsored negotiations -- including Japan, the United States, Russia and the two Koreas in addition to China -- that have been off and on for the past four years.

Diplomats had expressed hopes of keeping up the momentum generated by North Korea's closure Saturday of its main nuclear reactor in return for 50,000 tons of fuel oil to power its electricity generators.

The shutdown and oil deliveries constituted the first on-the-ground compliance with an accord reached in Beijing on Feb. 13 laying out a choreographed series of North Korean nuclear disarmament steps to be matched by economic aid and friendlier diplomatic ties with Washington and its Asian allies.

North Korea's statements have indicated that it expects improved relations to include an end to economic sanctions, removal from the U.S. list of governments supporting terrorism and less hostility from Japan. Linking these goals to the disarmament steps was the issue that diplomats proved unable to resolve in Beijing this week -- and that they may find haunting them in the days ahead.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry warned Friday, for instance, that the six-party talks could go into another stall if Japan continued to link aid to the dispute over Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean intelligence agents. Japan has refused to contribute economic aid to North Korea until it gets more information about what happened to Japanese citizens whom North Korean agents took to the communist state in the 1970s and '80s.

As the talks broke up, the diplomats decided to hand off discussions to lower-level working groups, assigned to coordinate the next steps with corresponding moves by the United States, Japan and others. A communique from China said the chief negotiators and their teams would return in September to try again for a firm schedule, based on information to be generated by the working groups.

The abductees will be the subject of one of the working groups, the Chinese communique said. Another group will focus on normalization of relations between the United States and North Korea, raising the issue of how swiftly the Bush administration can deliver the politically sensitive diplomatic changes demanded by North Korea.

In addition, Hill noted, some of the sequencing between aid deliveries and North Korean steps to dismantle the nuclear program demands technical expertise beyond the reach of nonspecialists. North Korea's port facilities allow it to absorb only about 50,000 tons of oil at once, for instance, suggesting that other forms of economic aid may have to be substituted to keep the corresponding steps by North Korea up to speed.

Departing Beijing on his way home, Hill portrayed the delay as a minor hiccup rather than the harbinger of another prolonged stall by North Korea. "I'm still of the view that with a little luck we can wrap this all up by the end of the year, but it's obviously going to be difficult," he told reporters.

N. Korea nuclear talks shun deadlines for disarmament

From Reuters

July 20, 2007

BEIJING — Talks to end North Korea's nuclear arms program veered away Thursday from setting a deadline for the next phase of disarmament but settled on a set of tasks the United States said could be carried out this year.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said this week that North Korea had closed five main nuclear facilities, completing the first stage of a disarmament deal reached in February.

The six-nation talks in Beijing were seeking consensus on the second stage of disarmament: permanently disabling the Yongbyon nuclear complex and receiving a full declaration of Pyongyang's atomic arms activities in return for heavy fuel oil.

Chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill said the envoys broadly agreed on how that next phase will unfold but did not agree on a deadline. At the start of the latest talks Wednesday, he had proposed completing the steps by year's end.

Closure of the Yongbyon nuclear complex was delayed for many weeks by a financial snarl that held up North Korea's receipt of more than $20 million in frozen bank funds.

Hill said negotiators wanted to avoid more broken deadlines.

North Korea Proposes Military Talks With U.S.

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, July 13 -- North Korea revived its old demand for direct military talks with the United States on Friday, as international efforts to restart multinational talks on ending its nuclear weapons programs gained momentum.

In a statement carried by its official news media, the North’s Korea People’s Army proposed military talks at "any place and at any time" and "for the purpose of discussing the issues related to ensuring the peace and security on the Korean Peninsula."

The statement didn’t provide further details. But for decades, North Korea has been trying to engage the United States in direct military dialogue aimed at winning one of its regime’s key policy goals: a permanent peace treaty with the United States to replace the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War.

With its economy in a shambles and its 1.2 million-member military sucking away a lion’s share of the impoverished nation’s s meager national resources, the regime believes that a peace treaty will ensure its survival and enable it to focus more on rebuilding the economy, experts say.

There was no immediate U.S. response to the North Korean proposal on Friday.

But Washington had previously rejected such a proposal, objecting any talks that would exclude its ally South Korea and China.

China fought on the North Korean side during the war, while the United States led U.N. forces on the South Korean side. The United States and China are both signatories to the 1953 armistice, along with North Korea. South Korea did not sign.

North Korea is set to resume six-party talks on Wednesday with the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia on how to end its nuclear weapons programs. On Friday, a team of U.N. nuclear inspectors arrived in Beijing on their way to North Korea the next day to monitor and verify the shutdown of North Korea’s main nuclear complex.

Pyongyang’s latest demand for direct military talks with Washington has been expected because the six nations had previously agreed to consider peace talks on the Korean Peninsula if North Korea abandons its nuclear weapons programs.

U.S. and South Korean officials envisioned four-way peace talks involving all major participants of the Korean War: the United States, China and the two Koreas. But North Korea prefers direct talks with the United States in a ploy experts say is aimed at driving a wedge between Washington and Seoul.

Military dialogue looms large in North Korea’s strategy and is destined to complicate an ultimate resolution of the nuclear crisis. The North demands that the United States withdraw all U.S. troops from South Korea before giving up its nuclear weapons and signing a peace treaty.

The Korean cease-fire has never been replaced by a peace treaty, leaving the peninsula technically in a state of war. The United States keeps 30,000 troops in the South to support the South’s 670,000 strong military to guard against North Korea.

To force Washington into peace talks, North Korea has repeatedly called the armistice a "piece of useless paper." It also repeatedly warned that without a peace treaty, the Korean Peninsula remains at the "brink of nuclear war."

On Friday, it said it "will have no option but to exert utmost efforts for further rounding off the means for retaliatory strike strong enough to cope with the U.S. nuclear attack and pre-emptive strike in order to protect its dignity, sovereignty and right to existence."

North Korea 'on track' to scrap nuke weapons

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has expressed cautious optimism that North Korea would stick to a deal to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
"I do believe that the North Koreans will shut down the reactor. They say that they have made a strategic choice to get rid of their nuclear weapons programs,'' she said.

Nine months after the hardline communist state shocked the world with its first atomic test, hopes are rising for the imminent closure of North Korea's Yongbyon reactor, which produces bomb-making raw material.

Ms Rice said "at some point in time, that there's got to be an accounting for whatever was made out of the activity at Yongbyon.''

"I think we're going to know a lot about that in this next phase where they will have to declare what they've done, where they will have to disable the programs and the facilities in a more irreversible way than simply a shutdown.

"But I think we are seeing good signs that they're going to invite the IAEA inspectors in,'' the secretary of state said.

Ten inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were expected in North Korea Saturday after a stopoff in Beijing, the UN agency said.

North Korea has said it will consider shutting the Soviet-era Yongbyon facility as soon as it receives the first shipment of oil promised in a breakthrough deal with the United States and five other powers in February.

The two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan have been negotiating since 2003.

They will meet again in Beijing on July 18 and 19, the Chinese foreign ministry said.

"They're going to shut down Yongbyon and then there will be considerable pressure, I think from the six parties,'' Ms Rice said.

"It's a very good thing that we're in this with the other big regional players - China, Japan, Russia, South Korea.''

RUSSIAN MINISTER SAYS HE HAS 'NO DOUBTS' ABOUT NORTH KOREA

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in Moscow on July 10 that he "wouldn't make any complaints" about North Korea's cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Interfax reported. He called on the other participants in the six-party talks on Pyongyang's nuclear program "to strictly abide by our joint plan of seeking a settlement and not to bring into it issues relating to the bilateral relations of any of the states with Pyongyang." Radio Japan, which is the international service of Japanese national broadcaster NHK, said on July 11 that Lavrov was alluding to Japan's policy of pressing North Korea to provide full information on the fate of at least 13 Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s to train North Korean agents in the Japanese language and customs. Pyongyang has provided some information, but Tokyo considers its response inadequate. Lavrov stressed on July 10 that he has "heard no complaints that Pyongyang is failing to meet its commitments" to the IAEA. He added, "I don't think that at this moment we should have any suspicions, or any complacency for that matter." He described as "interesting" a recent EU proposal to deploy an international peacekeeping force in the Palestinian territories. Lavrov said that "we will study the [EU's] ideas with interest, but...we want to know in more specific terms [if the proposal is more than] a slogan and how it is meant to be put into practice and what it implies." PM

Six-nation nuclear talks will resume

International disarmament talks on North Korea's nuclear program will resume in Beijing next week, a report said, as the U.N. nuclear watchdog prepared to oversee Pyongyang's promised shutdown of its reactor.

China has informed participating countries that the negotiations will start July 18, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported. Talks involving China, Japan, the two Koreas, Russia and the United States were last held in March.

Today, International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said United Nations nuclear inspectors would return Saturday to North Korea to monitor the shutdown.