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North Korea Reactor Project Terminated
The United States and its partners in the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization have terminated a 10-year-old project to build a light-water reactor in North Korea, U.S. envoy Joseph DeTrani said yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 22). Washington had been pushing the partners to drop the energy-production project for two years. South Korea agreed last summer, while Japan and the European Union had long agreed with the U.S. position. The project had been frozen since the United States in 2002 charged that Pyongyang was conducting a secret program to produce nuclear weapons using highly enriched uranium, the Associated Press reported. North Korea would have had to eliminate its nuclear weapons program and allow U.N. inspectors back into the country for work to resume However, with contract deadlines looming on the $4.6 billion effort, including an agreement with primary contractor Korean Electric Power Co., the partners agreed to end the project, according to AP. Former KEDO Executive Director Charles Kartman said Pyongyang would not have been surprised by the death of the project. “There's no surprise here for North Korea. They've been setting up their obstacles” for weeks and in September renewed the call for light-water reactors, he said. Kartman said the Bush administration had always planned to abolish the 1994 Agreed Framework that called for North Korea to disarm in exchange for receiving the reactor. Communication channels existed in 2002 between Pyongyang and Washington that could have led to negotiation rather than confrontation. “In my mind, the right thing to have done in 2002 was to go back to the North Koreans and ask them if they wanted to preserve the Agreed Framework,” Kartman said, adding that the U.S. strategy was “clumsy” (Peter James Spellman, Associated Press, Nov. 23).
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