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Washington Reportedly Rejected 2002 North Korean Offer to Discuss Nuclear Standoff
U.S. President George W. Bush in 2002 rejected an attempt by North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to engage the United States directly on Pyongyang’s nuclear program, two U.S. experts said in an article published today (see GSN, June 21). While in Pyongyang in 2002 “we were given a written personal message from Kim to Bush,” former U.S. ambassador to South Korea Donald Gregg and former journalist Don Oberdorfer wrote in today’s Washington Post. Kim’s missive stated that if Washington recognized his country’s sovereignty and provided security guarantees “it is our view that we should be able to find a way to resolve the nuclear issue in compliance with the demands of a new century.” Kim also pledged that “if the United States makes a bold decision, we will respond accordingly,” according to Gregg and Oberdorfer, who said they delivered the message to senior White House and State Department officials. The Bush administration, however, “spurned engagement with North Korea,” wrote Gregg and Oberdorfer. Some weeks later, Pyongyang ejected international nuclear inspectors, withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and started up plutonium separation facilities, Reuters reported (Reuters, June 22). North Korean officials said today they could eliminate their nuclear weapons if the United States treated their country as a friend, the Associated Press reported. “If the United States treats the North in a friendly manner, we will possess not one nuclear weapon,” Kim Chun-shick, a South Korean government spokesman, quoted a North Korean delegation to his country as saying. Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, the top South Korean official meeting with the delegation, said today that the two sides had a “productive and constructive discussion” at today’s opening meeting (Ji-Soo Kim, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, June 22). It is possible that six-party talks on the issue will reconvene next month, Wang Jiarui, head of one of the key channels through which China deals with North Korea, told Reuters today. “The possibility is there,” the Chinese Communist Party official said “As to when (specifically) it can happen still depends on the efforts of all the sides.” “According to our understanding of North Korea from exchanges with them, I think they are still willing to resolve the problem through talks,” he said. The six-party talks remained “the only relatively good framework to solve the existing disputes,” said Wang. “We believe this issue will be resolved in the end because we do not want to see a nondialogue way of resolving the North Korean nuclear problem,” he said (John Ruwitch, Reuters, June 22).
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