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Top U.S. Nuclear Negotiator Proposes Pyongyang Visit
Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the top U.S. envoy to North Korean disarmament talks, has proposed a visit to Pyongyang next month for direct discussions with the communist nation’s leadership, a South Korean official said today (see GSN, Sept. 21). Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said he relayed Hill’s proposal last week to North Korean officials during inter-Korean talks in Pyongyang. “Should Hill’s visit to the North be realized, it would serve an opportunity to further solidify the outcome of the six-party talks,” Chung said. The South Korean daily Chosun Ilbo reported today that some U.S. officials opposed a Hill visit. State Department spokeswoman Darla Jordan responded to the report by saying that “nothing has changed,” the Associated Press reported today (Jae-Soon Chang, Associated Press/San Diego Union-Tribune, Sept. 22). Hill warned North Korea not to play “hide and seek” with nuclear inspectors once they return to the country and demanded that Pyongyang reveal its suspected uranium enrichment program, the Financial Times reported today. “We need a system that works. We don’t want to play hide and seek. We don’t want to be running around the North Korean countryside,” Hill said. “We need much more clarity on [the alleged uranium program] than we have now,” he said. Hill added that North Korea’s latest demands this week for a light-water nuclear reactor before disarming were “unhelpful.” He said the United States and its negotiating partners remained opposed to discussing the provision of a reactor for energy production until Pyongyang dismantles its atomic weapons installations. Hill acknowledged that dismantling North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor could take years and that Seoul would need three years to provide a promised 2,000 megawatts of electricity to the North (Dinmore/Fifield, Financial Times, Sept. 22). Provision of a light-water reactor can only be considered once North Korea has completed dismantling its indigenous nuclear program, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said yesterday. Lavrov said he and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice agreed in a recent meeting that the six parties would follow the sequence of steps elaborated in last week’s Beijing agreement (RIA Novosti, Sept. 21).
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