North Korea Might Withhold Nuclear Information

North Korea indicated during the recent round of six-party talks that the declaration of its nuclear program might not include details on its weapons holdings, the South Korean Dong-A Ilbo newspaper reported today (see GSN, Oct. 1).

Pyongyang is considering withholding the number of nuclear weapons in its arsenal and the amount of plutonium it holds from the nuclear declaration set to be submitted this year.

“If we report such information while disabling our weapons, that will reveal the technological level of our nuclear weapons.  Therefore, it is hard to report information related to nuclear weapons now,” top North Korean nuclear negotiator Kim Kye Gwan reportedly said.

Pyongyang agreed in a February denuclearization deal to fully declare and disable its nuclear program.  It pledged last week to follow through on that agreement by the end of this year.

North Korean negotiators during the four days of talks in Beijing that ended Sunday agreed to address the country’s suspected uranium enrichment efforts.  They agreed that the United States in an upcoming statement on the talks would not promise to remove the Stalinist state from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, Dong-A Ilbo reported.

A trip to North Korea is planned by a disablement technology team involving personnel from the other six-party talks nations — China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States.  The team is expected to finish up a plan for disabling nuclear facilities and by November to begin work on three sites at the Yongbyon complex — a five megawatt reactor, a retreatment plant and a nuclear fuel rod production site.  Roughly 10 core components from the facilities would be sealed in North Korea under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (Dong-A Ilbo, Oct. 1).

Kim said before leaving Beijing that the planned talks statement would address the terrorism list issue, Agence France-Presse reported.  “The timeline [for removal] was specified in the join statement,” he said (Agence France-Presse I/Spacewar.com, Oct. 2).

Meanwhile, the heads of North and South Korea met today for the second-ever leadership summit between the two nations, the Associated Press reported.  A potential peace declaration is expected to be at the top of the agenda for South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, whose nations established a cease-fire in 1953 to the Korean War.

“I certainly am not looking for those inter-Korean discussions to change the basic facts on the ground or the six-party talks,” U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey said yesterday (Burt Herman, Associated Press/Globe and Mail, Oct. 2).

“We think that it will hopefully contribute to peace and security.  Ultimately it needs to lead to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said today (Agence France-Presse II/Spacewar.com, Oct. 2).

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