IAEA Team Arrives in North Korea

Officials with the International Atomic Energy Agency arrived in North Korea today for talks on overseeing the halt of operations at the nation’s plutonium-producing nuclear reactor, Reuters reported (see GSN, June 25).

Closing the Yongbyon reactor would be the first step of North Korean denuclearization, according to an agreement reached at the six-party talks in February.

“We are always needing to be optimistic.  I think the D.P.R.K. will now do what they have (been) asked to do,” IAEA safeguards chief Olli Heinonen said before flying from Beijing to Pyongyang.

The IAEA team is expected to spend three days in North Korea, setting up plans for the agency to monitor that the nuclear facilities and reprocessing site had been closed and sealed, Reuters reported.

This is the first visit by IAEA technical personnel to North Korea since December 2002, when Pyongyang ejected agency inspectors and then announced its withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (Lucy Hornby, Reuters, June 26).

North Korean officials seemed ready for negotiations, Heinonen said upon arrival.

“It seems to be a good start,” he told the Associated Press in a telephone interview (Alexa Olesen, Associated Press I/Yahoo!News, June 26).

“They are the one who (will) shut it down and not us so they have to make their own plans.  How long it will take is a little bit up to them,” Heinonen said earlier in the day.

The Yongbyon reactor could be fully disabled by the end of 2007, according to the lead U.S. negotiator at the six-party talks.

However, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said the negotiations are not likely to go smoothly.

“Usually in the six-party process, if there’s a problem out there, then the problem will arise,” he said, according to AP.

“We’re really on the edge of all this,” he said yesterday.  There is still “a lot of work to do,” according to Hill.  “But I think what we’re working on right now is a very important step, which is to shut down the facility and prevent the production of additional plutonium.”

Hill said he hopes negotiators would address “end-game issues” next year, including elimination of North Korean nuclear fuel stores (Foster Klug, Associated Press II/Yahoo!News, June 25).

Hill said North Korean officials last week agreed to provide details of its suspected uranium enrichment program, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday.  Full declaration of the country’s nuclear program is a component of the February deal.

“We had a very good discussion about it, I am not going to get into the specifics of it except to say that they acknowledged that this issue must be resolved to mutual satisfaction,” said Hill, who visited Pyongyang last week.

The United States confronted North Korea with intelligence on the program in 2002.  That accusation — publicly denied by Pyongyang — led to the collapse of the 1994 Agreed Framework freezing the Stalinist state’s nuclear program and to the nuclear standoff (P. Parameswaran, Agence France-Presse I/Yahoo!News, June 25).

Various experts continued to voice doubts about North Korea’s ultimate willingness to eliminate its nuclear arsenal.

“My skepticism comes from the fact that I don’t think any country that has actually got nuclear weapons has given them up,” said Bobby Ray Inman, former head of the U.S. National Security Agency.

He said today that the most other nations might hope for is that Pyongyang would agree not to build any more weapons, AFP reported.  The major fear is that that cash-strapped nation might sell a weapon “to somebody who would be much more willing to use it,” Inman said (Agence France-Presse II/Spacewar.com, June 26).

“If North Korea doesn’t want to give up its nuclear weapons at all and is purely prolonging the process, the United States is only buying time,” said Korea expert Zhang Liangui of the Chinese Central Party School in Beijing, according to the Los Angeles Times (Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times, June 26).

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