Oil Shipment Leaves for North Korea

South Korea today shipped the first load of fuel oil to North Korea, which could respond within days by shutting down operations at its plutonium-producing Yongbyon nuclear facility, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, July 11).

Pyongyang has said it would close the reactor upon receiving one-tenth of the 50,000 tons of oil pledged by other nations in the six-party talks for this first step in North Korean denuclearization.  The shipment of 6,200 tons of fuel was expected to arrive Saturday at the port of Sonbong and to be unloaded within two days.

International Atomic Energy Agency personnel are also expected to arrive in North Korea on Saturday.  Monitoring of the nuclear shutdown process should begin “early next week” and be finished “within a maybe month or so,” said agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei.

“I expect that operation to move smoothly,” he said during a trip to Seoul.  “I am quite optimistic that this is a good step in the right direction.”

ElBaradei said completing the dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, under the terms of an agreement reached by the six nations in February, would be a “long process.”

“We should not delude ourselves,” he said.  “It will take time to have a comprehensive solution.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed today that the next round of negotiations would take place on July 18-19 in Beijing.  This would be the first session since March (Jae-Soon Chang, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, July 12).

Movement on the February agreement was stalled for months while North Korea waited to collect about $25 million that had been frozen at a bank in Macau.  Progress picked up recently after the money was finally transferred through U.S. and Russian institutions into Pyongyang’s hands.

“We believe that this type of momentum needs to be maintained,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang.  “The meeting of the heads of delegations will press ahead with this positive momentum” (Agence France-Presse I/Spacewar.com, July 12).

Diplomats at next week’s planned talks are expected to discuss the second stage of North Korean denuclearization, South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min-soon said yesterday.

“These include the listing of all nuclear programs of the North, actions concerning the disablement of its nuclear facility, the provision of the 950,000 tons of fuel and the normalization of ties,” he said, according to Agence France-Presse (Agence France-Presse II/Yahoo!News, July 11).

The U.N. nuclear watchdog would require in the second phase that Pyongyang declare all nuclear programs, including its alleged uranium enrichment effort, AFP reported.  Following U.S. claims regarding the existence of a secret uranium program, North Korea in 2002 abandoned the 1994 Agreed Framework under which it suspended its known nuclear work, ejected IAEA inspectors and announced its withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

“This is a process that will obviously take some time because we will also have to make sure that if they have nuclear weapons, as they say they do, these weapons should be dismantled,” ElBaradei said (Agence France-Presse III/Spacewar.com, July 12).

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