State Department Official Heads for North Korea

U.S. State Department official Sung Kim is scheduled to travel Thursday to North Korea, where he plans to urge regime leaders to move forward with the faltering denuclearization process, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Jan. 28).

The Bush administration is still waiting for Pyongyang to submit what it considers a sufficient declaration of the nation’s nuclear programs.  Kim said he would press for the Stalinist state to release the list “as quick as possible.”

“The requirement is for a complete and correct declaration,” he said today during a stop in Seoul.

The declaration is a major component of the second phase of the disarmament plan produced last year by the six nations involved in negotiations on North Korea’s nuclear program.  It was originally scheduled to be delivered by Dec. 31.

In return for giving up its nuclear programs, Pyongyang stands to receive energy, security and diplomatic benefits.

A full declaration is “necessary in order for further progress to be made on all of the obligations,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday.

Kim was expected to meet today with South Korean officials, before moving on tomorrow to China and then to North Korea for up to three days.

“We’ll try to make progress on the six-party talks,” he said (Kwang-Tae Kim, Associated Press/Washington Post, Jan. 29).

The six-party process remains intact and the United States is not prepared to threaten North Korea with penalties for failure to release the nuclear declaration, a high-level U.S. official told Reuters.

That just takes you down a different road and I don’t think anyone is ready to take that road,” the official said.

“We are really trying to make this work.  We feel … we’ve actually gotten some success from this process and we don’t want to give up just because we are a couple weeks off schedule,” he added (Arshad Mohammed, Reuters/New York Times, Jan. 28).

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