Rice to Focus on North Korea in Asia Trip

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to focus on the North Korean nuclear standoff during her trip through Asia this week, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Feb. 22).

Rice was in Seoul today for the inauguration of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.  She is expected to conduct talks with officials there and then move on to China and Japan.

Rice indicated she would not hold talks with North Korean officials, saying any such meeting would not be “useful at this time,” United Press International reported (United Press International, Feb. 23).

North Korea agreed last year to give up its nuclear programs in exchange for energy, security and diplomatic benefits.  The regime to date has halted operations at its Yongbyon nuclear complex and begun disabling three key facilities.

However, progress on the deal faltered this year after Pyongyang failed to submit a full declaration of its nuclear activities that met U.S. expectations.

“We need a complete declaration from the North Koreans about both their proliferation activities, their current plutonium program — which they are in the process of disabling — but also the HEU (highly enriched uranium) program, that they need to make clear what has happened there,” Rice said Friday, according to AFP.

Washington also wants North Korea to provide information on its reported support for a suspected Syrian nuclear program (Agence France-Presse/Spacewar.com, Feb. 24).

Washington is looking at whether North Korea might offer information on proliferation and uranium enrichment activities in a document that would remain secret, a senior U.S. official told Reuters.

Pyongyang must provide a full declaration all at once if it wants to be removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and be freed from penalties under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the official said.

“The difficulty with that is that the North is quite clear that … their expectation is that they would be removed from the terrorism list and TWEA.  And those things are really impossible to consider without this issue settled,” he said (Arshad Mohammed, Reuters/Yahoo!News, Feb. 22).

North Korean officials denied any involvement in construction of a purported Syrian nuclear reactor that was the target of an Israeli air strike in September, a U.S. expert said last week following his return from Pyongyang (see GSN, Feb. 22).

“Their comment was, we don’t have anything to do with Syria in the nuclear arena,” said Siegfried Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The regime also said it had not received any nuclear technology from the black market operation once led by top Pakistani atomic scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan,  the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Feb. 11).

“When I bring up the Pakistan connection, they say, ‘That’s your story, we haven’t dealt with the Pakistanis on uranium enrichment,’” said Hecker, who made his annual trip to North Korea from Feb. 12-16 (Scott Lindlaw, Associated Press I/Fresno Bee, Feb. 22).

A foreign media operation for the first time last week was allowed into North Korea’s sole operating nuclear reactor, AP reported.

In footage from broadcaster APTN, workers are seen removing spent nuclear fuel from the 5-megawatt reactor as part of the ongoing disabling process.  The chief engineer at the Yongbyon complex acknowledged that the pace of work has slowed.

“It has been slowed down.  Especially the discharge of fuel rods from the core has been slowed down,” said Yu Sun Chol.  “We think the main reason for that is that the United States and other six-party countries, they have not fulfilled their commitments for the agreement of the six-party talks” (Associated Press II/Detroit News, Feb. 22).

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