U.S. Official Returns to North Korea

A senior U.S. State Department official returned to North Korea today for further talks aimed at breaking the deadlock on shuttering the Stalinist state’s nuclear program, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, May 7).

Sung Kim, the agency’s Korean affairs chief, led a team of experts into Pyongyang for the second time in less than a month.

Talks are expected to focus again on North Korea’s obligation under a 2007 denuclearization agreement to provide a declaration of its atomic activities and holdings.  The document was due Dec. 31 but Washington says Pyongyang has been unwilling to provide a full accounting. 

The dispute has hindered the nuclear dismantlement effort; however, a controversial compromise plan would reportedly require North Korea to detail its plutonium program while only acknowledging U.S. suspicions on uranium enrichment and nuclear proliferation activities (see GSN, April 28).

The North is likely to give the U.S. team some sort of declaration, a South Korean official said.

“North Korea could show a draft declaration so that the team can review its contents,” the official told the Yonhap News Agency.  “We have to see whether a final version will be produced or [if] additional discussions will be needed” (Agence France-Presse/Spacewar.com, May 8).

High-level U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal that the team is expected to receive “boxes of documents” regarding operations of the plutonium-producing Yongbyon nuclear reactor.

The documents would help Washington to determine how much weapon-usable nuclear material North Korea has separated from the reactor’s spent fuel.  U.S. officials suspect the amount is up to 50 kilograms while Pyongyang has said it has removed 30 kilograms.

Kim’s team is set to spend up to three days in Pyongyang and then return with the documents so they can be translated and examined.  The amount of detail in the records would indicate whether North Korea is prepared to provide the full picture of work at Yongbyon. 

If the answer is affirmative, the Bush administration could move to take North Korea off the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.  That has been a major demand from Pyongyang in the denuclearization program.  The regime has indicated its willingness to make significant moves afterward, possibly including demolition of a cooling tower and other facilities at Yongbyon (Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, May 8).

“We hope to see things move forward,” a State Department official told the Financial Times.  “If you have the right kind of information about the operation of the facility, how long it runs for, what goes into it, you can make calculations about whether the other information you have matches up” (Daniel Dombey, Financial Times, May 7).

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