U.S. officials have criticized China and Russia in recent days for insufficiently pressuring North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions, the Washington Post reported Saturday (see GSN, Feb. 7).

“They’re carrying Pyongyang’s water instead of ours,” said a senior U.S. official.  “They could cut them off, and in six months North Korea would be in dire circumstances,” the official said.

U.S. President George W. Bush said he spoke to Chinese President Jiang Zemin Friday and “reminded him that we have a joint responsibility to uphold the goal that we talked about in Crawford (in October), that goal being a nuclear-weapons-free peninsula; that we have responsibilities, joint responsibilities; that Russia has a responsibility.”

Bush also said that “all options are on the table.”

U.S. officials recently told Beijing that its response to the situation could damage the U.S.-Chinese relations, the Post reported (Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, Feb. 8).

South Korea’s second highest-ranking official, meanwhile, said that he does not believe North Korea has nuclear weapons, the Associated Press reported.

“North Korea is believed to have extracted enough plutonium to make one or two bombs before 1994,” Prime Minister Kim Suk-soo said today.  “Since there has been no confirmation that it actually has produced nuclear weapons, we believe that they do not have any,” he added.

Missile Test Warning

U.S. Ambassador Howard Baker, Washington’s envoy to Tokyo, warned of a possible North Korean missile flight test over Japan, the Associated Press reported today

“We hear reports that they may engage in a missile test, perhaps overflying the island of Japan,” Baker said (Christopher Torchia, Associated Press/Newsday, Feb. 10).

Food Aid Reduced

The U.N. World Food Program, meanwhile, announced it is cutting humanitarian food supplies to hundreds of thousands of North Koreans because of slumping donations (see GSN, Jan. 6).

“What we’re having to do now, because the resourcing situation has not improved, is to start cutting off beneficiaries in the eastern half of the country,” said WFP spokesman Gerald Bourke.  “To have to make cutbacks in that area is extremely serious because these are among the people in North Korea who are suffering most,” he added.

The United States cut its donations to the program over concerns about food distribution, according to Reuters.  The program had planned to feed 6.5 million North Koreans in 2003 (Tamora Vidaillet, Reuters, Feb. 10).

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