|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
 |
 |
    |
|
|
|||
 |
|
||
|
|||
|
|
|
|
||||||||
|
North Korea: U.S. Officials Expect Pyongyang to Begin Reprocessing Soon White House officials and intelligence experts expect North Korea to activate its nuclear reprocessing plant in the next few weeks, the New York Times reported Saturday (see GSN, Feb. 28). Officials said the reactivation of the plant, where North Korea could separate plutonium from spent nuclear fuel, could be timed to coincide with the beginning of military action in Iraq. “Once they start reprocessing, it’s a bomb a month from now until summer,” said a senior official. Current and former defense and security officials have told the White House that the current policy — of refusing negotiations until North Korea begins to disarm — is failing and direct negotiations might be necessary, the Times reported. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Congress last month that the United States should engage in “a bilateral discussion” with North Korea under “a multilateral umbrella, of any sort” (see GSN, Feb. 5). “Off-the-Wall Angry” Armitage also commended the 1994 Agreed Framework that froze North Korean plutonium production activities until this year, but his comments left U.S. President George W. Bush “off-the-wall angry,” according to a senior administration official. Several White House officials supported that account of Bush’s reaction. Following Armitage’s testimony, Bush told Secretary of State Colin Powell and other officials that he was forbidding public discussion of direct talks with North Korea, the Times reported (David Sanger, New York Times, March 1). Nuclear Reactor Project Paused Meanwhile, South Korea, Japan and the United States recently decided to delay acquiring key components needed to build two nuclear reactors in North Korea, the Korea Times reported today. The countries are all executive board members of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, the institution created to build two nuclear reactors as part of the 1994 agreement. A senior Korean Foreign Affairs-Trade Ministry official called the move a slowdown in the project, which will be followed with an official statement on the future of the effort (Korea Times, March 3). “No final agreement has yet been made whether to slow down the whole project or part of it, or to freeze it. This will be discussed according to North Korea’s future moves,” a Korean official said yesterday (Seo Hyun-jin, Korea Herald, March 3).
| ||||||||||
Back to top
