U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday denied reports that the White House has accepted the idea of a nuclear-armed North Korea, but he said direct negotiations would yield little (see GSN, March 6).

“I don’t know of any basis for the report that we have decided to live with a nuclearized North Korea,” Powell said in testimony to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and State.  “We’re working with all of our friends in the region to see that North Korea does not become nuclearized, or even more nuclearized than it may be,” Powell said.

Powell complained that direct negotiations were being depicted as an easy way out of the current nuclear standoff.

“Now, every time you pick up the paper in the morning it says, ‘Oh, a quick solution is just — why don’t you just call them up and go talk to them?’  Well, that’s what happened some years ago and we came up with the Agreed Framework.  The Agreed Framework served a useful purpose in capping the Yongbyon facility so that it wasn’t producing any more fissionable material.  And I give credit to the Agreed Framework for having done that for eight years,” he said.

“But at the same time, the potential for developing fissionable material was left in place,” he added.

Powell said the answer now lies in multilateral negotiations and involvement of regional powers.

“We’re making it clear to the North Koreans that we do want to talk, but we want to talk in a multilateral forum,” he said.  “It is not just a problem between the United States and the D.P.R.K.  That’s the way they want to see it.  It’s a problem with the D.P.R.K. and the international community; the D.P.R.K. and the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Powell added.

He also testified that the United States is pushing a diplomatic solution the problem.  Washington wants a peaceful resolution to the crisis and is involved in several initiatives to start a multilateral dialogue, Powell said.

“Some of them are very, very quietly underway,” he added (Federal New Service transcript, March 6).

Experts testifying elsewhere in Congress yesterday, however, called for direct dialogue.

Even if nuclear-armed North Korea were prevented from exporting nuclear material, the regime could collapse and “loose nukes could fall into the hands of warlords or factions,” said Ashton Carter, a former assistant defense secretary and now a Harvard professor.

“The half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,400 years,” Carter told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday.  “I don’t know how long the North Korean regime will last, but it’s not that long,” he said (Sonni Efron, Los Angeles Times, March 7).

President George W. Bush echoed Powell’s comments during his press conference last night.

“This is a regional issue.  I say a regional issue because there’s a lot of countries that have got a direct stake into whether or not North Korea has nuclear weapons,” Bush said.  “We’ve got a stake as to whether North Korea has a nuclear weapon.  China clearly has a stake as to whether or not North Korea has a nuclear weapon.  South Korea, of course, has a stake.  Japan has got a significant stake as to whether or not North Korea has a nuclear weapon.  Russia has a stake.  So, therefore, I think the best way to deal with this is in multilateral fashion, by convincing those nations they must stand up to their responsibility,” he added.

Bush said he was buoyed by the fact that Chinese President Jiang Zemin supported a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula (White House transcript, March 6).

Possible U.S. Pullout From South Korea

The United States is examining options for redistributing, or removing, military forces in South Korea, according to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.  New South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun has asked the United States to “look at how we might rebalance our relationship and our force structure,” Rumsfeld said.

“I suspect that what we’ll do is we’ll end up making some adjustments there,” he said.  The Pentagon can make such a move, Rumsfeld said, because South Korea’s armed forces provide “the kind of upfront deterrent that is needed” (Rowan Scarborough, Washington Times, March 7).

“Whether the forces would come home or whether they’d move farther south on the peninsula or whether they’d move to some neighboring area are the kinds of things that are being sorted out,” he added.

The Pentagon is conducting a similar re-evaluation with its forces in Western Europe, Rumsfeld said.  The potential realignment is not a result of changing political situations or the U.S. relationship with South Korea and Germany, defense officials said (Jaime McIntyre/Reuters, CNN.com, March 7).

KEDO Work Continues

The political standoff has not, however, stopped the preparation of the two nuclear reactors that were to be built for North Korea allowed under the 1994 Agreed Framework.

“Work continues at the site,” said Brian Kremer, a spokesman for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization.  The project is 20 percent complete, he told Global Security Newswire today.

The site preparation is funded by loans from South Korea and Japan, and is not contingent on U.S. financial support, according to Kremer (see GSN, Feb. 4; David McGlinchey, Global Security Newswire, March 7).

The Bush administration has so far passed up opportunities to terminate the Agreed Framework, despite White House criticism of the agreement, which was signed under former President Bill Clinton, the Boston Globe reported.  In May 2001, the Bush administration authorized the transfer of some nuclear power safety information to North Korea.

“They’ve engaged in rhetorical hostility, but policy continuity with the Clinton administration’s North Korea policy from the very beginning,” said Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass.).

In a March 4 letter, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham told Markey that the department had sent 300 nuclear-related documents to North Korea, the Globe reported.  The documents include a safety analysis report, training documents, quality assurance documents and construction documents, according to the Globe.

In light of the current crisis, however, the White House is “now considering appropriate courses of action, possibly to include suspension or revocation of the May 2001 authorization,” according to Abraham (Wayne Washington, Boston Globe, March 7).

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