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North Korea: Pyongyang Says Inter-Korean Nuclear Agreement is “Dead North Korea declared a 1991 inter-Korean nuclear agreement to be “a dead document,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said yesterday (see GSN, May 12). Complaining of U.S. aggression, a KCNA statement said “The inter-Korean declaration on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was thus reduced to a dead document due to U.S. vicious hostile policy to stifle the D.P.R.K. with nukes.” North Korea also announced that the goal of a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula was “completely derailed” (Korean Central News Agency, May 13). The Joint Declaration for a Non-Nuclear Korean Peninsula mandated that North and South Korea “will not test, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons.” The pact also dictated that Pyongyang and Seoul only use nuclear power for peaceful purposes and promise not to possess facilities for reprocessing or enriching nuclear material (David McGlinchey, Global Security Newswire, May 13). The United States, meanwhile, refused a request from South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun to forgo the possibility of a pre-emptive military strike on North Korea. U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Washington would keep “all options open,” although the White House claims it has maintained its commitment to a multilateral solution. “We, of course, seek a peaceful diplomatic resolution to the issues involving North Korea,” National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said yesterday. “While not taking any options off the table, we’re working very hard toward that goal — a multilateral solution,” he added (Joseph Curl, Washington Times, May 13). Nuclear Weapon Devices Seized in Hong Kong Meanwhile, Japanese officials are investigating a business run by a Korean resident of Japan for allegedly attempting to export devices to develop nuclear weapons, Asahi Shimbun reported. The devices — en route to North Korea — were seized in Hong Kong. Japanese trade ministry officials filed a criminal complaint April 24 against the company, known as Meishin, for allegedly attempting to export the industrial transformers that could be used to enrich uranium. The Japanese government must sanction the export of such devices, and officials reportedly blocked Meishin’s attempt to export the same devices in November (Asahi Shimbun, May 9).
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