During a meeting Sunday, Chinese President Hu Jintao told U.S. President George W. Bush that North Korea is willing to participate in multilateral talks to defuse the nuclear standoff on the Korean Peninsula, Kyodo News Agency reported today (see GSN, June 4).

North Korea has long said it wants one-on-one talks with the United States, while Washington has insisted on a multilateral format.

Hu and Bush met during the Group of Eight summit in Evian, France.  Hu told Bush that North Korea wants “some sort of bilateral contacts as the price for a multilateral meeting,” according to a Bush administration official.

“If it means the North Koreans sitting at a table with two or three or four other parties, look us in the eye and say what’s on their mind, if you want to consider that a bilateral contact, then, sure, that will happen,” according to the official (Kyodo News Agency, June 5).

U.S. Plans to Consolidate

The United States will move a key military facility out of Seoul by the end of the year, United Press International reported today.  The 37,000 U.S. military personnel in South Korea are stationed in roughly 100 bases throughout the country.  As part of the developing plan, all U.S. forces will be consolidated into three large bases south of Seoul, according to Seoul’s Assistant Defense Minister for Policy Cha Young-koo.

U.S. defense officials also plan to move 15,000 U.S. military personnel away from the North Korean border in a two-stage plan that will unfold over several years, according to UPI (Jong-Heon Lee, United Press International, June 5).

U.S. Will Not Pay, Bolton Says

Meanwhile, U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said yesterday that Washington will not pay for North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

“We continue to insist that North Korea must terminate its nuclear weapons program completely, verifiably and irreversibly,” Bolton said.  “And there will be no inducements to get them to do so,” he added.

Bolton said that paying North Korea would encourage other countries around the world to develop nuclear weapons.

“We are not going to pay for the elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program — a program the North should never have begun in the first place,” he said.

Bolton added, however, that “assistance would be provided to North Korea” if Pyongyang “addresses concerns about its WMD and missile program and exports, as well as other issues, including its conventional force disposition, narcotics trafficking, human rights and its continued sponsorship of terrorism outside its borders” (Agence France-Presse, June 5).

Defector Says South Korean Officials Used Intimidation Tactics

A North Korean defector claims in a Wall Street Journal commentary that South Korean officials intimidated his wife after he testified to a U.S. congressional committee on Pyongyang’s weapons programs (see GSN, May 21).

Using the pseudonym Bok Koo Lee, the defector wrote that South Korean officials have been pressuring him not to divulge information since he arrived in South Korea four years ago.

“It soon became obvious that they feared my testimony because it might jeopardize South Korea’s ‘sunshine policy,’ which seeks to keep the North’s repressive regime in power in order to avoid the economic consequences to the South were it to collapse,” Bok wrote.

Bok alleged that North Korean agents were in Iraq during the first Gulf War on “an operational war basis for Saddam Hussein.”  He wrote that he had traveled to Iran to test launch a missile equipped with a new guidance system.

Bok also wrote that 90 percent of electronic and guidance material for North Korean missiles comes from Japanese exports.  Implicating a tentative U.S. ally, Bok wrote that 60 Russian scientists work in North Korea to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

South Korean officials stopped harassing Bok’s wife after several U.S. lawmakers intervened, according to Bok.

Senators Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) and Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) stepped in and stopped the intimidation, “for the moment,” he wrote (Bok Ku Lee, Wall Street Journal, June 5).

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