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North Korea: South Korea Rejects Security Council Intervention South Korea’s foreign minister yesterday dismissed U.S. efforts to bring the nuclear standoff on the Korean Peninsula to the U.N. Security Council (see GSN, July 29). “I think it better for us to resolve this outside the U.N. framework,” Yoon Young-kwan said. Yoon said that Security Council efforts would only dissuade North Korea from abandoning its nuclear ambitions. He acknowledged, however, that a North Korean response to U.S. proposals on peace talks has been unhurried. “The timing of the answers seems to be a little slower than we expected,” he added (Ward/Mallet, Financial Times, July 30). A South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said, however, that Seoul was not opposed to U.N. involvement but was wary of the timing of such a move. The issue has not caused a rift between the United States and South Korea, according to Kim Sun-heung (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, July 30). U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton is scheduled to hold talks today with South Korean officials on the nuclear crisis (Seo Hyun-jin, Korea Herald, July 30). According to a top South Korean foreign policy adviser, however, North Korea’s demands for a nonaggression treaty could hamper peace negotiations. Washington is not likely to provide Pyongyang with such a treaty, said Ban Ki-moon, a presidential adviser on foreign policy (Soo-jeong Lee, Associated Press, July 30). The United States is developing a proposal to calm North Korea’s security fears, but it will only put the idea forward during multilateral talks, Reuters reported. “The United States is preparing a ‘concept paper,’ but it will only be shown to North Korea at five-nation talks,” a senior Japanese official said today (Teruaki Ueno, Reuters, July 30).
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