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Washington Expects Beijing to Pressure Pyongyang on Nuclear Program, Cheney Says
The United States continues to look to China to press for an end to North Korea’s nuclear program, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said in an interview that aired yesterday (see GSN, May 27). “The Chinese need to understand that it’s incumbent upon them to be major players here,” Cheney told CNN’s Larry King Live. Cheney described North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as “one of the world’s most irresponsible leaders,” and characterized the country as a police state with widespread poverty and malnutrition, the Associated Press reported. “And [Kim] obviously wants to throw his weight around and become a nuclear power,” Cheney said (Associated Press/Yahoo!News, May 29). Meanwhile, South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Song Min-soon and presidential security adviser Kwon Jin-ho departed for Washington today to lay the groundwork for a June summit expected to focus on North Korea’s nuclear efforts, Agence France-Presse reported. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun is expected to meet June 10 with U.S. President George W. Bush, according to White House spokesman Scott McClellan (Agence France-Presse/SpaceWar.com, May 31). Meanwhile, Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization monitoring stations would be able to detect even a small nuclear explosion if North Korea conducted a nuclear test, the organization’s executive secretary, Wolfgang Hoffmann, said Saturday. “I am quite confident we would be able to detect,” a test, he told Kyodo News (Kyodo/Yahoo!News, May 28). Humanitarian relief agencies should redouble their efforts to provide food aid to North Korea regardless of the level of progress on the diplomatic front, aid officials told AP today. “Whether there is progress or not in the six-party talks, we feel that as humanitarian agencies, we need to continue to provide assistance to the North Korean people who are genuinely in need,” said Victor Hsu of the Church World Service. “Those of us who visit regularly see that the need is very immense” (Audra Ang, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, May 31).
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