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North Korea to Demand Withdrawal of Alleged U.S. Nuclear Weapons From South Korea
North Korea plans to demand that the United States withdraw nuclear weapons allegedly deployed in South Korea at next week’s multilateral talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear program, Interfax reported yesterday (see GSN, July 20). “If the final goal of the talks is the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, then … the process should involve both sides simultaneously — North Korea and the U.S.A.,” a North Korean diplomatic source said. Pyongyang also wants written security guarantees from the United States, he said. He added that Pyongyang “cannot rely on verbal collective guarantees by other parties involved in the talks even if they are put on paper” because the United States “may, under various pretexts, subsequently renounce obligations which have not been made legal by a bilateral agreement” (Interfax/BBC Monitoring, July 20). Meanwhile, Tokyo announced today it was determined to raise the issue of Japanese nationals abducted by Pyongyang during the Cold War, the Associated Press reported. Both Pyongyang and Seoul have argued against including the issue in next week’s talks. “It may be Japan has been saying things North Korea is not so happy to hear, but we will bring up the kidnapping issue,” said Yu Kameoka, a spokesman for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Japanese Foreign Ministry official Akitaka Saiki departed for Beijing yesterday to seek Chinese assistance in resolving the abductions issue, Kyodo reported (Mari Yamaguchi, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, July 21). While the five nations negotiating with North Korea all have a “slightly different perspective” on the talks, they agree that Pyongyang’s nuclear program is a threat, said Thomas Schieffer, U.S. ambassador to Japan. “I think at the end, the problem will not be whether the five parties are speaking with one voice. The problem would be whether or not North Korea is willing to forgo nuclear weapons,” said Schieffer. He added that the matter of the Japanese abductions was important but should be a secondary issue at the talks. “The issue of nuclear weapons is not the only issue that the United States has with North Korea. There are all sorts of issues, and the abductee issue is one of those that we have great concerns” over, Schieffer said (Agence France-Presse/SpaceWar.com, July 20).
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