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North Korea Says It Will Rejoin NPT, Allow Inspections Once Nuclear Standoff is Resolved
North Korea has announced its intention rejoin the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty upon resolution of the international dispute over its nuclear weapons program, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday (see GSN, July 29). North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun was quoted by state media as saying that Pyongyang would rejoin the pact and allow international inspections “once the nuclear issue is resolved smoothly” (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, July 31). Paek also presented Pyongyang’s conditions for such a resolution: North Korea’s removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism; an end to U.S. sanctions on North Korea; and removal of U.S. nuclear weapons that Pyongyang has said are deployed in South Korea, Reuters reported (Ueno/Kim, Reuters, July 31). The U.S. and North Korean delegations at six-nation nuclear talks in Beijing held two more bilateral meetings over the weekend to discuss the wording of a revised Chinese proposal on developing a framework to end the nuclear crisis, AFP reported. “Overnight, the Chinese host put together the second draft,” Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. delegate to the talks, said today. “My delegation did some internal discussions about it, seeing what points we are more pleased with, what points we’re still concerned about,” he said. Japan also raised objections to the initial version because it did not refer to the abductions of Japanese nationals by North Korea, Jiji Press quoted a Japanese delegation source as saying. In addition, Tokyo objected to the document because it did not use the term nuclear “dismantlement” as sought by the United States and Japan. The draft did, however, propose security guarantees for North Korea, a primary concern to Pyongyang, the Kyodo news agency reported (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Aug. 1). Hill seemed to indicate that Washington might be willing to allow Pyongyang to retain an atomic energy program if it rejoined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, AFP reported. “We don’t challenge the fact that they have the rights to this under the treaty, but we challenge whether they should be exercising these rights,” said Hill. “The question is how that will work and when that will work and frankly how it will work with other parties,” he said (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, July 29). North Korea has rejected a South Korean offer of electricity aid in return for Pyongyang abandoning its nuclear program. The North is also demanding nuclear energy reactors, Reuters reported. “The North says the electricity proposal is conditional on the dismantling of nuclear programs and is no different from the existing (U.S.) dismantle-first demand,” the South Korean JoongAng daily quoted an official in Seoul as saying (Reuters, July 30). Russia, meanwhile, offered to cooperate with Pyongyang on nuclear energy program if the North were to rejoin the treaty, ITAR-Tass reported. An atomic energy program would help North Korea “resolve acute energy problems,” said Valeriy Yermolov, deputy head of the Russian delegation in Beijing. However, “international law and Russian legislation do not allow cooperation even in the peaceful nuclear energy sector with a state which is not a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency and has not signed an agreement on guarantees with the IAEA,” Yermolov said (ITAR-Tass/BBC Monitoring, Aug. 1).
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