North Korea said today it would not give up its nuclear weapons program until the United States provided a light-water reactor for an atomic energy program, the Los Angeles Times reported (see GSN, Sept. 19).
Pyongyang yesterday signed an agreement to end its nuclear weapons program in return for energy and economic assistance, security guarantees from the United States and potential normalization of relations with Tokyo and Washington. The other five nations involved in the negotiations with North Korea — China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States — agreed to discuss providing Pyongyang with a light-water reactor for generating electricity “at an appropriate time.” However, North Korea’s official news agency today announced that “the U.S. should not even dream of the issue of [North Korea’s] dismantlement of its nuclear deterrent before providing” a light-water reactor. The United States dismissed North Korea’s statement. “This is not the agreement that they signed, and we’ll give them some time to reflect,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said last night. Pyongyang’s demand is “unacceptable,” said Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura. Some experts said North Korea’s statement did not undermine yesterday’s agreement, but would be likely to complicate the next round of talks in November. “I don’t think it blows up the deal. What it does is underline how difficult the process remains,” said Robert Einhorn, an international security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Einhorn said the agreement contained only a vague list of shared principles, according to the Times. “This wasn’t a big, substantive reconciliation,” he said. “This was an agreement to set aside a disagreement and move ahead with the talks.” Thee United States should have learned from past difficulties to be more specific in any agreement with North Korea, said Toshimitsu Shigemura, a North Korea expert at Japan’s Waseda University. Pyongyang is known for adding new demands when nearing an agreement, he said. “The other party wants to avoid a breakdown, so they can’t reject that,” Shigemura said. “The U.S. and Japan were weak. They shouldn’t have given in, even if the negotiations broke down.” Chinese analysts were uncommonly critical of their nation’s ally after today’s demand. “It is very stupid for North Korea to ask to change a just-signed deal,” said Jin Linbo, Asia-Pacific director with the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing. “It will now be criticized by all parties, not just the U.S.” (Demick/Efron, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 20). Beijing today expressed hope that all parties would meet their commitments in yesterday’s deal, Reuters reported. “(We) believe all parties will seriously fulfill their promises with a responsible attitude,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang (Reuters I, Sept. 20). Some nuclear experts said North Korea’s demand for light-water reactors made no sense in light of the country’s chronic energy shortage and decaying power grid, Agence France-Presse reported today. The reactors could take up to a decade to build and their output would overload the North’s circuits, said independent nuclear expert Kang Jungmin (Agence France-Presse, Sept. 20). South Korea said it would work to bridge the differences between North Korea and the United States, Reuters reported. “North Korea and the U.S. may push and pull over the wording of ‘appropriate time,’ but the South Korean government’s role is to mediate that in a moderate way,” said South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun. “South Korea has its own position. We are going to work to bring North Korea and the U.S. closer to our position,” said South Korea’s top envoy to the talks in Beijing, Song Min-soon (Reuters II, Sept. 20). Both the United States and North Korea had reservations about the agreement before signing it yesterday, the New York Times reported today. The North Korean delegation was unhappy with the text drafted by China but willing to sign, said one senior U.S. official. “They said, ‘Here’s the text, and we’re not going to change it, and we suggest you don’t walk away,’” said the official. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, chief U.S. negotiator, said Washington remained opposed to mentioning a light-water reactor in the agreement but that China included in anyway. The United States also opposed the ambiguous term “appropriate” to depict the timing of such a reward. Beijing, Moscow and Seoul, however, were content with that language. Beijing, meanwhile, increased pressure on Washington by indicating that the United States would be blamed for any breakdown of the talks. “At one point they told us that we were totally isolated on this and that they would go to the press,” the senior administration official said. Several officials told the Times that U.S. President George W. Bush was preoccupied with other issues and that the Beijing agreement provided a way to avoid a confrontation with Pyongyang. In addition, Bush had concluded several years ago that there were no acceptable military options for fully destroying Pyongyang’s nuclear programs, according to participants involved in the discussions. The agreement omits any mention of Washington’s accusation that the North is running a clandestine uranium enrichment program to its plutonium program (Kahn/Sanger, New York Times, Sept. 20). Some experts have said that Pyongyang is more interested in protecting the alleged uranium program, the Times reported today. “It’s a huge hole in the agreement,” said Art Brown, former chief CIA officer in charge of North Korea. “If they don’t acknowledge they have it — and if they have buried it in some cave — we’ll say it’s included in the deal and they’ll say there is nothing there to give up.” U.S. intelligence and State Department officials yesterday began reviving an old plan for inspecting all of North Korea’s nuclear installations, the Times reported, but access to the country for such inspections remains to be negotiated in the coming months. “We will need to travel throughout the country, and be given unhindered access,” said one senior Bush administration official, who said he backs yesterday’s agreement. “Can you imagine the North Koreans letting us do that?” (Sanger, New York Times, Sept. 20). Meanwhile, Russia announced its readiness to build a nuclear energy reactor for North Korea in the wake of yesterday’s agreement, the Associated Press reported yesterday. “We do build nuclear power stations abroad, we could do the same in North Korea,” said Federal Atomic Energy Agency chief Alexander Rumyantsev. “Everyone knows about the energy shortage in North Korea, therefore we must act quickly” (Associated Press/ExpressIndia.com, Sept. 19).
By Greg Webb
Global Security Newswire
VIENNA — With hopes for reaching a consensus apparently lost, European Union diplomats here haggled today to find the support needed to report Iran’s nuclear activities to the U.N. Security Council (see GSN, Sept. 19). Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board have been debating the terms of an EU text that calls for notifying the council of Iran’s “failure in a number of instances” to comply with its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty commitments. The EU push represents a major change for France, Germany and the United Kingdom, which earlier this year resisted U.S. calls for similar action against Iran. At that time the three nations were in active talks to persuade Tehran to end its uranium enrichment program, which U.S. officials believe is the heart of a nuclear weapons program. Since acknowledging its long-secret nuclear program in 2003, Iran has persistently said its aims are peaceful. The negotiations failed in August, however, after Tehran withdrew and claimed that EU demands were excessive. Iran elected to end its voluntary suspension of enrichment activities by restarting a uranium conversion site, and the European nations subsequently joined the U.S. push to refer the situation to the U.N. Security Council. That body has the power to take enforcement actions that the international nuclear agency here lacks, including the imposition of economic sanctions. In an early draft resolution circulated today among some of the agency’s board members, the European nations called for IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei “to report to all members of the agency, and to the Security Council … Iran’s many failures and breaches of its obligations to comply with its NPT safeguards agreement.” The text says that “history of concealment of Iran’s nuclear activities [and] the nature of these activities” justify notifying the Security Council, “the organ bearing the main responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” The text recommends no Security Council action other than “making clear to Iran” that the nuclear controversy would best be resolved if Tehran complied with IAEA requests for more information about and access to Iran’s nuclear program. No ConsensusSupport for this text, while drawing majority support from the 35-member board, is far from universal and lacks the backing of both Russia and China, two key nuclear powers with veto power on the Security Council. In addition, “there are at least three or four very important countries on the board that so far have not committed themselves to supporting the EU-3 approach,” a Western official disclosed today. Nevertheless, the European nations have pressed forward and appear willing to seek board approval by a vote rather than by traditional consensus. All previous board decisions on nuclear safeguards have been adopted by consensus, so new ground could be broken here this week. “It will set a bad precedent if that happens,” said a second Western diplomat familiar with agency affairs who opposes reporting the matter to the council. Taking a vote would force some nations to come out against the measure, or abstain, and could wrongly imply that those nations do not support nuclear nonproliferation. The first Western official, however, pressed for council referral. “Our objective is to reinforce and strengthen the work of the IAEA in Iran, not to replace the IAEA and not to take the action away from the IAEA, but to have the higher moral, legal and political authority of the U.N. Security Council brought to bear [and] pressure applied to Iran,” the official said. Still, the second Western diplomat expressed concern that Iran could respond to a Security Council report by ending the voluntary measures it has taken to grant the agency access to its nuclear facilities. Iran has recently hinted that it could take severe steps if Western nations refuse to recognize its right to establish a domestic nuclear fuel production capability. Calling pressure to abandon it nuclear program “an apartheid regime,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reaffirmed in a U.N. speech Saturday that Iran’s nuclear efforts are peaceful, but warned that “if some try to impose their will on the Iranian people through resort to language of force and threat with Iran, we will reconsider our entire approach to the nuclear issue.” Moreover, Tehran’s top nuclear negotiator threatened today to stop adhering to the Additional Protocol to Iran’s safeguards agreement with the agency, according to the BBC. Iran has signed but not ratified the protocol, which allows the agency to conduct more intrusive nuclear monitoring than standard safeguards permit. This week’s board meeting was expected to end Friday, but could last longer as the IAEA annual conference begins next week, so many diplomatic delegations will remain in Vienna.
By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — The United States considers itself halfway through defusing nuclear weapon threats represented by countries in an expanded “axis of evil,” Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control Stephen Rademaker said today (see GSN, Aug. 17). “The Iraq dimension has been addressed. The Libya dimension has been addressed. We are left with Iran and North Korea,” Rademaker said at a panel discussion at Georgetown University. President George W. Bush originally named Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the “axis of evil.” Rademaker said subsequent revelations about Tripoli’s WMD programs demonstrated that Libya should have been named as the fourth member. In 2003, Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qadhafi renounced weapons of mass destruction and revealed the extent his WMD programs — a consequence of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Rademaker said (see GSN, Sept. 19). “He very quickly came to the conclusion that he did not want to end up like Saddam Hussein,” Rademaker said. Former U.S. State Department WMD specialist Robert Gallucci, who is dean of the university’s foreign service school and moderated the discussion, disputed Rademaker’s implication that Iraq had been a nuclear threat comparable to the other three. Gallucci added that the Iraq war had the negative effect of further convincing North Korea of the need for nuclear weapons to deter the United States from attacking. Rademaker portrayed the “axis of evil” list as a guide to countries that might transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists. Terrorists might also make use of “loose nukes” originating in Russia or Pakistan, he said, defending the Bush administration’s progress in threat reduction programs designed to reduce that possibility. “The Bush administration takes criticism for not doing more on this problem, but it is difficult to do more,” Rademaker said. The assistant secretary said mistrust on both sides — U.S. lawmakers’ concerns about indirectly funding the Russian military, and Russian suspicions of U.S. spying under cover of threat reduction — limits what can be accomplished in U.S.-Russian threat reduction programs. “This is the fundamental problem that we confront,” he said, calling the problem “more difficult than some would wish to concede.” Representative Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee’s national security subcommittee, voiced concern that Russia is not spending U.S. threat reduction aid as intended. “It’s frankly not spent. If we get 50 cents on the dollar for what we give, I’ll be amazed,” Shays said. Faced with criticism from Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Rademaker defended the administration’s conduct of the May Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference. “I don’t think we dropped the ball. I think you’re failing to appreciate the enormity of the problem,” Rademaker said, calling the consensus basis of the treaty review an obstacle to progress (see GSN, May 31). Replied Schiff, “The performance and outcomes of the administration at the NPT conference was a zero.”
By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — A potential U.S.-India nuclear cooperation deal announced in July offers potential nonproliferation benefits by formalizing existing Indian policies against spreading nuclear weapons technology and by addressing “today’s” proliferation concerns, a senior Bush administration official said today, (see GSN, Sept. 9). Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control Stephen Rademaker said India has not been a proliferation concern. “We thought it was important to formalize India’s commitment to nonproliferation,” he said, responding to a question at an event hosted by Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies. In addition, he said, “focus” has shifted away from encouraging universal membership in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty toward trying to prevent treaty members from obtaining nuclear weapons capability and potentially sharing it with terrorists. “We’d like to enlist India as a partner in focusing on those aspects of nonproliferation,” he said. Spurgeon Keeney, a former deputy director of the disbanded Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, was critical of that argument. “He’s articulating an administration position that’s hostile to the treaty and wants unilateral U.S. determination of what’s right and wrong. If you have treaties, they should be applied across the board,” he said today in a telephone interview. ‘Today’s’ Proliferation FocusRademaker said India — a non-NPT state — has demonstrated “responsible stewardship of their technologies and has not as far as we know been responsible for intentionally transferring such technology to other governments and to nonstate actors. And there’s no record of covert networks operating out of India, engaging in such transactions.” As part of the deal, he noted, India would adhere to the guidelines of the multilateral Nuclear Suppliers Group for exports of nuclear-related items. That would be a “huge deal,” Rademaker said, because India has been a lead voice of the United Nations nonaligned movement opposing export controls, arguing they are a means to keep the underdeveloped world impoverished. He added that India also would enact a law limiting the export of sensitive technologies, has agreed to separate its military and civilian energy nuclear facilities, putting the latter under IAEA safeguards, and would sign on to an Additional Protocol for its civilian nuclear facilities. “So the judgment of the Bush administration is that on balance, this is a plus for dealing with today’s nonproliferation problems, which as I said is less a matter of rolling back nuclear weapons programs outside the NPT than it is of keeping those who are today non-nuclear weapons states nuclear weapons states free and also keeping these kinds of weapons” out of the hands of terrorists, he said. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Ca.), also on the panel, called the deal’s potential nonproliferation benefits “extremely limited” and said the administration’s reason for the agreement had “very little to do with nonproliferation [and] has a lot more to do with a desire to have an effective counterweight to China.” U.S. officials reportedly have said that closer relations with India could help it become a military counterweight to China in the region. Schiff said the deal could actually harm nonproliferation efforts because casting India in the role of China’s counterweight could encourage New Delhi’s reliance on nuclear weapons. The deal would not restrict India’s nuclear weapons program. The deal further could undermine efforts to gain Chinese help in pressuring North Korea to disarm and referring Iran to the U.N. Security Council over a suspected nuclear weapons program, he said. “If you were China, would you be motivated that the U.S. has struck a deal with India because it wants to provide a counterweight to China?” he said.
U.S. President George Bush last week reaffirmed his commitment to work toward nuclear energy cooperation deal with India, The Electricity Daily reported (see GSN, Sept. 16). In a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly conference in New York, Bush said he hoped Congress would “adjust U.S. laws and policies” to allow for transfer of U.S. nuclear technology to New Delhi, according to Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran. Singh said Indian lawmakers have offered their full support for the nuclear cooperation plan announced during Singh’s visit to Washington in July (see GSN, July 19). Bush and Singh differed, however, on Iran’s nuclear program. While New Delhi opposes WMD proliferation, Singh told Bush that the standoff with Tehran should be resolved through further diplomacy (The Electricity Daily, Sept. 20).
The United States officially deactivated its Peacekeeper nuclear missile yesterday at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Aug. 17). The base housed the last 50 Peacekeepers, also known as MX missiles, deployed in the United States. Washington began removing the 71-foot-tall weapons from its ICBM arsenal in 2002, AP reported. The missiles were retired at yesterday’s ceremony. “The Cold War was won, and the Peacekeeper helped win it,” said Ronald Sega, undersecretary of the Air Force (Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Sept. 19).
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