Bush to Discuss North Korea During Asia Trip

U.S. President George W. Bush is expected to discuss North Korea’s nuclear program this week with leaders in South Korea, the first stop in a three-nation Asia tour, the Yonhap News Agency reported (see GSN, Aug. 1).

Bush is scheduled today to leave for Seoul.  He plans afterward to visit Thailand and then head to China for the beginning of the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

“South Korea will be all diplomacy … (we’ll have) a good discussion about common issues,” Bush said last week.

“The two things on my mind now in North Korea are getting rid of the nuclear weapons program, which, as you know, can be very destabilizing.  When North Korea fires rockets or tests, it creates reverberations around the immediate area,” he added.  “Secondly is to … constantly keep in mind the human rights violations that take place there.”

Other topics of discussion are expected to include North Korea’s removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and increasing South Korean involvement in the global effort against terrorism.

The two nations for years have worked with China, Japan and Russia to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear programs.  After various fits and starts, the effort has appeared to pay off, with Pyongyang halting operations at its Yongbyon nuclear complex and, more recently, issuing a declaration of its nuclear efforts and demolishing a reactor cooling tower.

Talks are continuing on a verification plan to ensure that North Korea has come clean about its nuclear activities and holdings.  The ultimate intent is to clear the nation of all nuclear weapons, though observers question whether Pyongyang would give up its arsenal (Yonhap News Agency, Aug. 4).

Negotiators from Pyongyang and Washington conducted a second day of talks on Friday, Kyodo News reported.

Sung Kim, U.S. State Department special envoy to the six-nation negotiations, said after the first session that Ri Gun, North Korean Foreign Ministry chief for U.S. affairs, had offered no reaction to a proposed verification plan.

Both men were expected to leaving Beijing on Saturday (Kyodo News, Aug. 1).

A new book claims that Bush administration hard-liners are to blame for the years-old nuclear standoff with North Korea, Agence France-Presse reported.

U.S. intelligence agencies reported in 2002 to 2003 that North Korea was operating a procurement program for equipment that could be used to enrich uranium, according to Meltdown:  The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis, written by former CNN reporter Mike Chinoy.  However, the agencies had not found that Pyongyang actually possessed a plant for production of nuclear weapons that would contain enriched uranium, the book says.

Conservative elements in the administration ordered then-Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly to confront North Korean officials on the issue, according to Chinoy.  Their hope was to derail the Clinton-era Agreed Framework, a deal intended to halt North Korea’s nuclear weapons effort.

U.S. officials said after Kelly’s October 2002 trip to Pyongyang that leaders in the Stalinist state had acknowledged uranium enrichment efforts.  That claim led to the dissolution of the Agreed Framework; four years later, North Korea would detonate a nuclear weapon (see GSN, Oct. 10, 2006).

Chinoy told AFP that he has not discovered any information indicating that North Korea specifically acknowledged uranium enrichment activities.

“It’s interesting that the transcript remains classified but it appears that a North Korean official used much more ambiguous language and also tabled an offer to negotiate — which Kelly rejected,” said Chinoy, whose research included 14 trips to North Korea and more than 200 interviews.

“There are parallels and differences obviously with the way the intelligence became a source of controversy in Iraq but unlike Iraq, the actual intelligence that the Americans had in North Korea in the spring and summer of 2002 was pretty solid,” he added.  “But the combination of internal politics and media generalization … created the impression that … was somewhat different from the reality”

Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, who succeeded Kelly as top negotiator in the nuclear issue, moved Washington back toward diplomacy by meeting directly with North Korean officials without approval from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and by cutting hard-liners out of the process, the book says.

“There is an irony here that the hard-liners attempt to pressure the North Koreans to give up the bomb, in fact, created circumstances where the North became a nuclear power and made the whole process of undoing their nuclear program much, much harder,” Chinoy said (Agence France-Presse/Spacewar.com, Aug. 4).

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