The United States might offer North Korea a formal nonaggression pact if Pyongyang agrees to dismantle its nuclear weapons programs, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, July 21).
During talks last week, U.S. officials told Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo that they are willing to hold a second round of talks with China and North Korea, according to the Post. The United States is insisting, however, that the talks be immediately followed by broader negotiations, which would include South Korea, Japan and possibly Russia, U.S. officials said.
During the broader talks, U.S. officials would present a plan to end the crisis on the Korean Peninsula. Bush administration officials are currently debating the final form of the plan.
A White House official, however, denied that the U.S. approach had shifted.
“As we have said many times, we will not submit to blackmail or grant inducements for the North to live up to its obligations,” he said (Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, July 22).
U.S. President George W. Bush, meanwhile, dismissed reports that North Korea might have developed a second facility to reprocess spent nuclear fuel rods into plutonium.
“The desire by the North Koreans to convince the world that they’re in the process of developing a nuclear arsenal is nothing new,” Bush said.
Bush’s comments are in sharp contrast to his earlier statements on North Korea’s nuclear development and his rhetoric on Iraq’s alleged weapons programs, the New York Times reported (David Sanger, New York Times, July 22).
Some officials, however, are casting doubt on reports of a second reprocessing site, the Washington Times reported. U.S. officials said that krypton 85 — a byproduct of plutonium production — detected at the border between the Koreas probably came from North Korea’s known reprocessing site at Yongbyon, according to the Washington Times (Bill Gertz, Washington Times, July 22).
The State Department said the report on the second site was uncertain.
“We receive a steady stream of information on various types of activity in North Korea, much of which is unsubstantiated and can’t be confirmed, and I would put certainly the one report over the weekend into that category,” State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said (Yonhap News Agency/BBC Monitoring, July 22).
North Korea Could Have Eight Nuclear Weapons by End of Year
Former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry said yesterday that North Korea could develop up to eight nuclear weapons by the end of this year, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, July 15).
Perry also said that North Korea could produce five to 10 nuclear weapons next year.
“I consider that this poses an unacceptable risk to our security,” he said. “There are plenty of bidders out there willing to bid for it. And if any of the terror groups are willing to get nuclear weapons or are able to get that plutonium, then we could see it end up in an American city,” Perry added (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, July 22).
The European Union said yesterday that Iran must sign the Additional Protocol — which allows intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring of its nuclear activities — or risk ruining the relationship between Tehran and Brussels (see GSN, July 21).
A statement by EU foreign ministers said they “decided to review future steps of the cooperation between the EU and Iran in September,” when the IAEA is due to present a second report on Iran’s nuclear program.
European officials said that hard-line and moderate officials in Tehran were damaging bilateral ties.
“It does not matter whether they are reformers or conservatives. They are united when it comes to a national security doctrine,” a British diplomat said (Dempsey/Bozorgmehr, Financial Times, July 21).
The United States, meanwhile, has teamed with an Iraqi political party to rehabilitate a branch of the Iraqi intelligence services that spied on Iran, according to Iraqi politicians and agents.
The Iraqi National Congress, headed by longtime exile Ahmad Chalabi, has met with senior officials from the now-defunct Iraqi spy agency known as the Mukhabarat.
“As far as what we do, we are sending back information to the Pentagon, to people who are responsible,” said Abdulaziz Kubaisi, an INC member who has been recruiting former intelligence agents (Banerjee/Jehl, New York Times, July 22).
By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — Five Central Asian states plan to meet in September in an effort to complete an agreement establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region, a senior U.N. disarmament official told Global Security Newswire yesterday (see GSN, March 11).
The meeting, scheduled to be held by the end of September in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, will involve representatives from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, said Tsutomu Ishiguri, director of the U.N. Regional Center for Peace and Disarmament in Asia and the Pacific. The purpose of the meeting is for the Central Asian states to develop a joint response to comments on a draft treaty provided by four of the five declared nuclear weapons states. Of the five, only China has submitted no comments.
The nuclear weapons states submitted their written proposals earlier this year, but the Central Asian states later requested that they be resubmitted in Russian so that they were available in a common language, Ishiguri said, adding that the proposals were resubmitted by early March. After the Central Asian states had an opportunity to individually review the translated comments, representatives from the Central Asian states’ U.N. missions then met twice in New York — June 3 and July 17 — to “review notes,” Ishiguri said.
U.N. mission representatives are now expected to meet again by the end of this month to finalize details for the Tashkent meeting, Ishiguri said. He added that the Central Asian states need to send high-level officials to the Tashkent meeting, in addition to technical experts, so that decisions can quickly be made “on the spot.”
After the Tashkent meeting, the Central Asian states will be in a position to meet with the nuclear weapons states to discuss their proposals, Ishiguri said. While the five nuclear weapons states cannot prevent the creation of the zone, the Central Asian states have requested that they sign a protocol to the treaty stating that they agree to respect the zone.
The United Nations hopes the treaty can be signed by the end of this year, Ishiguri said. The Central Asian states have twice anticipated signing the treaty — once in October 2002 and again in April.
In May, Ishiguri told GSN that delays in signing the treaty should not be interpreted as a sign that the Central Asian states are losing interest in establishing the zone. He noted then that the Central Asian states had reaffirmed their commitment to the creation of the zone in working papers presented at a meeting of the U.N. Disarmament Commission (see GSN, April 18) and during a meeting of Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty members (see GSN, May 9). He told GSN yesterday, however, that there is concern that momentum could be lost if the treaty is not signed soon.
Large protests are expected next month at Offutt Air Force base in Nebraska, where U.S. nuclear officials and scientists are scheduled to discuss plans for the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the Omaha World-Herald reported Thursday (see GSN, July 21).
The Aug. 7 meeting is expected to focus on whether the United States should develop low-yield nuclear weapons.
“It’s the whole enchilada, this meeting. Anybody who is anybody in nuclear weapons will be there,” said Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group, which first revealed the once-secret gathering that had been planned for almost one year (Robynn Tysver, Omaha World-Herald, July 17).
The first shipment of low-enriched uranium produced through a program to reduce stockpiles of weapon-grade uranium was shipped last week to a site in Tennessee for further processing into nuclear reactor fuel, the U.S. Energy Department announced yesterday (see GSN, April 15).
Last week’s shipment of low-enriched uranium was created through the High-Enriched Uranium Blend Down Program, which seeks to reduce stockpiles of highly enriched uranium stored at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The HEU is blended down with natural uranium at the site to create low-enriched uranium, which is then sent to Nuclear Fuel Services in Erwin, Tenn. There, the LEU will be prepared for fabrication into nuclear reactor fuel. The program is scheduled to continue through 2007, according to the Energy release.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham yesterday praised the advance of the program.
“Today marks a big step in our nation’s nonproliferation efforts,” Abraham said. “We have taken material that was left over from the Cold War and turned it into something that is unattractive for use in weapons. Not only that, but we’ve turned it into a material that has an important peacetime use: producing electricity,” he said (U.S. Energy Department release, July 21).
In a gesture of cooperation between Cold War adversaries, five senior Russian military officials visited a heavily guarded U.S. Peacekeeper missile silo being dismantled in Wyoming yesterday, the Denver Post reported (see GSN, Oct. 4, 2002).
“It’s part of an overall process of transforming the relationship between our two countries from one of post-Cold War rivalry to one of working cooperatively,” said Brig. Gen. Frank Klotz, commander of the 20th Air Force. The silo is located 60 miles north of Cheyenne, Wyo.
The Russian delegation included Gen. Col. Nikolay Solovtsov, commander of the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces (Coleman Cornelius, Denver Post, July 22).
U.S. Energy Department officials have expressed concern over a number of incidents at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, but have decided to delay further action, Energy Daily reported today (see GSN, June 19).
In a letter sent July 7 to Los Alamos Director George Nanos, Stephen Sohinki, director of Energy’s Price-Anderson Enforcement Office, outlined a number of safety incidents that had been reported in the first half of 2003, according to Energy Daily. For example, workers were reported to have been contaminated with tritium while removing copper piping in the laboratory’s ion beam facility in May.
Sohinki also said that one Los Alamos section had reported six incidents of “elevated airborne radioactivity levels” in the first half of the year, which resulted in personnel and room contamination. In addition, a laboratory facility’s nuclear inventory was found to be in excess of storage limits because of a poor calculation of materials stored there, he said.
Sohinki said that while the incidents normally would have been cause for a formal investigation, he would allow Nanos to address the issues first.
“Therefore, because of your personal commitment and positive first steps toward resolving the types of systemic issues discussed in this letter, (the Office of Enforcement) will exercise enforcement discretion,” Sohinki wrote (George Lobsenz, Energy Daily, July 22).
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