Global Security Newswire

The Bush administration has demanded verification of North Korea's nuclear operations because only an "idiot" would trust the regime to follow through on its pledge of denuclearization, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in comments released Friday (see GSN, Dec. 19).

Pyongyang signed a deal last year to dismantle its nuclear sector in exchange for a host of concessions from China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. However, there have been several snags in carrying out the agreement, most recently on the issue of verification.

North Korea has rejected U.S. assertions that it agreed to collection of nuclear samples as part of the process and has balked at signing a written agreement on verification. Such a document is needed to address "ambiguities" in the verification protocol, which would also involve site visits, interviews with key personnel and reviews of records, Rice said.

Addressing criticism from U.S. conservatives, Rice said the White House had not placed too must trust that the regime in Pyongyang would voluntarily meet its nuclear obligations, Reuters reported.

"Nobody was trusting of the North Koreans. I mean, who trusts the North Koreans? You'd have to be an idiot to trust the North Koreans," she said at the Council of Foreign Relations.

"That's why we have a verification protocol that we are negotiating," Rice added.

The ongoing talks have been worthwhile, even if they have yet to meet their ultimate goal, Rice said. There has been no plutonium production in North Korea since 2005 and disablement activities continue at the Yongbyon nuclear complex.

Nations working with Pyongyang have received thousands of pages of documents, along with samples that "have led us to be more suspicious of some things that they might be doing," Rice said.

"This is a process that still has a lot of life in it," she said. "North Korea negotiates this way sometimes in ups and downs" (Reuters I/Yahoo!News, Dec. 19).

"I think that within the context of the six-party talks, you ultimately will get a verification protocol that allows us to deal with a lot of very troubling activities," Rice said (Agence France-Presse/Spacewar.com, Dec. 19).

Meanwhile, reports in Seoul indicate that South Korea is trying to arrange secret talks with North Korea in hopes of reducing tensions between the two nations, the Associated Press reported.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has taken a more hard-line stance on the North than his predecessors. Pyongyang has responded with a number of confrontational moves, including suspension of cooperative tourism and train-service programs.

The South Korean Unification Ministry rejected reports by the Yonhap News Agency and Chosun Ilbo that the two nations have already conducted secret meetings or that Seoul hoped to arrange such talks (Jae-Soon Chang, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Dec. 22).

Also, South Korean and U.S. intelligence services have indicated that new information appears to support North Korea's claims regarding the health of leader Kim Jong Il, Reuters reported.

Kim is believed to have suffered at least one stroke since August and to have undergone brain surgery. Reports of his health troubles coincided with another setback in the denuclearization process and led to questions about who had ultimate authority in the Stalinist state, but Pyongyang has issued images and reports intended to show that Kim remained in good health.

Aerial images showed that Kim's train was in locations that he was reported to have visited, a South Korean intelligence source told Chosun Ilbo. "Based on this, and considering other information, I believe the possibility is quite high that Kim Jong Il did actually visit those places," the official said (Herskovitz/Kim, Reuters/Yahoo!News, Dec. 21).