Top North Korean officials have vowed to push ahead with their nuclear programmes as long as the atomic standoff festers, saying time is not on U.S. President George W. Bush's side, an influential U.S. expert said on Saturday after meetings in Pyongyang. The officials also promised never to let nuclear weapons fall into the hands of al Qaeda or other militants, said Selig Harrison, of the Center for International Policy in Washington.
| Their assurances make me feel so much better. I mean, if you can't trust Kim Jong Il, who can you trust? |
Harrison, making his seventh trip to Pyongyang, told reporters on arrival in Beijing after days of meetings that the officials were not expecting a resolution before U.S. presidential elections in November. But they also had no deadline to test nuclear weapons or missiles if six-country talks on their programmes dragged on. Pyongyang laid out an offer for an initial freeze of its plutonium programme, continuing to dismiss Bush's demand for a complete, irreversible and verifiable dismantling (CVID) up front and deny they ever admitted to a covert uranium programme. "If Bush insists on his present policy of CVID first, we wouldn't be interested in having a deal with the United States," Harrison quoted Kim Yong-nam, who heads the presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly and is the North's number two leader, as saying. "My feeling is Bush is delaying the resolution of the nuclear issue due to the presidential election," Kim said. "He (Bush) may be trying to gain time, but time is not on his side," he said. "We are going to use this time 100 percent effectively to strengthen our nuclear deterrent, both quantitively and qualitatively."
The comments come during a growing sense of urgency for progress after Beijing hosted two inconclusive rounds of talks. Cheney told China "time is not our side" to resolve the crisis and South Korean media reported Beijing, in turn, urged Kim to soften his stance. However, Kim Yong-nam said the North had no deadline on the talks, according to Harrison. Foreign Ministry officials told him they expected a third round of six-party talks comprising the two Koreas, China, Russia, the United States and Japan before the end of June, as scheduled, and working group meetings in late May. But there was no agreed agenda for the working group, Harrison was told. At a recent meeting in New York, the North's diplomats tried to introduce their initial freeze proposal while U.S. special envoy Joseph Detrani insisted solely on CVID. Harrison quoted Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun saying of the talks: "Frankly speaking, I am not that optimistic."
Officials repeated to Harrison a message they say the United States distorted -- that they had no obligation to clarify the uranium question to their enemies. "Informally, they say their policy is not to confirm or deny," Harrison said. In response to allegations by Cheney that North Korea could proliferate nuclear technology, Kim said there was a clear distinction between missiles and nuclear material. "There can be trade in missiles, but in regard to nuclear material, our policy, past, present and future, is that we would never allow such a transfer to al Qaeda or anyone else."
| So can we infer from this that you'd sell Binny a Scud, then? |
Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye-gwan, the North's envoy to the talks, detailed a freeze proposal under which the North would grant inspections to determine how much weapons-grade plutonium it had reprocessed and would pledge not to test nuclear material or transfer it to other parties, Harrison said. In exchange, the United States would allow the North to receive energy aid and electricity from South Korea, Russia and China, lift economic sanctions that have been in place since the 1950-53 Korean War and remove the North from its list of countries sponsoring terrorism, he said. Harrison said officials were very careful not to take sides in the U.S. elections but noted: "Their position is that they don't expect anything from the Bush administration." |