Christopher Hill, the top U.S. negotiator to six-party North Korean nuclear talks, used his first major public appearance in Washington since returning from negotiations last week to prepare critics and supporters alike for a long, tough process that will be fraught with problems.In a speech and remarks this morning at the Brookings Institution, Hill singled out U.S. allegations that North Korea maintains a secret highly enriched uranium program as a likely source of future trouble in the talks. Hill charged that U.S. intelligence has discerned in the past a pattern of acquisitions, including aluminum tubes made in Germany, that is "entirely consistent" with a highly enriched uranium program. Hill said the tubes were of a sort that could be consistent with centrifuges believed to have been supplied by the network of rogue Pakistani scientist A. Q. Kahn. Hill said he was not sure whether North Korea has mastered uranium production techniques, but "we need to see what happened to this equipment."
Hill said that even in private, North Korea continues to deny the existence of an HEU program but is willing to discuss the topic. Disclosure of any HEU equipment and activities is a critical part of the nuclear deal's second phase, as part of a full declaration of any North Korean nuclear assets.
"To be sure, there will be problems coming out with that declaration," Hill said. He also reiterated a U.S. commitment to try to resolve financial sanctions against the Macao-based Banco Delta Asia, a bank accused by Treasury authorities of complicity in laundering counterfeit North Korean-made U.S. currency.
Hill used the occasion to distance the six-party deal reached last week from the Clinton administration's 1994 deal with North Korea. He said the negotiating structure he spearheaded is designed to create a series of "very short" deadlines–as a way to continue testing North Korean intentions.
Hill's remarks appeared designed, in part, to counter the political attacks from hard-liners disappointed at the Bush administration's willingness to begin seeing any rewards flow to North Korea before it has fully and verifiably shed its nuclear weapons and facilities. Critics, led by recently resigned U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, charge that the administration has fallen back on the Clinton administration's approach of allowing benefits to flow to Pyongyang simply for freezing its nuclear reactor complex at Yongbyon (though the 1994 Clinton deal also envisioned moving to eventual full nuclear disarmament). Bolton and others also have suggested that the administration could have gotten the same–or even a better–deal years ago.
Administration officials, meanwhile, counter that what makes last week's deal different is that it is multilateral and could only have emerged with the pressure of the other countries in the six-nation negotiating group, especially North Korea's neighbor and ally China. The State Department also argues that the early benefits in the deal's first phase–delivered in exchange for a suspension of the reactor and the return of inspectors from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency–are modest, consisting of just 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil.
Still, people who have spoken privately with State Department officials in recent days say that the administration was taken aback by the vehemence of the conservative criticisms.