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2 North Korea accord: Now for the
hard part By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - All sides have managed to save
face in an agreement that puts off the biggest
questions while promising the first halting steps
toward an end to North Korea's nuclear program.
The agreement reached at the six-party
talks in Beijing on Tuesday fulfills US envoy
Christopher Hill's promise while in Seoul on his
way to Beijing of a "first tranche" in a
"step-by-step process" - and is more or less what
he worked out last month with North Korea's envoy,
Kim Kye-gwan, in Berlin.
The immediate
question is whether North Korea will take the
initial
step
as signed on Tuesday afternoon in Beijing and shut
down its nuclear facilities, including its
5-megawatt reactor at the nuclear complex at
Yongbyon, within 60 days as specified in the
agreement.
North Korea may insist on
waiting until the other signatories to the
agreement, the United States, China, Russia, Japan
and South Korea, have come up with 50,000 tons of
heavy fuel oil - an "emergency" shipment that is
just the first of many those countries have agreed
to provide.
If North Korea does fully
cooperate and disable the complex, the other five
countries will pour in another 950,000 tons of
heavy fuel for a grand total of 1 million tons.
That's half as much as North Korea demanded, but
Pyongyang is fully expected to up the ante when
the time comes to talk about the huge unanswered
questions.
North Korea's ultimate goal
remains a massive influx of the electrical aid
that was to have been supplied by the twin
light-water nuclear reactors promised in the 1994
Geneva Framework Agreement.
That agreement
broke down for another question that remains
unanswered in Tuesday's agreement - North Korea's
program for developing warheads with highly
enriched uranium. Hill's predecessor, James Kelly,
after visiting Pyongyang in October 2002, returned
to Washington claiming that North Korea had
acknowledged the program after he and members of
his team showed maps and other evidence picked up
by US satellites.
North Korea has strongly
denied the existence of any uranium program, and
the omission of any mention of it appeared to some
observers as a flaw in the new deal. Until that
issue is resolved, the US is not seen as likely to
go along with any deal for energy aid beyond the
heavy fuel promised on Tuesday.
North
Korea's refusal to talk about the uranium program
contrasts with its boasts of having gone back to
producing warheads with plutonium at their core at
Yongbyon after expelling inspectors sent by the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the
end of 2002.
North Korea, under the latest
agreement, must agree to invite IAEA inspectors to
return, giving them the right to traipse around
Yongbyon as they were doing from 1994 to 2002,
making certain the freeze remains in place.
The production of warheads at Yongbyon
raises yet another issue - will North Korea be
willing to see them destroyed under terms of the
agreement, and will the IAEA inspectors be able to
travel to test storage sites outside Yongbyon?
The question is critical since North Korea
conducted its first underground nuclear test last
October. The explosion was the equivalent of less
than a kiloton of TNT, probably considerably below
Pyongyang's expectations, but signs from North
Korea in the run-up to Hill's meeting with Kim
Kye-gwan in Berlin were that another test was
likely.
Disposal of North Korea's nukes
will be especially difficult since it is far from
certain how many actually exist. Estimates go up
to a dozen, but there has been absolutely no hard
confirmation.
Hardline conservatives,
notably former US ambassador to the United Nations
John Bolton, are expected to criticize the deal
as
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