Pyongyang shuts reactor,
opens mouth By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON - North Korea opened a
prolonged campaign for a long list of concessions
after shutting down its 5-megawatt experimental
reactor at its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, about
100 kilometers north of Pyongyang.
Senior
North Korean diplomats signaled their strategy at
the outset of what is likely to be an unsuccessful
drive to get the country to abandon its entire
nuclear program in accordance with
the
six-nation agreement reached in Beijing in
February. Well before inspectors from the
International Atomic Energy (IAEA) arrived in
Pyongyang to monitor and verify the shutdown of
the reactor, Han Song-ryol, head of the North
Korean Disarmament-Peace Institute, said
"denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is
possible" only if the US suspends its "hostile
policy" and withdraws its troops from South Korea.
Han, who previously served as North
Korea's deputy ambassador to the United Nations,
issued this warning in a talk at Chatham House in
London after Pyongyang had called for military
talks with the United States. Washington, however,
refused to accept Pyongyang's suggestion, which
diplomats viewed as an attempt to bypass South
Korea.
North Korea's call for withdrawal
of the 29,000 US troops still in South Korea leads
a long list of demands that Pyongyang plans to
make at every stage of the bargaining process.
North Korea's rationale is that it can only meet
conditions of the February agreement "in tandem"
with reciprocal responses and gestures by the US.
Pyongyang followed this strategy in
finally deciding to shut down the reactor after
Washington had given up an attempt to isolate
North Korea from the international financial
community by blacklisting Banco Delta Asia in
Macau as a conduit for North Korean counterfeit
money.
Pyongyang was to have turned off
the reactor within 60 days of the signing of the
February agreement but waited another three months
while the US got Banco Delta Asia to transmit
US$25 million in North Korean accounts to the US
Federal Reserve Bank in New York, which relayed
the money to the Russian Central Bank, which in
turn placed it in a North Korean account.
The transfer of the funds represented a
reversal of a US Treasury Department effort to
isolate North Korea financially by banning any
institution dealing with Banco Delta Asia from
doing business in the US or with any US
institution. Treasury officials charged North
Korea with using the bank as a conduit for
counterfeit funds and also for dealing in arms and
drugs.
Even after getting the $25 million,
North Korea held off on shutting down the reactor
until receiving 6,200 tonnes in heavy fuel oil
from South Korea - the initial portion of 50,000
tonnes in heavy fuel that the North is getting as
a reward for living up, finally, to the first
stage of the February agreement.
While the
shipment was on the way, however, Kim Myong-gil,
North Korea's current deputy ambassador to the UN,
listed more demands, including the lifting of all
economic sanctions and removal of the nation from
the US State Department's list of "terrorist
countries".
North Korea is sure, however,
to demand far more, including talks on a "peace
treaty" for the Korean Peninsula and an enormous
infusion of energy aid.
"North Korea will
try every attempt to maximize confrontation," said
Kim Tae-woo, senior research fellow at the Korea
Institute of Defense Analyses. "Sooner or later
they will talk about peace talks" - with
withdrawal of US troops sure to be a condition for
a peace treaty to replace the armistice that ended
the Korean War in July 1953.
Both those
topics are certain to worry South Korean leaders
even though the South has promoted reconciliation
with North Korea. South Korean officials will
oppose peace talks that exclude the South and also
want US troops to remain in the country despite
leftist pressure for all of them to leave.
While promoting these demands, North Korea
will try to pressure the US and South Korea into
providing vast quantities of energy aid in
addition to the 50,000 tonnes the South is now
sending.
The February agreement calls for
North Korea to receive another 950,000 tonnes
after acknowledging all its nuclear activities and
then abandoning the entire program. North Korea,
however, wants continual shipments of heavy fuel
oil - and also is expected to call for resumption
of construction of twin light-water nuclear
reactors on its northeast coast.
The 1994
Geneva Framework Agreement called for North Korea
to get the light-water energy reactors at a cost
of more than $5 billion, most of it provided by
South Korea, while the US was to send heavy fuel
to North Korea until the reactors were completed.
North Korea, under terms of the 1994 agreement,
shut down its 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon while
inspectors from the IAEA were on permanent duty
there making sure the reactor was sealed and
locked.
The 1994 agreement broke down,
however, after a senior North Korean official in
October 2002 acknowledged to a visiting US team
led by James Kelly, then the US chief envoy on
North Korea, the existence of a program for
developing nuclear warheads with highly enriched
uranium. North Korea repeatedly denied having made
such an admission and expelled the IAEA inspectors
at the end of 2002 after the US suspended
shipments of heavy fuel oil as called for in the
1994 agreement.
The shutdown, again, of
the Yongbyon reactor completes a circular pattern
that leaves North Korea about where it was five
years ago. The difference, however, is that North
Korea, after restarting the reactor, built several
nuclear warheads with plutonium at their core in
addition to two such warheads that it had had in
its stockpile before the signing of the 1994
agreement.
While the IAEA inspectors are
back in North Korea this week, negotiators will
again converge on Beijing for resumption of the
six-party talks at which Pyongyang is expected to
suggest specific demands in return for listing all
its nuclear activities, as stipulated in the next
stage of the agreement, and dismantling everything
it has at the Yongbyon complex.
South
Korean analysts complain that a major problem is
that the February agreement does not specify
exactly what programs the North must give up. The
agreement does not mention highly enriched
uranium, for instance, although the chief US
envoy, Christopher Hill, has said North Korea must
come clean about highly enriched uranium. Nor does
the agreement say anything about North Korea's
nuclear stockpile, which may amount to as many as
a dozen warheads.
Analysts believe North
Korean leader Kim Jong-il views those warheads as
his main bargaining chip even though he's not
likely to want to produce more of them. North
Korea conducted its first and only underground
nuclear test last October 6, three months after
test-firing seven missiles that presumably could
be designed to carry a warhead to a target.
"Christopher Hill has in mind the
disablement of the nuclear facilities within this
year," said Kim Sung-han, professor at the
Institute of Foreign Affairs and National
Security, "but I'm not sure North Korea is ready
to do that."
Even after the nuclear
facilities are disabled, analysts noted, North
Korea would still have nuclear warheads and
missiles.
The North's timing appeared to
reflect the desire to influence the South Korean
presidential election in December. North Korea has
castigated possible conservative candidates who
have promised to reverse many of the
left-of-center policies of South Korean President
Roh Moo-hyun and his predecessor, Kim Dae-jung,
who formed the Sunshine Policy of reconciliation
with the North.
North Korea may also want
to wrest more concessions from the US before that
country's next presidential election in November
2008. President George W Bush has softened his
previous hardline policy on North Korea, listening
to the advice of the State Department rather than
that of Vice President Richard Cheney and other
opponents of reconciliation.
Journalist
Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and
the confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia -
for more than 30 years. (Copyright 2007
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
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