Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
September 25, 2008
Pg. 1
By Steven Lee Myers and Elaine Sciolino
WASHINGTON — North Korea’s move to resume the reprocessing of plutonium, perhaps as soon as next week, left the country on the verge of restarting a nuclear weapons program whose shutdown had been portrayed by the White House as a significant diplomatic achievement.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday that the United States still hoped to preserve a hard-won agreement that called for the North to dismantle its nuclear reactor. But North Korea has refused to resume talks, and no new ones are planned.
The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna announced Wednesday that North Korea had barred international inspectors from a reprocessing plant at its nuclear reactor complex in Yongbyon. The agency said that North Korea, which tested its first nuclear device in 2006 and is believed to have enough plutonium for at least six nuclear bombs, intended to resume production of nuclear weapons-grade fuel there within a [FONT=Times New Roman, Times]week[/FONT].
While reversible in theory, any resumption of nuclear work would violate the terms of the agreement, which was announced with fanfare in June and solidified, it appeared, by North Korea’s public demolition of a cooling tower at Yongbyon.
North Korea’s actions have at best returned negotiations to where they stood months ago, leaving little time for a resolution before the next American administration takes office in January.
Senior Bush administration officials said Wednesday that they believed that North Korea was engaging in transparent brinkmanship to extract concessions as the United States sought to cement the country’s commitment to give up its nuclear weapons with a strict and intrusive verification system.
“They don’t have a lot of ways to get leverage, and this is one of them,” one Bush administration official who was involved in the negotiations said of North Korea’s move. The official, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic efforts and internal administration assessments.
North Korea’s actions are likely to provide fodder to conservative critics of the administration, who say that North Korea has no intention of giving up its nuclear program and that it is blackmailing the United States and its negotiating partners to subsidize North Korea’s failing economy.
But its elaborately choreographed violation of the agreement in publicly announced steps over the past few weeks could also be part of a tough negotiating stance that North Korea feels is necessary to obtain the security guarantees and financial aid the country was promised as part of the nuclear accord.
North Korea’s negotiators have strenuously complained that the Bush administration has yet to fulfill its promise to remove North Korea from a list of state sponsors of terrorism, as President Bush announced in June that he was prepared to do, and instead has made new demands.
Those include requiring North Korea to accept the verification system before the United States would carry out reciprocal steps, a condition that a senior administration official acknowledged was not put in writing.
“It is, I think, more serious than just brinkmanship on the part of the North Koreans,” said Charles L. Pritchard, a former ambassador and special envoy for talks with North Korea who is now president of the Korean Economic Institute in Washington. “They’re trying to recoup what they’ve given away for nothing, from their point of view.”
If North Korea follows through, it would be the second time the country resumed production of the material for nuclear weapons during President Bush’s time in office. In acting now, when the White House is already consumed with a financial crisis, North Korea may be adopting a strategy similar to one it employed at the beginning of 2003, when it restarted its nuclear program just as the United States was preparing to invade Iraq.
Complicating the matter is uncertainty over the health of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, who administration officials said Wednesday had a stroke last month that debilitated him physically and possibly mentally. That has raised concerns that hard-liners may be acting forcefully to demonstrate that North Korea faces no leadership crisis during Mr. Kim’s illness.
American and European officials, trying to assess the seriousness of the North Korean intentions, noted that so far, experts who have been overseeing the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear program, including some Americans, had not yet been expelled from the country. “We don’t see the tensions on the ground,” the senior administration official said.
The reprocessing plant, which turns spent nuclear fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium, is the most secret part of the Yongbyon nuclear complex. Its reactivation would be significant, even though the main reactor has been partly dismantled under the agreement.
Moreover, allowing international inspectors to monitor activity at the plant was one of the most significant concessions the North made as part of the agreement on ending its program. If inspectors remain barred from the plant, it will become far more difficult to keep track of how much nuclear fuel the North produces.
“There are no more seals and surveillance equipment in place at the reprocessing facility,” Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in Vienna.
Arms control experts say that if the plant is in good repair, it will take little time to restart the plutonium-making process, and that making pure plutonium from spent fuel rods once the process starts could be only weeks away. It would take two to three years, by contrast, for North Korea to produce extractable new plutonium if it restarted its reactor.
The Bush administration immediately warned North Korea not to reactivate the plant, while urging it to resume negotiations on ways to verify its lengthy declaration of its nuclear activities over many years.
Ms. Rice, in New York for the United Nations General Assembly session, said a decision by North Korea to resume reprocessing nuclear material “would only deepen its isolation.” She has met with the foreign ministers of China, South Korea and Russia, all parties to the negotiations with the North Koreans.
“Everyone knows what the path ahead is,” she said. “The path ahead is for there to be agreement on a verification protocol so that we can continue along the path of the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
She did not elaborate on what additional steps the administration would take. So far at least, officials said, it has not decided to retaliate by, for example, suspending shipments of heavy fuel oil that China, Russia, South Korea and the United States have been making under the agreement. The next American shipment is not due until October. Its fate could depend on whether the North Koreans move ahead.
The impasse over the verification of North Korea’s denuclearization reflected deep suspicions on both sides.
Mr. Bush has been criticized by some conservatives who say that the initial accord was not vigorous enough in verifying the North’s nuclear activities, including what officials say is a separate and still secret uranium program and evidence of the transfer of nuclear technology to other countries, specifically Syria.
“We’re still not convinced they have given us a true picture of what they may or may not have done,” the senior administration official said Wednesday, underscoring, he said, the need for a vigorous protocol for future inspections.
The official involved in the negotiations said that the United States had presented a draft of its verification proposals to the North Koreans in August and that it included “the max.” “We put the most we could on paper, anticipating they would bargain,” the official said.
Derek J. Mitchell, a former Defense Department official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that the American insistence on extracting a verification system was justified and probably difficult for Mr. Bush and his most hawkish aides to accept otherwise.
“I’m not sure any action can be taken, or is politically viable, without a demonstration of North Korean good faith,” he said.
At the same time, though, Mr. Mitchell noted that the United States had so far not conceded much, undercutting the process.
While Mr. Bush gave Congress 45 days notice that he intended to remove North Korea from a list of terrorist sponsors, he did not take that step before that window closed on Aug. 11. Also, he lifted sanctions under the Trading With the Enemy Act but imposed new ones under a little publicized emergency declaration he issued the same day in June.
“We haven’t given up much yet,” Mr. Mitchell said, adding that he, like others, assumed that there was little chance for an agreement during the final months of this administration. “Meanwhile, they have frozen their program. It is step by step, action for action. We can’t cut corners.”
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times]Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Elaine Sciolino from Paris. William J. Broad and Thom Shanker contributed reporting from New York, and Choe Sang-hun from Seoul, South Korea.[/FONT]
September 25, 2008
Pg. 1
By Steven Lee Myers and Elaine Sciolino
WASHINGTON — North Korea’s move to resume the reprocessing of plutonium, perhaps as soon as next week, left the country on the verge of restarting a nuclear weapons program whose shutdown had been portrayed by the White House as a significant diplomatic achievement.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday that the United States still hoped to preserve a hard-won agreement that called for the North to dismantle its nuclear reactor. But North Korea has refused to resume talks, and no new ones are planned.
The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna announced Wednesday that North Korea had barred international inspectors from a reprocessing plant at its nuclear reactor complex in Yongbyon. The agency said that North Korea, which tested its first nuclear device in 2006 and is believed to have enough plutonium for at least six nuclear bombs, intended to resume production of nuclear weapons-grade fuel there within a [FONT=Times New Roman, Times]week[/FONT].
While reversible in theory, any resumption of nuclear work would violate the terms of the agreement, which was announced with fanfare in June and solidified, it appeared, by North Korea’s public demolition of a cooling tower at Yongbyon.
North Korea’s actions have at best returned negotiations to where they stood months ago, leaving little time for a resolution before the next American administration takes office in January.
Senior Bush administration officials said Wednesday that they believed that North Korea was engaging in transparent brinkmanship to extract concessions as the United States sought to cement the country’s commitment to give up its nuclear weapons with a strict and intrusive verification system.
“They don’t have a lot of ways to get leverage, and this is one of them,” one Bush administration official who was involved in the negotiations said of North Korea’s move. The official, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic efforts and internal administration assessments.
North Korea’s actions are likely to provide fodder to conservative critics of the administration, who say that North Korea has no intention of giving up its nuclear program and that it is blackmailing the United States and its negotiating partners to subsidize North Korea’s failing economy.
But its elaborately choreographed violation of the agreement in publicly announced steps over the past few weeks could also be part of a tough negotiating stance that North Korea feels is necessary to obtain the security guarantees and financial aid the country was promised as part of the nuclear accord.
North Korea’s negotiators have strenuously complained that the Bush administration has yet to fulfill its promise to remove North Korea from a list of state sponsors of terrorism, as President Bush announced in June that he was prepared to do, and instead has made new demands.
Those include requiring North Korea to accept the verification system before the United States would carry out reciprocal steps, a condition that a senior administration official acknowledged was not put in writing.
“It is, I think, more serious than just brinkmanship on the part of the North Koreans,” said Charles L. Pritchard, a former ambassador and special envoy for talks with North Korea who is now president of the Korean Economic Institute in Washington. “They’re trying to recoup what they’ve given away for nothing, from their point of view.”
If North Korea follows through, it would be the second time the country resumed production of the material for nuclear weapons during President Bush’s time in office. In acting now, when the White House is already consumed with a financial crisis, North Korea may be adopting a strategy similar to one it employed at the beginning of 2003, when it restarted its nuclear program just as the United States was preparing to invade Iraq.
Complicating the matter is uncertainty over the health of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, who administration officials said Wednesday had a stroke last month that debilitated him physically and possibly mentally. That has raised concerns that hard-liners may be acting forcefully to demonstrate that North Korea faces no leadership crisis during Mr. Kim’s illness.
American and European officials, trying to assess the seriousness of the North Korean intentions, noted that so far, experts who have been overseeing the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear program, including some Americans, had not yet been expelled from the country. “We don’t see the tensions on the ground,” the senior administration official said.
The reprocessing plant, which turns spent nuclear fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium, is the most secret part of the Yongbyon nuclear complex. Its reactivation would be significant, even though the main reactor has been partly dismantled under the agreement.
Moreover, allowing international inspectors to monitor activity at the plant was one of the most significant concessions the North made as part of the agreement on ending its program. If inspectors remain barred from the plant, it will become far more difficult to keep track of how much nuclear fuel the North produces.
“There are no more seals and surveillance equipment in place at the reprocessing facility,” Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in Vienna.
Arms control experts say that if the plant is in good repair, it will take little time to restart the plutonium-making process, and that making pure plutonium from spent fuel rods once the process starts could be only weeks away. It would take two to three years, by contrast, for North Korea to produce extractable new plutonium if it restarted its reactor.
The Bush administration immediately warned North Korea not to reactivate the plant, while urging it to resume negotiations on ways to verify its lengthy declaration of its nuclear activities over many years.
Ms. Rice, in New York for the United Nations General Assembly session, said a decision by North Korea to resume reprocessing nuclear material “would only deepen its isolation.” She has met with the foreign ministers of China, South Korea and Russia, all parties to the negotiations with the North Koreans.
“Everyone knows what the path ahead is,” she said. “The path ahead is for there to be agreement on a verification protocol so that we can continue along the path of the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
She did not elaborate on what additional steps the administration would take. So far at least, officials said, it has not decided to retaliate by, for example, suspending shipments of heavy fuel oil that China, Russia, South Korea and the United States have been making under the agreement. The next American shipment is not due until October. Its fate could depend on whether the North Koreans move ahead.
The impasse over the verification of North Korea’s denuclearization reflected deep suspicions on both sides.
Mr. Bush has been criticized by some conservatives who say that the initial accord was not vigorous enough in verifying the North’s nuclear activities, including what officials say is a separate and still secret uranium program and evidence of the transfer of nuclear technology to other countries, specifically Syria.
“We’re still not convinced they have given us a true picture of what they may or may not have done,” the senior administration official said Wednesday, underscoring, he said, the need for a vigorous protocol for future inspections.
The official involved in the negotiations said that the United States had presented a draft of its verification proposals to the North Koreans in August and that it included “the max.” “We put the most we could on paper, anticipating they would bargain,” the official said.
Derek J. Mitchell, a former Defense Department official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that the American insistence on extracting a verification system was justified and probably difficult for Mr. Bush and his most hawkish aides to accept otherwise.
“I’m not sure any action can be taken, or is politically viable, without a demonstration of North Korean good faith,” he said.
At the same time, though, Mr. Mitchell noted that the United States had so far not conceded much, undercutting the process.
While Mr. Bush gave Congress 45 days notice that he intended to remove North Korea from a list of terrorist sponsors, he did not take that step before that window closed on Aug. 11. Also, he lifted sanctions under the Trading With the Enemy Act but imposed new ones under a little publicized emergency declaration he issued the same day in June.
“We haven’t given up much yet,” Mr. Mitchell said, adding that he, like others, assumed that there was little chance for an agreement during the final months of this administration. “Meanwhile, they have frozen their program. It is step by step, action for action. We can’t cut corners.”
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times]Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Elaine Sciolino from Paris. William J. Broad and Thom Shanker contributed reporting from New York, and Choe Sang-hun from Seoul, South Korea.[/FONT]