Print

Mail

wiki links

US signals end to arms accord with N Korea

The George W. Bush administration has decided to scrap the 1994 arms-control accord with North Korea that has provided Western energy aid in return for North Korea's promise to freeze the development of nuclear weapons, senior administration officials said Saturday.

North Korea acknowledged two weeks ago it was pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program and accused the US of taking steps that forced Pyongyang to nullify the accord. The White House has since debated whether to end the pact, with some aides warning such a step could lead North Korea to even greater nuclear violations.

For that reason, the administration plans to warn North Korea of serious consequences if it tries to remove nuclear material now stored under international supervision at Yongbyon, the reactor site that was the centerpiece of a previous nuclear standoff with North Korea in the early 1990s.

US diplomats visiting Beijing apparently asked China last week to convey that warning, though it is not clear whether the message has yet been delivered to the North Koreans.

The immediate practical effect of the decision to scrap the agreement is the halting of the annual shipments of 500,000 tonnes of fuel oil from the US to North Korea.

But abandoning the accord is also likely to mean that the US will urge its allies Japan and South Korea to suspend, if not terminate, a multibillion-dollar project to provide modern nuclear power plants to the North. Ground has already been broken for the reactors, which are designed to resist proliferation, and which would help North Korea provide basic electricity service to cities and towns that go dark every night, and to World War II-era factories that now barely operate.

But the symbolic importance of the Bush administration's decision is even greater: It signifies the start of an effort by the US to pose a stark choice for North Korea, between abandoning all of its nuclear weapons programs and facing near-total economic isolation.

"We think the framework as we knew it is dead," one senior Bush administration official said when questioned about the strategy. "The North Koreans already told us they viewed it as `nullified,'" the official said.

Other officials described a lengthy debate within the White House over the risks of abandoning the agreement altogether.

"There are some who fear that it could tempt the North Koreans into a rapid breakout, to produce weapons as fast as they can," one official involved in the debate said.

But Bush, who came to office deeply suspicious of the usefulness of the accord, has concluded that the North Korean admission proves that the accord was fatally flawed all along, his aides say.

US officials did not specify what consequences North Korea might face if it ignored US warnings, a sharp contrast to the approach being taken with Iraq. They argued again that the North, even if nuclear-armed and unpredictable, does not pose as great a threat to the US and its allies as does Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who does not appear to have any nuclear weapons so far but is suspected of having chemical and biological arms.

Several years ago the CIA estimated that North Korea already had reprocessed enough plutonium at Yongbyon to make one or two nuclear weapons, and that the fuel in storage could be fabricated into five or 10 more.

US officials said there is no indication so far that any of that material has been removed from the storage facilities.

This story has been viewed 1893 times.