The US is likely to decide before the end of the month whether to take the North Korean nuclear issue before the UN Security Council, a senior US defense official said yesterday.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld raised the North Korean dilemma only "lightly" in his talks here with Asian defense ministers, and insisted to reporters that US policy remains to pursue a resumption of stalled six-party talks.
"The president's policy is exactly what has been announced: encourage the six-party talks, the diplomatic path, and to the extent he or the others have announcements to make, they'll make them," he said.
Nevertheless, a senior official traveling with Rumsfeld said there was growing consensus within the US administration that the status quo could not continue.
Taking up the issue with UN Security Council "is something we're giving increased study to. And probably we'll come to a decision in the next few weeks," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
North Korea has boycotted the six-nation talks on its nuclear program since last June, and on February 10 declared it has nuclear weapons. Now US officials fear it could conduct a nuclear test with little or no warning, taking the standoff to a new level.
The official said he was not aware that the US had approached any of the other powers taking part in the talks about going to the UN Security Council.
But he said "there is a consensus of frustration."
"There's a lot of things going on. We have a one-year anniversary but moreover we have ... a spiral of threats by North Korea, and it appears to be marching to its own frustration drum," he said.
The official acknowledged, however, that there was no consensus among the other parties to the talks -- South Korea, China, Japan and Russia -- on the next step.
Japanese Minister of State for Defense Yoshinori Ohno said here Saturday that there should be a consensus before talking the North Korean issue to the UN Security Council.
But the US defense official said, "there is very broad consensus that if the North Koreans haven't made a conscious decision to come back to the table ... in the June timeframe, we need to sit down collectively and decide where we all go from here and develop a common roadmap. I think that is the sense in the air."
President George W. Bush meets June 10 with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, whose government is hosting a ministerial-level meeting with the North Koreans June 21-24 in Seoul.
"I would expect him to share with us by the time he comes what it is that they plan to offer, or what they plan to talk about when they meet at the ministerial level," the official said.
Those meetings would fall on the one-year mark since the last time the six-party talks were held.
In a speech to a conference on Asian security here Saturday, Rumsfeld stressed that China could play a key role in persuading North Korea to return to the talks.
Australian Defense Minister Robert Hill said he will encourage China to be more "proactive" with North Korea when he meets with Chinese leaders next week in Beijing.
"They have considerable influence, and we would like them to use all of their influence to encourage North Korea to return to the table," he said after meeting Rumsfeld.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has