US officials met twice last week with North Korean officials in New York to tell them the US was ready to resume nuclear negotiations and wanted to resolve the issue diplomatically, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said.
"We told the North Koreans that the six-party process is the venue for resolving the nuclear issue and we called on North Korea to follow through on its commitment to the six-party talks," Ereli said Monday.
He said the US requested the meetings because it was felt a face-to-face presentation of the US position might be effective.
Ereli said the US has meetings with North Korea's UN diplomats in New York from time to time when they serve a useful purpose to pass messages and make points known.
He said he did not know how North Korea responded to the US presentation made by Joseph DeTrani, the State Department's special envoy for North Korea negotiations
Ereli said DeTrani left Sunday on a trip to China, South Korea and Japan to continue consultations on getting the nuclear negotiations going again. Russia also is involved in the talks.
Three rounds of six-nation talks aimed at persuading the North to halt weapons development have taken place since last year but without a breakthrough. North Korea boycotted a fourth round scheduled for September and analysts believed it was holding out for a change in the White House.
On Saturday North Korea said after the talks in New York it had concluded that Pyongyang should hold off on nuclear negotiations until the US changes its "hostile" policy toward the country.
The report, from Pyongyang's official news agency KCNA, said officials met on Tuesday and Friday.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told The New York Times he was now certain the nuclear material his agency once monitored in North Korea had been converted into fuel for four to six nuclear bombs.
ElBaradei said his judgment that North Korea had converted its stockpile of spent nuclear fuel into weapons-grade plutonium was not based on new intelligence.
Instead, he said, it was based on the agency's years of accumulated knowledge of North Korea's abilities, and the amount of time that had passed since North Korea ejected inspectors and began removing the 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods that inspectors had been monitoring.
"I'm sure they have reprocessed it all," he said. "We know they have the fissile material," he said, referring to the rods, which can be reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium.
"The production process is not that difficult" to turn the rods into bomb fuel, and now enough time has passed for North Korea to have solved any production problems, he said.
North Korea agreed in 1994 to freeze plutonium production but in 2002 renounced the deal and ejected the IAEA after Washington accused it of trying to produce highly enriched uranium.
Asked whether the two New York meetings had moved the ball forward on North Korea, US State Department number-two Richard Armitage said: "I'm not sure."
"We'll have to wait until they digest what was said," said Armitage, who last week expressed the hope that the six party talks could resume by the first week of January.
The State Department refused to discuss the specifics or get into details on the meeting with the North Koreans.
Ereli said the US indicated to them it remained ready to resume the six-party talks at an early date, without preconditions, and called on Pyongyang to follow through on its commitment to continue with the discussions.
But a North Korean spokesman said at the weekend that Pyongyang would not return to the negotiating table until the lineup of a new US administration following President George W. Bush's re-election was fully known.
Washington intended to use the six-party talks to force North Korea to dismantle all its nuclear program, including those for peaceful purposes, he said.
Three rounds of talks have been held so far but North Korea refused to participate in the fourth round in September after rejecting a US aid-for-disarmament offer.
Ereli downplayed the significance of the New York meeting, stressing that the "the real substance, the real engagement, the real diplomacy is conducted" through the six-party process.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
RSS