North Korea is expected to hand over a list of its nuclear programs within weeks, a US envoy said yesterday, as the communist state prepares disable its plutonium-producing atomic plants.
US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill said a US expert team who arrived on Thursday in North Korea was to travel to the main nuclear complex at Yongbyon later yesterday or today to prepare to supervise the disabling of three main plants there next week.
Under a February six-nation accord the North, which carried out its first nuclear test in October last year, has pledged to declare and disable all its atomic programs by year-end in return for energy aid worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
If it goes on next year to dismantle the plants and give up its plutonium and weapons, it can expect normalized relations with Washington as well as a peace pact to replace the armistice which ended the 1950-1953 Korean War.
"We're expecting the first draft declaration ... probably in a matter of the next couple of weeks," said Hill, the US Assistant Secretary of State who has been Washington's chief envoy to the six-nation talks.
"The idea is that as we receive that, we have some information on programs we would want to have follow-on discussions on, with the understanding that by the end of the year we will have a complete declaration that everyone would agree is complete."
Hill was speaking in Seoul after talks with his South Korean counterpart Chun Young-woo.
Hill said a peace treaty, and the lifting of UN nuclear-related sanctions, would come only after North Korea completely abandons its nuclear weapons and related programs.
"The sanctions are there until the DPRK [North Korea] gets out of the nuclear business," he said.
While negotiations on a pact could begin after "substantial disablement," Hill warned: "We cannot conclude a peace process until the time that there is really a denuclearization. We are not going to have a peace agreement with a nuclearized DPRK."
The South and North Korean leaders, after a rare summit last month, called for the leaders of countries which fought the war to meet and declare an end to the war.
The declaration sparked accusations from critics that the Seoul government is moving too fast to make peace.
The February accord also envisages the North being removed eventually from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism.
"What we look forward to in getting North Korea off the terrorism list is that they have stopped all terrorism acts and fully signed up to UN covenants against terrorism," the US envoy said.
North Korea, which spent half a century developing its nuclear program, shut the Yongbyon plants in July. Disablement aims to put them out of action for up to a year.
After a 1994 denuclearization pact fell apart in 2002, the North quickly resumed production of bomb-making plutonium, and now has an estimated 45kg to 65kg of the material, enough to build several bombs.
Hill said China is trying to schedule a meeting of foreign ministers of the six nations involved in the talks -- the two Koreas, the US, Japan, China and Russia -- hopefully by the end of the year.
The US envoy was briefing Chun on his earlier talks in Beijing, including a meeting with his North Korean counterpart.
He was to leave for Japan later yesterday.
Japan's ties with North Korea are soured by what Tokyo says is Pyongyang's refusal to account for all the Japanese civilians kidnapped by the communist state in the Cold War era.
"We have continuously encouraged the DPRK to address this issue, to return any abductees in the DPRK, to properly investigate this issue and to make sure things of this kind never, ever happen again," Hill said.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS