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N Korea faces internal struggle: US experts

Hardliners in North Korea's powerful military may be resisting a US-led deal for the hardline communist state to disband its nuclear weapons program, US experts said.

The military, the experts said, would be the most affected by any surrender of atomic arms by North Korea, which on Friday fired a volley of missiles with a warning it might stop disabling its nuclear arsenal as part of an agreed multilateral deal.

Keith Luse, a senior US Senate official, suggested in a report on his return from a recent trip to Pyongyang that the North Korean military could possibly unravel the aid-for-disarmament deal that the administration of Kim Jong-il reached with the US, China, the two Koreas, Japan and Russia.

In his report to the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Luse asked: "Is the North Korean military resisting MFA [ministry of foreign affairs] efforts to substantively engage with the US and the other five countries?"

He then said: "Chairman Kim's best efforts to orchestrate a balance among competing interests within the North, may be a `stretch too far' for North Korean military hardliners.

"Declaring and discarding the jewel of their arsenal will be difficult for those viewing it as the ultimate deterrent," Luse said.

Luse, a senior professional staff of ranking Republican Senator Richard Lugar, was in North Korea last month to determine, among other questions, why Pyongyang was reluctant to provide a full declaration of its nuclear programs and weapons as well as its alleged proliferation activities.

North Korea was to have submitted the declaration by the end of December under the deal, which so far had led to the shutdown and near disabling of a key plutonium-producing reactor in Yongbyon.

Pyongyang submitted a list last November but the US says it has not accounted fully for a suspected uranium enrichment program and allegations of nuclear proliferation to Syria.

"Luse's observations are right on," said an anonymous US expert on North Korea.

"It is generally thought that Kim Jong-il is on the side of the angels so to speak, the engagers, but he can't ramp things on the throats of the military as the military rice bowl is the most endangered by this action, by getting rid of the nuclear weapons," the expert said.

The assessments by Luse and the Korea expert preceded those of Christopher Hill, the chief US envoy to the six-party talks on the nuclear deal, who this week referred to some "people" in North Korea who were against ending the pursuit of nuclear weapons.

"I think it is fair to say that there are people in North Korea who really are not with the program here, really rather continue to be producing this plutonium for whatever reason," he said.

"North Korea is a country that has a very vertically oriented governing structure to be sure ... but at the same time it is place for politics," Hill said.

Kim's administration had informed Washington on a number of occasions that it wanted to get the nuclear deal done before US President George W. Bush left office in January next year.

But after failing to give the full declaration of its nuclear arsenal, Pyongyang raised the stakes on Friday by test-firing several missiles and warning it may slow down disabling its atomic facilities.

The White House criticized the missile tests as "not constructive" and urged Pyongyang to focus instead on dismantling its nuclear facilities.
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