North Korea has handed detailed nuclear weapons records to the US, an important peek into the isolated regime’s bombmaking past but not enough to answer criticism that the administration of US President George W. Bush is grasping for a disarmament deal at any cost.
The technical logs from North Korea’s shuttered plutonium reactor would give outside experts a yardstick to measure whether the North is telling the truth about a bomb program that the poor nation has agreed to trade away for economic and political rewards.
“Our top three priorities are going to be verification, verification, verification,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said on Thursday.
A US diplomat collected the eight boxes of records during a three-day visit to Pyongyang. McCormack said getting the papers was the main reason for the trip.
Privately, State Department officials hope the approximately 18,000 secret papers will build confidence among conservative critics of the recent, relatively flexible U.S. posture toward North Korea, an isolated dictatorship President Bush once termed part of an “axis of evil.”
The Bush administration’s comprehensive disarmament deal last year with the North requires some congressional approval, and Republican unease is growing.
The North is five months past a deadline to produce a complete record of its weapons programs or an alleged side business selling nuclear know-how to other countries, and US officials announced no new deadline for the summary.
The North claims it met its obligations, but has also agreed to a new tentative deal to break the impasse. That deal would have the North acknowledge US concerns about an illicit uranium program and alleged sale or transfer of nuclear know-how to other nations but would not require the North to spell everything out.
The deal would set up a system to verify that North Korea is telling the truth and does not restart banned nuclear activities.
Terms of the deal do not satisfy some congressional Republicans whose votes the administration will probably need to provide money promised for weapons disposal and other pledges to the North.
“It is greater transparency on one part of North Korea’s nuclear program, but none on the others,” Representative Ed Royce said of Thursday’s document dump. Royce is the top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee’s panel on terrorism and nonproliferation.
Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Intelligence Committee’s senior Republican, said he hasn’t seen the details but that he’s skeptical of their import.
“Any mediocre performance by North Korea is taken as an earth-shattering positive development by our State Department,” he said. “It appears they will say anything to get a deal.”
North Korea agreed in recent weeks to blow up the cooling tower at Yongbyon, a largely symbolic display but one intended to demonstrate good faith in its nuclear talks with the US.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki yesterday erupted again with giant ash and smoke plumes after forcing evacuations of villages and flight cancelations, including to and from the resort island of Bali. Several eruptions sent ash up to 5km into the sky on Tuesday evening to yesterday afternoon. An eruption on Tuesday afternoon sent thick, gray clouds 10km into the sky that expanded into a mushroom-shaped ash cloud visible as much as 150km kilometers away. The eruption alert was raised on Tuesday to the highest level and the danger zone where people are recommended to leave was expanded to 8km from the crater. Officers also
RSS