North Korea has hinted it may be preparing to pull out of the global nuclear arms control treaty, a step that would escalate the crisis over its moves to restart its nuclear facilities, South Korean officials said yesterday.
In 1993, North Korea abruptly announced that it was withdrawing from the treaty but suspended the decision when Washington agreed to start talks with Pyongyang. The talks resulted in a 1994 deal called the Agreed Framework.
North Korea said in a statement late Sunday that the US violated the 1994 deal by halting promised energy supplies, putting the North's special status under that deal at risk.
"The US began ditching even the AF [Agreed Framework], thus putting this special status in peril," said the statement by North Korea's Foreign Ministry, carried on its foreign news outlet, the Korean Central News Agency.
South Korean media and officials say North Korea's language could signal that it is preparing to officially pull out of the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or NPT, meaning that it has no obligation to allow inspections.
"We're closely watching what North Korea's next step would be," a South Korean Foreign Ministry official, requesting anonymity, said at a briefing to local reporters. "It could be a withdrawal from the NPT."
Nevertheless, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Sunday that time remained to find a diplomatic resolution to North Korea's development of nuclear weapons, and the situation hasn't reached the crisis stage.
At the same time, preparations for war continued in the confrontation with Iraq, which some key senators said ranks far behind North Korea as a threat to the US.
Powell, making the rounds of the Sunday television talk shows, said the US was working with other countries to pressure North Korea into reversing its decision to restart its weapons program and expel UN inspectors monitoring its main nuclear complex.
Indeed, Powell objected to calling the North Korean problem a crisis.
"We don't believe it rises to a crisis atmosphere," he said on one show. "Nobody's alerting forces. It's a serious problem, and we're deeply engaged in trying to do something about it."
Defying international opinion, the North's isolated communist government has been moving to reactivate operations at its main nuclear complex at Yongbyon, which experts say could produce weapons within months.
It is suspected of already having at least one atomic bomb.
US officials said Sunday that Washington would enlist its Asian allies and the UN to intensify economic pressure on Pyongyang to abandon nuclear development.
North Korea maintains it will address concerns over the nuclear issue only if Washington signs a nonaggression pact. But the George W. Bush administration has ruled out talks unless Pyongyang first gives up its nuclear ambitions.
Outgoing South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who steps down in February, said yesterday that he would continue his "sunshine" policy of engaging North Korea to try to resolve the dispute.
"I'm confidant that our sunshine policy would eventually lead North Korea to reform and change," Kim said, adding that the West's past containment policy with the old Soviet Union and China had failed.
"Cuba is another good example that containment and isolation cannot succeed. The United States even waged war with Vietnam but failed to change the situation," he said.
Kim's successor, Roh Moo-hyun, also stressed the importance of dialogue with North Korea, warning that war on the Korean Peninsula could result in huge human losses.
South Korea plans to dispatch its assistant foreign minister, Lee Tae-shik, to Beijing on Thursday to solicit Chinese help in resolving the issue.
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