North Korea was expected yesterday to begin an unprecedented disabling of the nuclear program it has pursued for half a century, under the supervision of a US team of experts.
The state's official media gave no information on whether work had started at the Yongbyon nuclear complex.
But US nuclear envoy Christopher Hill said over the weekend that a US supervisory team was set to begin work yesterday.
"This will be, I think, an important moment when it's done," Hill said on Saturday in Tokyo.
The North, which staged its first nuclear test last October, has agreed with five negotiating partners to declare and disable all its nuclear programs by the end of the year in return for energy aid and several major diplomatic benefits.
In July it took the first step by shutting down the plutonium-producing reactor at Yongbyon.
Disablement aims to make the reactor and other nuclear plants unusable for at least a year while talks on a total denuclearization of the nation to continue.
According to agreements made at the negotiations, the North will receive energy aid worth hundreds of millions of dollars in return for disablement.
NORMALIZED RELATIONS
If it goes on next year to dismantle the plants and give up its plutonium stockpile and nuclear weapons, it can expect normalized relations with Washington and a peace pact to replace the armistice which ended the 1950-1953 Korean War.
The aim of disablement is to avoid a rerun of what happened in 2002, when a 1994 denuclearization pact with the US fell apart. Despite an eight-year shutdown, North Korea quickly resumed production of plutonium and now has an estimated 45-65kg -- enough to build several bombs.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency, quoting diplomatic sources, said chief nuclear negotiators from the six nations -- the two Koreas, the US, China, Japan and Russia -- recently agreed on 11 disablement measures at the three major plants at Yongbyon.
It said these include the withdrawal of about 8,000 spent fuel rods from the five-megawatt reactor, the only one in operation in the country.
Yonhap said the removal of the rods, which weigh some 50 tonnes in total, was expected to take at least six weeks. The US team was expected to keep them in a cooling pond until a decision could be made on how to dispose of them.
A six-nation pact reached in February also envisages the North's eventual removal from a US list of state sponsors of terrorism, and from the provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act.
But Hill said on Saturday that Pyongyang would first have to satisfy Washington that it was not engaged in any terrorism-related activities.
"They have to address the terrorism concerns that put them on the list in the first place," he said.
North Korea's quest for nuclear weapons began after the Korean War, when in 1954 Washington began stationing nuclear weapons in Japan, followed by the arrival of nuclear warheads in South Korea in January 1958.
SOVIET TRAINING
In the mid-1950s, North Korea signed a research agreement with Moscow under which hundreds of its scientists were trained in nuclear physics by the Soviets.
The North later signed a similar cooperation agreement with China.
After 33 years, the US withdrew its nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula in the early 1990s.
More recently, according to US sources, the North turned to Pakistan to develop a separate program based on highly enriched uranium.
Pyongyang has reportedly agreed to account for that program as well.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS