The US believes China and Russia have leverage they can use to persuade North Korea not to resume nuclear bomb testing, a senior US government official said on Thursday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that while the US had been saying since May that North Korea was preparing to resume nuclear testing for the first time since 2017, it was not clear when it might conduct such a test.
“We have a high level of confidence that they have made preparations,” he said. “We believe that they could do this... I can’t tell you: ‘We think it will be this day for the following reasons,’ because we just don’t have that level of knowledge.”
Photo: EPA-EFE / South Korean Defense Ministry
Washington wants to see Russia and China do what they could to dissuade Pyongyang, he said.
“We do think that they [North Korea] are making calculations about the degree of receptivity for others in the region, I think, particularly Russia and China. And I think that the Russian and Chinese attitudes do have influence with them,” he said.
The official spoke after the US asked the UN Security Council to meet publicly to discuss North Korea after a spate of missile launches, including what the Pentagon said was an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Photo: AFP
North Korea has long been banned from conducting nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches by the Security Council, which bolstered sanctions on Pyongyang over the past few years to try to cut off funding for those programs.
However, the 15-member body has been split on how to deal with North Korea. While Russia and China backed toughened sanctions after North Korea’s last nuclear test, they in May vetoed a US-led push to impose more UN sanctions over North Korea’s renewed ballistic missile launches.
The US official said Pyongyang might have delayed its resumption of nuclear testing because of China, including a Chinese Communist Party congress last month, and due to North Korea’s COVID-19 outbreak in May and June.
He said he thought the latter crisis made North Korea “more focused on ways in which they could get support from particularly China.”
“China and Russia have long been on the record as opposing the DPRK nuclear program,” the official said, using the acronym for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “It’s our belief, and certainly it is our expectation, that they will use the influence that they have to try and get the DPRK not to conduct a nuclear test.”
The official said Washington was prepared to engage directly with North Korea and to discuss humanitarian assistance.
Asked how stable he believed North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s government was, the official said: “We don’t see any evidence that there are particular challenges that would undermine Kim Jong-un’s standing. On the other hand, I’m not sure that we necessarily would.”
Asked what was motivating North Korea’s recent spate of missile testing, which Pyongyang has called a response to “aggressive” US-South Korean military drills, he said: “We don’t know because they are not talking directly to us.”
The official rejected growing calls among some North Korea experts for Washington to recognize the country as a nuclear power that is never going to disarm.
“There is an extraordinarily strong global consensus that is represented in a whole series of UN Security Council resolutions that obviously passed with the support of all the members of the P5, that the DPRK should not, and must not, be a nuclear nation,” he said, referring to the five council members with veto powers. “No country is calling for this... The consequences of changing policy, I think would be profoundly negative.”
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