hankyoreh

Ryu Jae Hoon, Washington Correspondant

WASHINGTON-North Korea’s foreign ministry has announced it will shut down its Yongbyon nuclear facility as soon as it gets its first shipment of an eventual total of 50,000 tons of heavy oil, which leaves only the timing unresolved ahead of the next round of six-party negotiations. Now that the hurdle of the initial implementation stage of the February 13 agreement is complete, the next task is overcoming the mountain that is the disabling of Pyongyang’s nuclear program. But since U.S. assistant secretary of state Christopher Hill underestimated the issue of Pyongyang’s frozen funds in Macau’s Banco Delta Asia as ‘‘procedural’’ and ‘‘technical,’’ you cannot be 100 percent optimistic about the road ahead.

As explained by key North Korean diplomat Han Song-ryol while visiting the United Kingdom on July 4, Pyongyang’s position on a non-nuclear Korean peninsula has not changed. If anything that position is stronger in the wake of concessions by the United States. Han called for an end to the United States’ hostile policy towards North Korea and the abolition of Pyongyang’s nuclear program to happen simultaneously. In a recent interview with The Hankyoreh, North Korean deputy ambassador to the United Nations Kim Myong-kil said the second phase of implementation requires Pyongyang to submit a list of its nuclear inventory, after which the United States must remove North Korea from its list of terror-sponsoring nations and lift the sanctions against it. ‘‘The second phase is not about reporting and disablement, but about the United States working together’’ with his country. The United States wants to see a uranium enrichment program on that inventory list, but Kim has said it ‘‘doesn’t even have one’’ and proposed that matters be resolved ‘‘in the style of Kumchang-ri.’’ In other words, if the United States wants to inspect for a uranium program, it can do so on the condition that Pyongyang is compensated for allowing it to do so, as was done when U.S. inspectors went to the suspected nuclear site at Kumchang-ri in 1999.

North Korean vice foreign minister and top delegate to the six-party talks Kim Kye-gwan is reported to have said that ‘‘disablement’’ is ‘‘like castrating a bull.’’ A source in Washington interpreted that to mean that Kim expects measures taken by the United States to be commensurate with something as serious as castrating a bull.

Both men seem to be suggesting that after the disablement of the North’s nuclear facilities, and when it comes time to dismantling its nuclear weapons, something not outlined in the February 13 agreement, North Korea could make no small number of additional demands. Given how the North has long said the key to resolving the nuclear issue will be for the United States, as the reason we had no choice but to have nuclear weapons, to remove its nuclear threat and make it possible for the building of mutual confidence.

In the latest edition of Arms Control Today, former U.S. ambassador to the Geneva Conference on Disarmament George Bunn, who as legal counsel for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency helped negotiate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, says it could send a ‘‘dangerous message’’ to countries like Iran if the United States were to give Pyongyang negative security assurances (NSA). He warns that the Bush Administration’s policy of ‘‘adamant rejection’’ of NSAs and refusal to rule out preemptive nuclear attacks will have a negative result for the non-proliferation regime. Bunn said he believes that ‘‘negotiating legally binding NSAs in the context of the NPT is the way to go.’’

There is not a lot of time. The Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation Executive Director L. Gordon Flake says that the chance to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue during the Bush Administration will be lost if there is not meaningful progress in the next six months. The expectant optimism that existed in Washington around the time of the February 13 agreement is long gone. The dominant mood is one of caution, with people waiting for the Bush Administration’s patience to expire, given that it has so little time left in office. You can see this in the context how, when Christopher Hill returned from his visit to Pyongyang last month, he said he was hopeful about complete denuclearization but felt burdened by the time and effort he thinks it will take to achieve that. Despite this, North Korea is making clear its intention to modulate the pace of denuclearization as it waits to see how accommodating the Americans are going to be of its demands.