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During this week’s six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program, negotiators must lay out a roadmap to disable the North’s atomic facilities and make a complete declaration under an agreement reached on February 13. Though South Korean officials have been concerned that allegations of North Korea-Syria nuclear cooperation may cast a shadow over the talks, a South Korean government official said on September 27, the first day of talks, “The mood in Seoul seems to be better than we originally anticipated.” Meanwhile, North Korea has not overreacted about the suspicions and has shown its willingness to stick to the agreement, the official hinted.

Chun Yung-woo, South Korea’s chief negotiator, likened the process of disabling North Korea’s nuclear facilities to a “road on which nobody travels.”

A broader plan for the talks was set following a visit by a delegation led by U.S. technicians earlier this month to North Korea’s Yongbyon facilities, where its key nuclear plant is located. The aim now is to disable three main atomic facilities - a nuclear fuel plant, a five-megawatt reactor that can produce plutonium and a plutonium reprocessing facility - by the end of this year.

North Korea has already agreed to disable the nuclear facilities. Under an agreement reached on February 13 of this year between North Korea and the nations involved in the six-party process, which include North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia, North Korea must declare and disable its nuclear weapons, for which it will receive aid and other political incentives.

At stake is how far the North will go with its commitment, depending on a timetable that is linked to a potential removal of North Korea from the United States’ list of state sponsors of terrorism.

After holding a bilateral meeting with his North Korean counterpart Kim Gye-kwan on September 26, the United States’ chief nuclear negotiator, Christopher Hill, told reporters, “We’d like to do more. The DPRK likes to do less. We’ll figure out a way through that.” DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and is the official name of North Korea.

The year-end deadline is too short for North Korea to take steps to fully remove nuclear contamination. Therefore, people close to the situation say that negotiators are weighing plans to remove only core parts such as fuel rods or control rods from the five-megawatt reactor.

Before entering the talks, Chun told reporters, “North Korea should reveal all of its possessions (during the process of reporting on its nuclear program) and the veracity is very important.”

So far, the eyes of the negotiators have been on the North’s alleged uranium enrichment program. In particular, negotiators have requested that North Korea clarify an allegation that Pyongyang acquired 20 enrichment-related centrifuges from the disgraced Abdul Qadeer Khan, billed as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program. At a working-level meeting for denuclearization in August, North Korea said it would clarify the allegation. In the middle of September, Japan’s Kyodo News reported that North Korea admitted it had imported high-strength aluminum tubes, a material used in centrifuges.

The U.S. intelligence assessment in 2001 was that North Korea could build more than 2,600 centrifuges by mid-2002. The report is widely considered to have been exaggerated.

What is important is to clarify whether North Korea went to the point where it can manufacture the centrifuge after it secured a high-speed rotor, a centrifuge’s core part. In addition, North Korea’s honest declaration is needed in order to show the volume of plutonium after reprocessing and the list of goods it possesses for making nuclear weapons.

On the evening of September 26, Hill described the issue of nuclear proliferation as “one of the important issues” at the six-party talks, referring to the allegations over North Korea-Syrian nuclear cooperation.

However, South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min-soon in New York, after meeting with the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said the allegations may not have a significant influence on the six-party talks.

Another potential issue is the North Korea-Japan relationship, which centers on the abduction issue. The inauguration of the moderate Yasuo Fukuda administration in Japan is expected to make headway in thawing Pyongyang-Tokyo relations.


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