hankyoreh

WASHINGTON - North Korea will finalize the disablement of its nuclear facilities by the end of the year and the United States will remove the communist nation from its list of states supporting terrorism, according to a U.S. government official on November 8.

At a news conference with South Korean reporters in Washington, the high-ranking official said, “The six parties have agreed to complete the first step of disablement this year, following the October 3 agreement. The other five countries will take the appropriate action when the North reports on how the disablement proceed. The removal of North Korea from the U.S. list of nations supporting terrorism is included in this,” added the official.

Timed with North Korea’s implementation of its promise to complete nuclear disablement by the end of the year, the United States is also going to take due measures, such as removing North Korea from its black list and lifting restrictions under the Trading with the Enemy Act within the same time frame.

In connection with the agreement reached at the ROK-U.S. foreign ministers’ talks on November 7, in which the two nations are going to examine ways to garner political support from high-level politicians in order to promote denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, the official remarked, “There are various ways for the heads of state to express their will. They could participate in top level multilateral talks, but they can also express their views without meeting.”

This indicates that, according to the way the situation develops, other options are under discussion. Each leader might issue a separate statement, for example, as opposed to the previous proposal for a four-party summit with the two Koreas, the United States and China.

In the meantime, Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Song Min-soon, who is currently visiting the United States, met with Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana to discuss ways of applying the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction program to the North’s nuclear disablement process. CTR was designed for dismantling nuclear production facilities in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and has been implemented since 1991.

At the time, Sen. Lugar proposed the Nunn-Lugar Act, which detailed U.S. plans for the removal of all nuclear weapons and related equipment from Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine and resolution of technological and financial issues necessary for transporting them to industrial facilities.

In an interview with Free Asia on November 5, Sen. Lugar said that he had recently sent two aides to North Korea to describe the political and economic gains the communist regime will get when it dismantles its nuclear weapons program.