USA/FILE: Washington responds to the North Korean disarmament deal

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the North Korea nuclear disarmament agreement Tuesday (February 13) a good beginning and said that the six parties involved in the plan had the incentives to make it "stick." North Korea agreed to take steps toward nuclear disarmament under a groundbreaking six-party agreement that will bring the impoverished communist state some $300 million in aid. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday (February 13) that the North Korea nuclear disarmament agreement was a good first step in the process of disarming the country. "This implementing agreement has the advantage first and foremost of being multilateral. It has as a part of it China, Japan, South Korea and the United States, all countries that have the right set of incentives and disincentives at hand not just to make a deal with North Korea but to make sure that one sticks," Rice said. North Korea agreed Tuesday to take steps toward nuclear disarmament under a groundbreaking deal that will bring the impoverished communist state some $300 million in aid. Under the agreement, reached by six countries in Beijing four months after the secretive state stunned the world by testing a nuclear device, Pyongyang will freeze the reactor at the heart of its nuclear program and allow international inspections of the site. Japan and the United States also said they would take early steps toward normalizing relations with Pyongyang. Washington agreed to resolve the issue of frozen North Korean bank accounts in Macau's Banco Delta Asia within 30 days, chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill told reporters. The United States will also initiate, under a separate bilateral forum, a process to remove North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Joseph Cirincione of the Center for American Progress called the deal a "no-brainer." "What's not to like about this deal? It's cheap for us, nobody dies in implementing it and if we carry it through to completion, we will have disarmed North Korea, the second successful state after Libya that will have given up nuclear weapons in the past three years," Cirincione said. The proposed plan hammered out by the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and China after nearly a week of intensive talks will only be the first step in locating and dismantling North Korea's nuclear arms activities, leaving many questions to future negotiations. Rice said Iran, another country at loggerheads with the West over its nuclear program, should see North Korea as an example. "Why should it not be seen as a message to Iran that the international community is able to bring together its resources?" she said at a news conference. Hill and North Korean envoy Kim Kye-gwan warmly shook hands and patted one another's arms during a closing reception. Pyongyang's official KCNA news agency said the other parties decided to offer economic and energy aid equivalent to one million tonnes of heavy oil in connection with North Korea's "temporary" suspension of the operation of its nuclear facilities. Hill dismissed that report as posturing. U.S. trade sanctions will also begin to be lifted from a country President George W. Bush once lumped with Iran and Iraq on an "axis of evil." One area of uncertainty is whether North Korea has a highly enriched uranium program as alleged by Washington. North Korea has not acknowledged the existence of such a program. Highly enriched uranium can be the fissile material for nuclear weapons and its production can be much harder to detect than plutonium refinement. As details of the draft leaked out, Japan was already voicing doubt that any agreement could be made to stick. The deal says North Korea must take steps to shut down its main nuclear reactor within 60 days. In return, it will receive 50,000 tonnes of fuel oil or economic aid of equal value. The North will receive another 950,000 tonnes of fuel oil or equivalent when it takes further steps to disable its nuclear capabilities, including providing a complete inventory of its plutonium -- the fuel used in Pyongyang's first nuclear test blast in October. The 1 million tonnes of fuel would be worth around $300 million at current prices. The steps for now do not involve providing 2,000 megawatts of electricity -- at an estimated cost of $8.55 billion over 10 years and about equal to North Korea's current output -- that South Korea pledged in September 2005 and which is due after North Korea's denuclearisation is completed. The deal faces a tricky path to fruition amid profound distrust between North Korea and its would-be donors. North Korea stepped down the path to nuclear disarmament before, in a 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration collapsed in 2002 after Washington accused Pyongyang of seeking to produce weapons-grade uranium. The United States maintains some 30,000 troops on the Korean peninsula, which has remained in a technical state of war since the 1950-53 Korean War truce. Japan will not join in giving aid to North Korea because of past abductions of its nationals by Pyongyang's agents, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in Tokyo.

ITN Source | February 14, 2007

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