SEOUL (REUTERS) — With the North Korea nuclear crisis overshadowing an economic agenda, ministers of North and South began a second day of talks on Thursday with no hint as to whether they would discuss Pyongyang’s atomic ambitions.
South Korean newspapers, meanwhile, saw Wednesday’s statement by the chief North Korean delegate, Kim Ryong-Song, that Pyongyang had no plans to build nuclear arms as little more than a ploy to sidestep the issue.
The top U.S. arms control diplomat said North Korea’s decision this month to quit the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty curbing the spread of atomic arms could be taken to the U.N. Security Council as early as this week.
Such a move could further infuriate the isolated communist state, diplomatic sources close to North Korea said in Tokyo, and actual discussion of the issue in the Security Council could prompt North Korea to resume tests of ballistic missiles.
Few observers expect the ninth round of North-South ministerial talks to yield progress on the nuclear issue.
“The meeting just began, so it’s difficult to assess the mood,” said one official at the luxury hotel on the outskirts of Seoul where the talks were taking place.
“It’s my assumption that if developments overnight were positive, we will have a regular meeting.”
The crisis was sparked in October when the United States said the North had admitted to developing nuclear arms. Pyongyang ejected U.N. nuclear inspectors last month, and later removed the seals from a mothballed reactor and pulled out of the NPT.
NO BUYOFFS
North Korea has said any move by the United Nations to impose sanctions would escalate the crisis and could even trigger war.
U.S. undersecretary of state John Bolton, speaking at a news conference in Seoul after talks with South Korean officials, insisted that Washington would not give in to nuclear blackmail.
“We are not in the marketplace for buying off North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction,” he said late Wednesday.
Bolton dismissed as a “red herring” the North’s demand that the United States sign a non-aggression pact but said Washington could consider putting in writing President Bush’s statement that America had no plan to invade the North.
The issue could be referred to the Security Council as early as this week, Bolton said.
“I don’t think that it’s a question of ‘if’ it goes to the Security Council… It’s a matter of time,” he said. “We are confident it will get there by the end of this week.”
All of the United States’ fellow permanent Security Council members — Britain, France, China and Russia — opposed North Korea having nuclear weapons and should have no objection to the issue being taken to the council, he said.
The North Korea issue can be referred straight to the Security Council by a member without a resolution from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has no emergency meeting scheduled, officials in Vienna.
An official at the IAEA’s Seoul office said the issue was under discussion behind closed doors and plans existed to convene a special meeting in Vienna although no date had been set.
Pyongyang has insisted that the only solution to the impasse is for the United States to agree to direct talks and to sign a non-aggression treaty. Last year Bush grouped the North with Iraq and Iran in an “axis of evil.”
In Washington, a senior U.S. official said there were no plans to press for sanctions at a Security Council debate and the aim of such a discussion would be to make clear that North Korea’s nuclear programs are an international problem and not a dispute with Washington alone.
The impasse has sparked a series of diplomatic initiatives and U.S. officials have cited some progress, an indication that Washington has shifted from its hard line of “no negotiations” now that the standoff has become a distraction to its preparations for war against Iraq.
North Korea’s delegates to the ministerial talks told their Southern counterparts on Tuesday that Pyongyang had no intention of developing atomic arms, a South Korean official said.
AVOIDING THE ISSUE
The denial defied predictions that North Korea would resist discussing with Seoul an issue it had insisted was exclusively a problem for Pyongyang to work out with the United States and appeared to indicate Pyongyang may want to end the standoff.
But the South Korean press greeted the statement with skepticism.
“North Korea is trying as much as possible to avoid directly discussing ways to solve the nuclear problem with the South, the concerned party,” the Hankook Ilbo daily said in an editorial that called on Pyongyang to change its negotiating stance.
Bolton said any resolution of the crisis would not involve the Agreed Framework reached in 1994 under which Pyongyang froze its nuclear program in return for light-water reactors believed to be harder to use to create weapons-grade material.
“You can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” Bolton said. “It is nearly impossible to believe that we would trust them with any form of fissile material in the future.”
After Bolton spoke, diplomatic sources close to North Korea said in Tokyo that Pyongyang would resume tests of ballistic missiles if the Security Council discussed the crisis.
“The North would lift its self-imposed moratorium on missile launches if and when the issue is referred to the Security Council,” said a source, adding that an actual test launch would follow soon.
“Pyongyang will never cave in to threats and will respond with an even harder line,” he said. “But we have to see the true intention behind Bolton’s remarks.”
North Korea stunned its neighbors in 1998 by firing a medium-range ballistic missile over Japan. The following year, it announced a moratorium on missile test flights to last until the beginning of this year and said last September it would extend the moratorium indefinitely.
This month, as international pressure grew, it said it felt free to resume firing tests.