Release Date: 2008-05-14
Original Link: http://presszoom.com/story_145125.html
Washington -- A top U.S. official has returned from North Korea with new details of Pyongyang’s nuclear activities that will help advance international efforts to stabilize the Korean Peninsula. “Our top three priorities are going to be verification, verification, verification,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said as a U.S. delegation returned to Washington with 18,000 pages of newly released documents.
(PressZoom.com) - Washington -- A top U.S. official has returned from North Korea with new details of Pyongyang’s nuclear activities that will help advance international efforts to stabilize the Korean Peninsula.
“Our top three priorities are going to be verification, verification, verification,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said as a U.S. delegation returned to Washington with 18,000 pages of newly released documents. The documents date back to 1986 and outline operations at the Yongbyon nuclear complex, where North Korea produced weapons-grade plutonium that was used in an October 2006 nuclear detonation.
Sung Kim, director of the State Department's Office of Korean Affairs, received the materials after a three-day meeting in Pyongyang to break the latest deadlock over an October 2007 agreement reached in the Six-Party Talks. The agreement reached in the multilateral negotiations with North Korea said that, in return for disclosing details of its long-running nuclear weapons development program, the country would receive food, fuel and other benefits.
Six-nation talks involving China, Japan, North and South Korea, Russia and the United States began in 2003 with the aim of eliminating the presence of nuclear weapons and related technology from the Korean Peninsula. In return for dismantling its nuclear weapons development program and for revealing its nuclear trade activities with other nations, North Korea would receive a series of benefits, the parties agreed.
Although North Korea shut down Yongbyon as part of a February 2007 agreement, it still has not fulfilled its pledge to provide a full account of past nuclear activities, which was due to negotiators on December 31, 2007, the United States says.
U.S. Ambassador to the Six-Party Talks Christopher Hill has joined in stepped-up talks to convince Pyongyang to honor its overdue pledge, but recent revelations of North Korean support for a Syrian nuclear reactor -- since destroyed by an Israeli air strike -- underline global concerns not only about North Korea’s nuclear progress, but also its willingness to bypass international agreements to spread potentially dangerous weapons technologies. (See “Syria Did Not Disclose Building Nuclear Reactor.”)
Translators and analysts will review the records, which they hope will give a more complete view of North Korea’s plutonium program, McCormack said. This is a key step toward ending the threat of nuclear weapons. “We will do an assessment and will consult very closely with the other members of the talks and share the information,” he said.
“Review of the operating records provided on May 8 will be an important first step in the process of verifying that North Korea’s declaration is complete and correct,” McCormack said May 10. “We are working with the Chinese and our other partners to establish verification and monitoring mechanisms to ensure that all parties, including [North Korea], are living up to their commitments.”
International aid organizations report that poor harvests are leading to a skyrocketing demand for food in North Korea. A full declaration would open the way for greater international assistance, as well as increased investment and engagement with the lifting of U.S. sanctions imposed as part of Washington’s designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism.
Although they are a step toward North Korea’s promised nuclear declaration, the new documents are not expected to shed any further light on North Korea’s project in Syria or suspicions that North Korea pursued uranium enrichment as a parallel path to nuclear weapons, two questions that Pyongyang still must address.
“We still await more complete results and a more complete report as to exactly what happened,” Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte said May 9 in Tokyo. “I would say this was a step in a process but it's an ongoing process.”
A statement on the release of the new documents from North Korea is available on the State Department Web site.