Seoul sees hope in talks

Government sources in Seoul described to the JoongAng Ilbo yesterday what they said were some of the details of the “bold new proposals” the North Korean delegation reportedly offered in Beijing last week. On Friday, North Korean media had said its delegation had given U.S. negotiators such a proposal to end the tense standoff over North Korea’s nuclear program. One official said the proposal had enough “positive aspects” to warrant consideration.
The sources said North Korea proposed, on the first day of the talks, a package of exchanges with the United States, offering to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in exchange for steps by the United States to move toward normal relations with the North.
A senior official here said the North Korean delegation appeared to drop its demand for a nonaggression treaty with the United States, speaking only of a guarantee of no first use of U.S. nuclear weapons.
But North Korea had also appeared to abandon its calls for such a treaty earlier, saying that the lesson of the Iraq war was that strong national deterrent capabilities were the only way to keep the United States from attacking.
South Korea was not represented at the meetings in Beijing, reportedly at North Korean insistence.
One of the sources here said the North Korean proposal was for simultaneous and comprehensive steps to settle the outstanding issues. The communist country reportedly was seeking political and economic ties, they added.
But the American response, from the senior U.S. representative James Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for Asia, was a reiteration of the U.S. position that the North Korean nuclear program must be verifiably dismantled before discussions of a U.S. response could take place. That evening, the sources said, the chief North Korean delegate Ri Gun, called Mr. Kelly aside for a private conversation in which he said his country had nuclear weapons that could not be dismantled.
Following meetings here with Mr. Kelly on Friday and Saturday, South Korean officials said Mr. Kelly had conveyed the North Korean assertions that they have nuclear weapons and have completed much of the reprocessing of 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods that had until early this year been in storage at its nuclear facility in Yeongbyeon.
The officials said the thrust of the North Korean proposal was not a significant departure from the Geneva Agreed Framework, a 1994 U.S.-North Korean agreement that the North would close its plutonium-based nuclear program in exchange for two modern nuclear power reactors and a supply of fuel oil while those reactors were being built.
What was notable, the sources said, was North Korea’s expressed willingness to scrap, not just suspend, its nuclear development programs.

by Oh Young-hwan