G-8 foreign ministers blast the North

The G-8 industrialized nations condemned North Korea’s uranium enrichment program at a meeting of their foreign ministers in Paris earlier this week, a South Korean official said yesterday.

The G-8 foreign ministers adopted a “chairman’s summary” after two days of talks concluded Tuesday, denouncing the North’s uranium program as a violation of UN Security Council resolutions, the official said.

The ministers also urged Pyongyang to address international concerns about its human rights record, the official said. The move could serve as a boon for South Korea’s push for a UN Security Council presidential statement condemning the uranium program that has fueled concern about Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons capabilities. Uranium, if highly enriched, can be weapons-grade, providing the defiant regime a second way of building nuclear weapons after its existing program based on plutonium.

But Pyongyang claims the program is to produce fuel for a power-generating atomic reactor. But few believe the claim by a regime that has pursued nuclear ambitions for decades and conducted two test explosions.

Yonhap