Nuclear compliance tops Rice's agenda for North Korea
WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit South Korea, China, and Japan this week to seek ways to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear programs before time runs out for the Bush administration.
President Bush has less than a year left to wean North Korea of its nuclear ambitions in exchange for economic and diplomatic benefits under a 2005 deal in which Pyongyang agreed to abandon all of its nuclear weapons and programs.
Making her first visit to Northeast Asia in more than a year, Rice will attend the inauguration of South Korean President-elect Lee Myung-bak in Seoul tomorrow and then travel to Beijing and Tokyo for consultations.
The success of the disarmament effort will depend in part on whether Lee and China adopt a tougher stance toward North Korea, analysts say. Lee has pledged to link South Korean aid to the North to progress on disarmament.
US officials said there are no plans for Rice to go to Pyongyang or to meet North Korean officials in Beijing.
At the top of her agenda will be reviving the six-party agreement under which North Korea has begun to dismantle key nuclear facilities at Yongbyon but has balked at providing a complete declaration of all of its nuclear programs. The agreement was reached by the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States.
American officials regard the declaration - which North Korea had agreed to produce by Dec. 31 - as a necessary condition for removing certain US sanctions on Pyongyang and as a key step toward its eventual denuclearization. According to US officials and analysts, the declaration's sticking point has been Pyongyang's reluctance to discuss any transfers of nuclear technology to other nations, notably Syria, and its suspected pursuit of uranium enrichment.
North Korea has produced plutonium, which can be used to make atomic bombs, at Yongbyon. Uranium enrichment would give it a second pathway to fissile material for nuclear weapons.
The United States has questions about any possible North Korean role in a suspected Syrian covert nuclear site that was bombed by Israel in September. Syria has denied having a nuclear program but the case remains murky.
A senior US official said Washington has begun exploring whether Pyongyang might disclose any proliferation and uranium enrichment in a separate document to be kept secret.
"We are flexible on this issue. We are open to ideas on how to do that," said the official, who spoke on condition that he not be named because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.
The official said China and South Korea had floated ideas to North Korea on what it might say in such a separate document but the United States had not.
However, he insisted that North Korea must disclose all of its nuclear programs at the same time to be relieved of sanctions for being on the list of state sponsors of terrorism and a violator of the US Trading With the Enemy Act.
Michael Green, a former White House official now at the CSIS think tank in Washington, said he thought the North Koreans were unlikely to agree to a declaration on the proliferation and enrichment. Rather, he said Pyongyang may stall in the hopes of getting a better deal from a new US president next year.
Green said he would like to see the Bush administration adopt a more coercive stance in its diplomacy to suggest there would be a price to pay for North Korea not keeping its agreements.
"It seems to me that the only way to make progress is if you sustain that mix of pressure and inducements," he said.
Lee's inauguration may give Washington a way to get tougher with North Korea because of his plans to link economic aid to progress on denuclearization. Lee has also suggested that he would press the North to improve its human rights record.
The senior US official played down the idea of the United States taking a harder line, saying it would consider more punitive measures if it concluded the six-party process had ground to a halt but that it was not near such a conclusion: "We continue to believe that however slowly - however painfully slowly - their system is moving, it is trying to grapple with this question" of making the declaration. 