The Hindu : N. Korea's decision raises stakes

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 23, 2002

International

International

N. Korea's decision raises stakes

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE Dec. 22. North Korea today stunned its neighbours by announcing that it was now beginning to dismantle the monitors or surveillance devices at its nuclear power facilities that might yield plutonium for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. The move, if not reversed under international pressure, will enable Pyongyang to rid itself of constraints on its `sovereign' rights to produce nuclear energy and put the spent fuel to other uses.

The prime reactor in question, seen by the international community as North Korea's fast-track in a nuclear-weaponisation overdrive, had remained in disuse under the Agreed Framework, which the U.S. and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), the North's official name, had signed in 1994. While the announcement is not a diplomatic surprise, given the fact that the DPRK had indicated this possibility over a week ago, the time-lag had led to speculation that Pyongyang might have even decided to soft-pedal its way through the maze of nuclear proliferation.

With the global community, more especially the U.S. and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), refusing to dismantle the surveillance gadgets as demanded by North Korea, the move acquired the proportions of yet another act of defiance of world opinion by the Kim Jong Il regime in Pyongyang. Though the word from the DPRK was only a logical corollary to Mr. Kim's recent decision to un-freeze the plutonium-yielding plants, the timing of the new move has raised a virtual diplomatic rumpus in the Asia-Pacific region.

The election of Roh Moo-hyun as South Korea's President and Washington's efforts to reach out to him seem to have been prime factors behind North's decision. A South Korean spokesman characterised the move as the manifestation of an "extremely regrettable conduct''.

Speaking in Seoul, he demanded that North Korea should `freeze' its "nuclear system''. Towards this end, the DPRK should, at first, rescind its latest decision and re-seal the nuclear reactor where the monitoring devices were being dismantled at present.

The South Korean Foreign Minister, Choi Sung-hong, and the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, discussed the crisis over telephone today. The two pledged to sustain bilateral and international cooperation to checkmate North Korea, according to an authentic version in Seoul.

In Tokyo, the Japanese Government not only regretted the North Korean move but also demanded that Pyongyang respond to the IAEA's proposals and re-engage it for a way out of this crisis. Japan indicated that it would coordinate its counter-moves in conjunction with South Korea and the U.S. Japan's reaction to the North's incremental confrontation with its present interlocutors (such as Tokyo and Seoul) came amid an indication that the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, might establish some degree of contact with North Korea during his planned official visit to Russia from January 9.

Though there was no instant reaction of a formal kind from the U.S. to Pyongyang's latest act of raising the nuclear stakes on the Korean peninsula, the move itself seemed designed to test an Iraq-obsessed America's political will elsewhere in the world.

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