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North Korea must give up nuclear weapons, says Rice

SINGAPORE: The U.S. on Saturday urged North Korea to “abandon” all its nuclear weapons in a culmination of the process set on course by Friday’s demolition of the cooling tower at the Yongbyon complex.

The U.S.’ call acquires unusual importance because of Japan’s comment that the elimination of North Korea’s existing stockpile of nuclear weapons is the real issue to address rather than just the dramatic destruction of a cooling tower.

Japan is one of the six parties still engaged in parleys to bring about the denuclearisation of Korean Peninsula. The other interlocutors are the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) or North Korea, the U.S., China as the proactive host, South Korea, and Russia.

Speaking in Seoul, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said: “I expect that the North [Korea] will live up to the obligation that it has [already] undertaken. ... At the end of this [six-party process], let me just emphasise again, at the end of this, we have to have the abandonment of all programmes, weapons, and materials [by the DPRK].”

Diplomats said the current phase of disabling North Korea’s declared nuclear facilities and their dismantlement in the proposed follow-up stages would only destroy its “capabilities” without dispossessing it of its atomic arsenal.

Prior to answering such concerns by urging North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons, Ms. Rice had, at the end of a meeting of Group of Eight Foreign Minister in Kyoto, underscored the value of the cooling tower’s demolition. She said North Korea was in fact using that tower to operate “an active [nuclear] reactor” at Yongbyon, the site of a plutonium-based programme.

Addressing the scepticism in some quarters about the credibility of the “declaration” that North Korea had now made regarding its nuclear activities, Ms. Rice said the six parties would in due course evolve “a verification protocol.”

The verifiers would also “need access to the reactor core ... [and] to the waste pool,” she said by way of “an example.” Ms. Rice said: “We [still] have serious questions about [the] highly enriched uranium programmes in North Korea as well as [its] proliferation activities.” The DPRK’s suspected proliferation-related assistance to Syria is now under the U.S. scanner.

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