North Korea stalling nuclear talks

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Why would that be? Do they think they will get a better deal if Kerry is elected?

N.Korea Seen Stalling in Nuclear Row Until U.S. Vote

Thu Apr 1, 2004 04:55 AM ET

By Paul Eckert and Martin Nesirky

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea seems to have lost interest in nuclear talks until after the U.S. presidential election in November, despite strenuous Chinese efforts to keep Pyongyang engaged, South Korean experts said on Thursday.

China's foreign minister emerged a week ago from a trip to North Korea voicing optimism about the six-party negotiations. But days later, Pyongyang state media flatly rejected the goals set out by Washington, Tokyo and Seoul, the experts said.

"I don't think North Korea is very serious about six-party talks," said Choi Jin-wook, a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification.

"Until the next American president is decided, the possibility of negotiations is very slim," added Cheon Seong-whun, an arms control expert at South Korea's top North Korea think tank.

Choi told Reuters that North Korea had adjusted its moves during the 18-month-old nuclear impasse while carefully watching the situation in the United States and South Korea. The other parties to the talks are Japan, Russia and host China.

North Korea engaged in brinkmanship over its weapons programs from late 2002 until early last year, kicking out U.N. inspectors and restarting a mothballed reactor plant to produce plutonium for bombs.

"After the Iraq war, North Korea was very serious about negotiating with the United States," Choi said.

"They accepted six-party talks even though they strongly demanded bilateral talks," sharply reversing course out of fear of being the next U.S. target, he said.

"Now they think George W. Bush is in trouble and his chances are declining and he can't do anything on the peninsula because he is preoccupied with Iraq," Choi said.

UKRAINE, LIBYA NOT MODELS

Last week, North Korean state radio rejected complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of its nuclear programs. "CVID" is the main U.S. demand in the six-way talks.

Pyongyang Radio said Washington's goal for North Korea was to "rob its nuclear deterrent and disarm the North, investigate its military capabilities before starting a war and suffocate its economy by killing its nuclear energy industry."

North Korean compliance with any disarmament deal would be as impossible to verify as such arms control pacts were with the old Soviet Union, Cheon said.

"Very closed socialist systems don't like the very concept of openness and verification. They'll do whatever they can do to resist verification," he said.

Both scholars said negotiators should not be distracted by the debate over whether North Korea sought to be a nuclear-armed power or was merely using such weapons as a bargaining chip.

"No country in the world would try to develop any serious weapons just for the bargaining chip," said Cheon.

What makes the nuclear issue so intractable is that North Korea wants to have its cake and eat it, too, brandishing nuclear weapons to ensure regime survival while using them to draw Washington into negotiations and extract aid, said Choi.

"Their dilemma is they want both," he said.

"Kim Jong-il is not an idiot, he's smart" about the risks to his one-man rule in North Korea that would come with opening up the country after resolving the nuclear row, Choi said.

"The nature of their system is why the Ukraine model or the Libya model doesn't work with North Korea," he said. Ukraine gave up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in the 1990s and Libya recently pledged to scrap all weapons of mass destruction.

REUTERS