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North Korea Wants More Atomic Weapons
Arab News, Agencies
SEOUL, 31 August 2003 — North Korea said yesterday the hard-line US stance at the Beijing nuclear negotiations meant there was no point in holding further talks and left it with no choice but to enhance its nuclear deterrent force.
China — North Korea’s closest ally and organizer of last week’s six-way talks — sought to keep the momentum for dialogue going.
A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman told the KCNA news agency Washington had adopted a harder line at the talks and had demanded Pyongyang “drop its gun first”.
The communist country angrily dismissed the talks, saying it was now even more convinced of the need to strengthen its nuclear arsenal.
Further discussion was no longer necessary, officials from the regime said, even though parties to the three-day meeting which ended Friday had agreed to hold another round of talks.
The gathering was “not only useless but harmful in every aspect,” the spokesman. “Betraying our expectation, the talks turned out to be no more than armchair arguments and degenerated into a stage show to force us to disarm,” the spokesman was quoted as saying.
“We are now more convinced than before that we have no other alternatives but to continue strengthening our nuclear deterrence as a self-defensive measure to protect our sovereignty.”
China, which arranged the meeting, said it hoped the talks aimed at defusing the nuclear crisis would continue, as agreed on Friday. It also repeated its opposition to nuclear weapons on the divided Korean Peninsula, but stopped short of condemning the North’s comments.
“We hope all parties will continue to make efforts and continue the process of dialogue,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.
But the North Korean spokesman said the Beijing talks — also attended by China, Japan, Russia and South Korea — were a trick aimed at disarming the communist state.
The US delegation had hardened its stance by saying it would negotiate fully with North Korea only once the North had scrapped its nuclear development program, he said.
“This means the US asking the DPRK to drop its gun first, saying it would not open fire, when both sides are leveling guns at each other,” it said.
“This made it impossible for the DPRK to have any interest or expectation for the talks as they are not beneficial to it,” the spokesman said in KCNA’s English-language version.
The earlier Korean-language text said: “We are not interested at all in this kind of talks.”
It was not clear whether the spokesman’s comments signaled a formal change in policy from Friday’s agreement to talk again or was part of Pyongyang’s rhetorical repertoire. The English-language version was ambiguous enough to refer to this week’s talks rather than future meetings.
Earlier, an unidentified North Korean delegate to the talks made similar remarks to reporters at Beijing airport. He said he saw no need for further discussions.
But analysts dismissed the delegate’s comments as posturing by the North, which typically steps up its rhetoric or makes conflicting statements to try to confuse its opponents or win concessions. The same could be true of the ministry remarks.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman’s comments on increasing North Korea’s nuclear deterrent force were somewhat clearer, but did not state directly that the North already has nuclear weapons, as the United States suspects.
A commentary in the official newspaper Minju Joson said every country had a right to defend itself and went further than the ministry by saying the North already had a nuclear force.
“The DPRK’s nuclear deterrent force is a means for self-defense which it was compelled to build to cope with the situation in which the sovereignty of the country was seriously infringed upon due to the evermore undisguised US moves to stifle it with nukes,” the newspaper said.
Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, the head of the US delegation, told reporters the talks had been productive but there was a long way to go before the crisis was defused.
It began last October when Kelly confronted the North with evidence of its secret nuclear program. Washington said the North confirmed it had the covert project.
The crisis deepened after the isolated North threw out UN inspectors, pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and took its Yongbyon nuclear plant out of mothballs.
Pyongyang has frequently used bluster when discussing its nuclear capabilities. US officials have said North Korea raised the rhetoric on Thursday by talking about carrying out a test and saying it could declare itself a nuclear power. “The contradiction is a maneuver and consistent with North Korea’s pattern of behavior in the past,” said Shi Yinhong, an international relations expert at Beijing’s People’s University.
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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