Friday, December 13, 2002
Pessimism grips Seoul as nuclear crisis deepens
Agence France-Presse Seoul, December 13
With less than a week to go before presidential elections, South Korea watched with growing pessimism on Friday a deepening confrontation over North Korea's nuclear programme.
Officials and analysts saw North Korea's shock announcement on Thursday that it was reopening a plutonium programme mothballed for the past eight years as another ploy in its dangerous game of nuclear brinkmanship with the United States. Washington branded North Korea's decision "regrettable" and warned that Pyongyang's gambit would fail.
"The United States will not enter into dialogue in response to threats or broken commitments, and we will not bargain or offer inducements for North Korea to live up to the treaties and agreements it has signed," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.
In addition, the North told the International Atomic Energy Agency to unseal thousands of fuel rods stored under guard in cooling ponds and to remove its monitoring cameras from all the North's nuclear facilities.
"No one can say with certainty what the North Koreans are going to do now," said an analyst at the Unification Ministry which handles North Korean affairs here. He said the rhetoric in the announcement by the North was unusually mild in that it avoided customary heated condemnations of Washington and it also said the North wanted a peaceful resolution of the crisis.
However, Washington, which has branded the North the world's worst proliferator of missiles and a member of an "axis of evil," was not going to play ball, as White House spokesman Fleischer explained.
"Basically, North Korea wants to renegotiate its whole relationship with Washington and is using the nuclear issue to force the United States to engage. Washington won't budge on that," he said.
"What is certain is that this crisis is not going to end any time soon." Pyongyang's announcement was the latest development in a two month nuclear confrontation that stemmed from US revelations in October that North Korea had admitted to running a nuclear programme based on enriched uranium, in breach of a 1994 accord with Washington.
Thursday's statement relates to a mothballed plutonium producing programme that was frozen under the 1994 Agreed Framework accord, under which some 8,000 spent fuel rods from a five-megawatt experimental reactor were sealed in metal casings in cooling ponds at Yongbyon, North of Pyongyang, where two large reactors were under construction.
In exchange for freezing the programme, the US pledged to supply 500,000 tonnes of fuel oil and to form a consortium to build two light-water reactors which are under construction on North Korea's east coast.
But supplies of oil were halted last month in a US-led response to fears that the North was running a new nuclear programme based on enriched uranium. Energy-starved North Korea says the decision to cut off fuel supplies forced it to reopen its nuclear programme.
The suspended fuel shipments represent some 20 percent of the North's power production capacity in a country chronically short of electricity for its factories, hospitals and homes.
South Korean analysts said there was nothing Seoul could do but watch and wait to see who would blink first, Pyongyang or Washington.
"South Korea is in a very difficult position. It has little room to maneouver as a mediator," said Lee Jong-Seok of the private Sejong Institute here.
Lee said that in the worst case scenario the United States, which is currently obsessed with Iraq, might consider a military strike on the North.
"The best option is that the North comes clean about its nuclear programme and the United States resumes oil shipment while seeking a peaceful solution," he added.
Meanwhile construction of the light water reactors at Kumho, on North Korea's northeastern coast, was progressing normally, according to Chang Sun-Sup, chairman of the consortium building them, the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization.
"The light water reactor project, as of now, is being carried on as normal with no disruption (from the North Korean) side," he said. "However, we have to wait and watch developments."
The construction of the five-billion-dollar reactors financed by Japan and South Korea could be mothballed if the Agreed Framework is abandoned, he cautioned.
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