North Korea Will Resume Nuclear Talks

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November 1, 2006
North Korea Will Resume Nuclear Talks
By JOSEPH KAHN and HELENE COOPER
BEIJING, Oct. 31 — North Korea agreed Tuesday to resume nuclear disarmament talks, a first sign of easing tensions since the country’s nuclear test this month. But the talks have dragged on inconclusively for three years, and the chances for rolling back the country’s now-proven nuclear capability remained uncertain.

China announced that six-nation talks would reconvene shortly after a hiatus of more than a year, and an American envoy in Beijing said they could take place in November or December.

The agreement was a procedural victory for Beijing, which scrambled to reopen a diplomatic channel even as it joined the United States and other international powers in supporting United Nations sanctions on North Korea after the Oct. 9 test.

But Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, has participated in multiple rounds of talks over the past several years while he accelerated his pursuit of nuclear weapons, and some analysts suspect that he agreed to restart talks now to forestall tough enforcement of sanctions and to persuade China and South Korea to ease his government’s growing economic woes.

While North Korea’s decision to restart the talks is being heralded as a diplomatic breakthrough, American envoys will be returning to the negotiating table to face an adversary that now has a demonstrated nuclear capability — a fact that America will try to minimize even as North Korea tries to exploit it, Bush administration officials and analysts said.

“The dangerous possibility is that North Korea sits down at the table and says, ‘We’re now a nuclear state, let’s deal with it,’ ” said Bonnie Glaser, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In an interview on Tuesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice played down suggestions that America’s negotiating task would be made more difficult by the North’s nuclear test. “Nobody accepts that they’re a nuclear power,” she said. The North Koreans, she said, “can say it all they wish.”

Ms. Rice said the United States would work with the other participants of the talks to force the North to take a concrete step toward ending its nuclear program. She offered few details but acknowledged that two of the possibilities being discussed were a dismantling of one of the North’s many nuclear facilities and the readmission of international inspectors.

Other officials who have discussed the administration’s internal deliberations have said the dismantling should begin with a facility like North Korea’s five-megawatt reactor, which is continuing to produce nuclear fuel, or its plutonium reprocessing center, where spent reactor fuel can be turned into material for weapons.

“We understand it can’t go from zero to 100 in the first session,” Ms. Rice said. “But the core of this is denuclearization, and we have to have concrete evidence.”

Christopher R. Hill, the assistant secretary of state responsible for the talks, and Kim Kye-gwan, his North Korean counterpart, met secretly in Beijing under Chinese auspices to hash out terms of resuming negotiations, Chinese state media reported.

Mr. Hill said Tuesday that he expected “substantial progress” at the talks and that they would resume without preconditions. But he acknowledged that previous talks had been plodding and painstaking, and promised no quick breakthrough.

“We are a long way from our goal, still,” he said. “I have not broken out the cigars and Champagne quite yet.”

For the past year, North Korea had refused to resume negotiations on its nuclear program until the United States lifted financial penalties imposed on a Macao bank last year that have hobbled the country’s international financial transactions. Mr. Hill said that he agreed to discuss the matter as part of the nuclear talks — perhaps in a special working group that would convene at the same time as the main negotiations — but that he had made no promises.

The Bush administration accused the Macao bank, Banco Delta Asia, of helping North Korea to launder money from drug smuggling and other illicit activities and to pass counterfeit $100 bills manufactured by the North Korean government. In September 2005, the Treasury Department ordered United States banks to sever relations with the bank, a move that had broad ripple effects, curtailing North Korean access to the international banking system and further isolating the government in Pyongyang.

The talks, which involve Japan, South Korea and Russia as well as China, North Korea and the United States, reached a vaguely worded agreement for nuclear disarmament in September 2005, which North Korea quickly disavowed. The talks collapsed a short time later amid mutual recriminations.

Mr. Hill said Mr. Kim reiterated during their meetings in Beijing that putting the 2005 accord into effect should be the main focus of the renewed talks.

That agreement called for North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program in exchange for a range of diplomatic, economic and energy incentives, but left most of the details to subsequent negotiations that never took place.

“We all reaffirmed, including the North Koreans, our commitment to the September statement and the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” Mr. Hill said.

Bush administration hard-liners, who have been chafing under Ms. Rice’s multilateral diplomatic approach to North Korea, played down the resumption of talks, saying that America is merely back where it was a year ago before the North abandoned the talks, except now Pyongyang has the added bargaining chip of having exploded a nuclear device.

“Where’s the stick?” asked one administration official. “We’re celebrating the six-party talks, but we’re back to endless chatter.”

Gary Samore, a North Korea expert who helped negotiate President Clinton’s 1994 agreement with the North, said, “I think the North Koreans gamed this all out. They calculated they could get away with a nuclear test if they allowed themselves to be cajoled back into the six-party talks.”

But North Korea’s commitment to resume talks may reduce the chances that it will soon conduct a second nuclear test, as some in the region feared it might be preparing to do.

Some Chinese experts have argued that North Korea needs to dispel doubts about its nuclear capabilities and complete its quest to become a full nuclear power before it will be willing to bargain away what it refers to as its “nuclear deterrent.”

They say that Kim Jong-il may feel he can demand a higher price for disarmament now than he could when some international experts, including some of China’s top North Korea specialists, had expressed doubts that the country could make its own nuclear bombs.

Many others disagree, including a growing contingent of Chinese officials and foreign policy specialists who take a skeptical view of the North’s intentions and favor a tougher line on China’s Korean War-era ally, according to numerous people involved in the debate.

Shi Yinhong, an international relations expert at People’s University in Beijing, said he believed that Kim Jong-il’s agreement to return to talks was motivated mainly by his desire to head off tough enforcement of international sanctions.

“His purpose has been to develop nuclear bombs and that purpose has not changed,” Mr. Shi said. “His goal now is to keep his bombs but reduce the penalty he has to pay by appearing to be negotiating in good faith.”

Some Chinese experts said Beijing had made clear that it would exercise considerable economic and financial leverage on North Korea if it continues to develop its nuclear program and refuses to return to talks.

In September, China did not sell any oil to North Korea, Chinese customs statistic show. The cutoff came before the nuclear test but after North Korea conducted a test of its ballistic missiles in July, ignoring Beijing’s pleas for restraint.

Beijing provides an estimated 90 percent of North Korea’s oil by pipeline, and any sustained reduction in oil shipments could cripple the country’s already weakened economy.

Liu Jianchao, the foreign ministry spokesman, said Tuesday, before the resumption of talks was announced, that China had no plans to sever aid or trade with North Korea, but dodged questions about the oil cutoff.

Joseph Kahn reported from Beijing, and Helene Cooper from Washington.