July 16, 2007
North Korea Shuts Nuclear Reactor. Now What?
The nuclear watchdog of the U.N. has confirmed that North Korea shut down its Yongbyon nuclear reactor, nearly five years after the reclusive communist nation defiantly sparked a WMD standoff with the United States. Time for high-fiving in the White House, right?
Only if you've got a short memory. Washington has been down this road with dictator Kim Jong-il before, and while there's a startling amount that the U.S. doesn't know about the Dear Leader, one thing is certain: Kim isn't going to make the de-nuclearization process easy.
Christopher Hill and Mohamed ElBaradei, the top Western negotiators with Pyongyang, had tempered reactions to the shutdown.
"I certainly have to anticipate that there will be problems in the future because I never thought it would take until July to get this first step done," said Hill, the assistant secretary of state.
"It's a very important step that we are taking this week, but it's a long way to go," seconded ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA.
Hill will meet with the other six-party nuclear talk negotiators in Beijing on Wednesday. The group last met five months ago, when after a marathon deal-making session North Korea agreed to dismantle its program in exchange for resumption of food and energy aid along with release of its assets.
That breakthrough was met with deep skepticism in some quarters of the Beltway, most vocally from former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who pilloried the concessions to Pyongyang's "bad behavior." But deal-making was always the only option in many observers' estimation, even before the Iraq war defanged perceptions about the U.S. military threat.
North Korea's decision to finally shutter the Yongbyon facility seems to have been prompted by a recent shipment of oil delivered by neighboring South Korea. Those two nations are still technically at war, and South Korea is home to one of the largest U.S. military footprints in the world.
Both of those parties want to end the war on paper, but it's not clear North Korea will make that move freely and willingly, mostly because it never makes concessions freely and willingly. Pyongyang has long demanded a guarantee that it won't be attacked by the United States, which the Bush administration refuses on the grounds that nothing is off the table. On Friday, North Korea proposed direct military talks with Washington, but that was greeted with a measure of skepticism.
In his remarks to reporters today, Hill re-emphasized that nothing short of "complete de-nuclearization" would clear the path toward normalized relations with North Korea. IAEA inspectors must now set about confirming whether Pyongyang has pulled the plug on its other reactors and disclosed the location of every one of its nuclear facilities.
Posted at 7:28 PM
Posted to:
IAEA, North Korea, Nuclear Weapons, Terrorism
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