North Korea Skips Six-Party Talks

Despite a June agreement, North Korea refused to take part in another round of six-party talks before the end of September, blaming both U.S. policy and South Korea’s recently revealed nuclear experiments. Still, all parties continue to express interest in future talks.

All six parties—which also include China, Japan, and Russia—agreed during the last round of talks in June to hold another high-level session, as well as another working-group meeting of lower-level officials, before the end of September. North Korea, however, had already signaled in August that the talks would be delayed, saying President George W. Bush’s criticism of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il made it “impossible” to attend further talks. (See ACT, September 2004.)

The talks are designed to resolve the most recent North Korean nuclear crisis, which began in October 2002 when U.S. officials claimed that their North Korean counterparts had acknowledged having a clandestine uranium-enrichment program. Since then, North Korea has accelerated its nuclear activities.

Seeking to shift the blame for the delay, North Korea argued in a Sept. 27 government newspaper article that the United States has “destroyed the fundamental basis” of the talks. The article asserted that Washington is refusing to “reward” Pyongyang for freezing its nuclear facilities—a repeated North Korean demand. It also accused the United States of continuing its “hostile policy” of threatening North Korea with military force. This criticism did not directly address the proposal that the United States introduced at the June round of talks. (See ACT, July/August 2004.)

North Korea also criticized the United States for applying “double standards” to North Korea’s and South Korea’s nuclear activities, which it describes as similar. In August, South Korea revealed that government scientists had conducted small-scale uranium-enrichment experiments and separated a small quantity of plutonium (see page 33). Both uranium enrichment and plutonium separation can produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. There is no evidence, however, that South Korea’s recently disclosed experiments are part of a nuclear weapons program.

By contrast, North Korea has developed the infrastructure to manufacture nuclear weapons and said it possesses such weapons. On Sept. 27, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su Hon made the most definitive public statement about the matter to date, telling reporters in New York that Pyongyang has reprocessed approximately 8,000 spent fuel rods produced in a small nuclear reactor and “weaponized” the separated plutonium, the Associated Press reported.

North Korea produced the spent fuel rods before its reactor program was frozen by the 1994 Agreed Framework, a bilateral agreement with the United States. In December 2002, North Korea ejected UN inspectors who were monitoring the spent fuel as part of the agreement. (See ACT, January/February 2003.)

In a Sept. 27 statement from the state-run Korean Central News Agency, North Korea denied widespread speculation that it is delaying the talks until after the November U.S. presidential election.

It does not appear that the six-party talks process will break down altogether. The other five parties have said they will work to make sure another round takes place. For its part, North Korea demanded Sept. 27 that Washington “take practical action to revive the…fundamental basis” for the talks, as well as admit its “involvement” in the South Korean nuclear experiments. The article did not elaborate.