North Korean export of nuclear material would be "red line" for US

BBC Monitoring ^ | March 30 2005

[knighthawk]

Text of report in English by South Korean news agency Yonhap

Seoul, 30 March: The United States would be forced to take action if it confirms North Korea transferred fissile material to another country, Washington's former top negotiator with Pyongyang said Wednesday [30 March].

"I believe that would be the red line," Robert Gallucci said in an interview with Yonhap news agency. "I believe that if the US had any information that North Korea was transferring fissile material, exporting it, it would have to act to stop it."

Gallucci suggested that bilateral negotiations between the US and North Korea should remain an option while the six-party talks continue.

"It's important that we not let this six-party modality get in the way of serious talks between Pyongyang and Washington," he said.

If North Korea comes through with "performance" on its nuclear issue, the US should consider giving the communist state a bilateral security assurance, he said.

Now the dean of the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, Gallucci led the US delegation to the laborious negotiations with North Korea that culminated in the 1994 Geneva Agreed Framework.

The agreement was for North Korea to freeze all of its nuclear activities in exchange for a set of light-water reactors, financed and built by an international consortium.

It lost its purpose when, in 2002, North Korea admitted to US officials that it had been running a secret uranium enrichment programme. The reactors have not yet been completed, and Pyongyang later recanted the remarks.

Six-party talks involving the two Koreas, the US, Japan, China and Russia, have since convened to tackle the nuclear row again, but were suspended since June from Pyongyang's boycott.

North Korea upped the stakes in February by declaring it had nuclear weapons and said it will not return to the dialogue table unless the US dropped its "hostile" policy towards its regime.

Gallucci said US President George W. Bush knew about North Korea's activities.

"He knew North Korea was cheating. He knew about purchases of centrifuges from Pakistan," he said.

"He didn't believe that a problem like this with a rogue state run by someone like Kim Jong-il could be resolved by negotiations."

Such scepticism on Bush's part, as opposed to South Korea's insistence on patience, is what makes the nuclear crisis this time different from that of 1994, according to Gallucci.

He registered concerns at the "troubles" in the South Korea-US alliance, shaken by the different perspectives.

"We are not worried about North Korea shooting missiles at us. We are worried about North Korea selling nuclear, fissile material to a terrorist group, and the group secretly introducing the weapon into an American city," Gallucci said.

"I don't think South Koreans understand that, and how vulnerable we feel about it after 11 September," he said.

The former negotiator remembered a moment of crisis when he reported to then-President Bill Clinton that North Korea had taken spent nuclear fuel rods out of their storage pond.

"I said (to President Clinton) that if we wished to use force to stop North Korea from getting plutonium, he would have to act before the plutonium is separated from the spent fuel," he said.

He said he knew that once the plutonium was extracted, it would disappear inside North Korea and the inspectors would never be able to find it.

Asked what he would have done differently had he known how the nuclear crisis would stand 11 years later, Gallucci said he would have tried to make the Agreed Framework more transparent, to set down more details.

"But it would have been hard. North Korea would not have accepted it," he said.

Source: Yonhap news agency, Seoul, in English 0730 gmt 30 Mar 05

[knighthawk]

Ping

[airborne]

"I said (to President Clinton) that if we wished to use force to stop North Korea from getting plutonium, he would have to act before the plutonium is separated from the spent fuel," he said.

He said he knew that once the plutonium was extracted, it would disappear inside North Korea and the inspectors would never be able to find it.

More fallout from the Clinton years.

[Williams]

"We are not worried about North Korea shooting missiles at us. "

Well I am. And all this namby pamby about acting to stop plutoniom shipments doesn't satisfy me. A nuclear armed NK with missiles should not be acceptable.