U.S., partners end N. Korea nuke project
By PETER JAMES SPIELMANN
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
NEW YORK -- The United States and its partners in an energy consortium
have terminated a project to build two light-water atomic reactors for
North Korea as an incentive to convince Pyongyang to dismantle its
nuclear weapons program, officials said.
The decision was a sharp rebuff to the North's demand that it be given
light-water reactors before it would open its nuclear program up to
international inspection.
It took almost two years for Washington to wear down the resistance of
its partners in the New York-based Korean Peninsula Energy Development
Organization, also known as KEDO. South Korea finally gave up the
partly built light-water reactors last summer. Japan and the European
Union had already sided with the U.S. "no carrot" policy.
On Tuesday, the executive board of KEDO concluded a two-day private
meeting without issuing a formal statement.
But the U.S. delegate, Ambassador Joseph DiTrani, said after the
meeting that the board members - the United States, South Korea, Japan
and European Union - had agreed on the "termination" of the light-water
reactor project, KEDO spokesman Brian Kremer confirmed.
The decade-old reactor project had been mothballed for the last two
years, kept barely alive in case North Korea showed signs of resuming
International Atomic Energy Agency inspections and liquidating its
ambitious self-proclaimed nuclear weapons program.
But with a Nov. 30 deadline looming on major contracts underlying the
$4.6 billion project - notably to the prime South Korean contractor,
Korean Electric Power Co. (KEPCO) - time, money and political will had
all evaporated.
The decision to kill the project comes at a particularly delicate
moment in the fitful series of six-nation talks aimed at disarming
North Korea. The fifth round of talks among the two Koreas, the United
States, Russian, China and Japan ended Nov. 11 without signs of major
progress.
Charles Kartman, the American who was executive director of KEDO from
2001 until this August, said the North must have anticipated KEDO's
demise.
"There's no surprise here for North Korea. They've been setting up
their obstacles" for weeks and in September had revived their demand
for the reactors, Kartman said.
At the end of the fourth round of six-way talks in September, North
Korea pledged in principle to disarm but maintained that it would need
light-water reactors to provide electricity beforehand. Fulfilling that
demand would postpone effective disarmament for several years.
At a summit of Asian and Pacific leaders last week, President Bush said
no reactors would be considered before the North gives up its nuclear
weapons program. Bush named North Korea, along with Iraq and Iran, as
part of an "axis of evil" in his State of the Union speech in 2002.
Meanwhile, North Korea says it is escalating its nuclear weapons
development program.
A shutdown of the Yongbyon research reactor in 1989 and reactor
slowdowns in 1990-1991 are believed to have yielded enough plutonium to
build two or three bombs, a situation that the Clinton administration
considered so threatening that it brought the United States and North
Korea close to war in 1994.
A bilateral nuclear inspection accord and deal to build two monitored
light-water reactors cooled tensions and led to the KEDO project.
Last May, North Korea's Foreign Ministry said the country had the
ability to harvest still more weapons-grade plutonium and bolster its
nuclear arsenal.
"You have to assume the North Koreans have weaponized the plutonium,"
Kartman said.
Under the agreement that formed the KEDO project, North Korea was to
abandon nuclear weapons development and allow access by International
Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, in exchange for 500,000 tons of heavy
fuel oil annually from the United States to meet its energy shortage
until it got the two light-water atomic power plants, built and paid
for primarily by South Korea and Japan, with some EU funding.
The program was frozen in 2002 after the United States claimed North
Korea had embarked on a second, secret weapons-development program.
Evidence to back the claim has never been publicly disclosed.
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