In defending the accord, Mr. Hill noted that it had been criticized from both the right and the left in the United States on the same basis — that it was no improvement on a 1994 agreement, which was struck by President Bill Clinton, broken by North Korea and later dismissed by President Bush as a mistake. Mr. Hill declined to criticize the earlier effort, but he said the new agreement was better for a variety of reasons. Among them, he said, was the fact that this is not just a bilateral accord but one endorsed by the major countries in the region and, most particularly, by China. He also noted that the new agreement set up a number of working groups with strict deadlines that are to take up issues that go beyond energy. Christopher R. Hill, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon.
Hill says new agreement with North Korea is better than 1994 agreement for a variety of reasons
US Seeks Account of North Korean Nuclear Effort
By WARREN HOGE
Published: March 6, 2007
The United States said today that North Korea must fully disclose its efforts to produce highly enriched uranium as part of negotiations now under way in New York that are aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and normalizing relations between the two countries.
“They need to come clean on it, explain what they have been doing, why they have been doing it, and ultimately they need to abandon it,” Christopher R. Hill, the chief United States negotiator, said.
Mr. Hill was speaking to an audience at the Japan Society in New York prior to a second day of talks with Kim Kye-gwan, his North Korean counterpart.
The two men met Monday for an afternoon session and a dinner meeting that Mr. Hill called “very constructive, very businesslike.”
The talks, the highest level meeting between North Korean and American officials in the United States since 2002, are the first product of a Feb. 13 agreement in Beijing where the government of Kim Jong Il said it would end development of nuclear weapons in exchange for fuel and other assistance.
The accord specified that North Korea must make a full account of all its nuclear activities, but the question of the uranium enrichment program arose today because of recent suggestions that the Bush administration may have exaggerated the progress North Korea has made in developing a uranium-produced bomb.
Last October, North Korea tested its first nuclear device, a weapon made out of plutonium. The United States believes North Korea has also been developing a device using highly enriched uranium, and they point to the large purchases of equipment designed for that purpose that North Korea has made from Pakistan.
“I think we are owed a pretty clear answer why all these purchases of expensive equipment were made and how far they have gotten into the process,” Mr. Hill said. He added, “It is not unusual for a country going nuclear to go nuclear on two tracks.”
The new agreement has come under criticism from American conservatives like John R. Bolton, the former United Nations ambassador, who believe it rewards North Korea with the delivery of fuel and assistance before the country’s nuclear capacity is dismantled.
In defending the accord, Mr. Hill noted that it had been criticized from both the right and the left in the United States on the same basis — that it was no improvement on a 1994 agreement, which was struck by President Bill Clinton, broken by North Korea and later dismissed by President Bush as a mistake.
Mr. Hill declined to criticize the earlier effort, but he said the new agreement was better for a variety of reasons.
Among them, he said, was the fact that this is not just a bilateral accord but one endorsed by the major countries in the region and, most particularly, by China.
He also noted that the new agreement set up a number of working groups with strict deadlines that are to take up issues that go beyond energy.
Topics to be pursued include a final peace agreement on the Korean peninsula to replace the armistice that ended the Korean war in 1953, the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s to train spies in Japanese culture, and the removal of North Korea from American listings of countries sponsoring terrorism and “enemy” countries with which trade is banned.
In the nuclear area, the accord specifies a 60-day deadline for shutting down Yongbyon, North Korea’s main nuclear complex north of the capital of Pyongyang, and allowing inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, back into the country.
Mr. Hill said that in a visit to Washington last week he had met with a number of senators from the Republican and Democratic leadership to explain the terms of the agreement and had received “a great deal of support, enormous support.”
But he added, “If we start missing deadlines and things start going badly, some of that support will peel off,”
Asked whether North Korea might be playing for time and waiting for a more hospitable government in Washington after the next election, Mr. Hill said, “They understand that things aren’t going to get better in the next two years.” And he said that no administration could ignore the spread of nuclear weapons.
He said that developing nuclear weapons did not make much sense for North Korea since it had done “terrible damage” to the country and left it “isolated and impoverished”.
“There’s real logic for them to get out of it,” he said, although he conceded there was a question “whether logic would prevail.”
Mr. Hill was asked if there were useful comparisons between North Korea’s new willingness to talk and Libya’s decision in 2003 to renounce terrorism, dismantle its chemical weapons stockpiles and dismantle a secret nuclear weapons program in exchange for normalization of its relations with the West.
“Libya made a full, firm and final decision one day to get out of the nuclear business,” Mr. Hill said. “With North Korea, I think it will be more of a step-by-step process.”
