U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday that it remains to be seen whether North Korea had a program to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, United Press International reported (see GSN, Feb. 20).
"I don't have any doubt that they would try whatever they possibly could," Clinton said in Seoul during a weeklong trip through Asia. "Have they? I don't know that, and nobody else does either."
U.S. intelligence agencies have in the past expressed varying levels of confidence that Pyongyang possesses an ongoing uranium enrichment operation (see GSN, May 16, 2007). Suspicions of secret activity led the Bush administration in 2002 to cancel the Agreed Framework, a Clinton-era deal intended to shutter Pyongyang's nuclear operations.
Critics say that the 2002 U.S. decision spurred Pyongyang to resume production of plutonium for nuclear weapons. North Korea is believed now to possess enough material for several bombs (United Press International I, Feb. 20).
During her stop in Seoul, Clinton named former Ambassador to South Korea Stephen Bosworth as the U.S. special envoy to North Korea. Having one official focused on the nation is "a signal to North Korea" regarding Washington's emphasis on resuming the six-nation talks on the regime's nuclear program, South Korean analyst Paik Hak-soon told the Christian Science Monitor.
After making notable progress on denuclearization, the talks stalled again late last year over a disagreement between Pyongyang and Washington on whether collection of samples would be allowed under a program to verify the scope of North Korea's atomic activities and holdings.
Clinton did not indicate how Washington will handle the deadlock over the verification issue, the Monitor reported (Donald Kirk, Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 21).
"If you step back, more broadly there is not a wide range of policy options given the political realities on the ground," said Korea expert Gordon Flake, who served as a campaign adviser to President Barack Obama.
Obama is not likely to put his political credibility on the line to make a big push on the issue, Flake said.
"I'm not aware of anyone who thinks ... if we just invested a lot of capital we would come up with this great raging political success," he said (Agence France-Presse/Spacewar.com, Feb. 20).
Delegates to a working-level session of the six-party talks agreed last week on the need for clearing the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons, UPI reported.
The working group, one of several established in a 2007 agreement, met for two days to discuss peace and security in Northeast Asia.
South Korean envoy Huh Chul said there was no dissension when he stated that a nuclear-free peninsula was key to the peace effort.
"The North also refrained from making overt criticism of Seoul's current North Korean policies, which could have made the talks difficult," Huh said.
Pyongyang has sought to be accepted as a nuclear power since detonating a device in October 2006. It has also claimed that the United States still has nuclear weapons in South Korea, an assertion denied by Seoul and Washington (United Press International II, Feb. 22).