North Korean efforts to enrich uranium are "worrisome," South Korea's foreign minister said today. Yu Myung-hwan said the North instead should put itself back on the path to denuclearization, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Oct. 16).
Pyongyang in September informed the U.N. Security Council that it had nearly mastered uranium enrichment, which would provide the regime with another means of producing nuclear-weapon material. This claim has not been independently corroborated. The North has already produced plutonium for nuclear devices.
Yu said North Korea's uranium program could be talked over at the United Nations.
South Korea and four other states -- China, Japan, Russia and the United States -- have spent years in talks with North Korea, in hopes of persuading the isolated state to give up its nuclear operations in exchange for diplomatic, security and economic benefits. The process made some progress -- including partial disablement of the North's plutonium-producing Yongbyon nuclear complex -- but stalled last year and appeared dead by last spring.
Pyongyang, though, has recently sought to re-engage with Seoul and Washington following nuclear and missile tests in the spring which further isolated it from the international community and resulted in tightening of U.N. sanctions.
Yu expressed doubt regarding the Stalinist state's recent diplomatic overtures and said in Seoul that "there are no real grounds" to determine whether the North has had "a fundamental change in its position in the nuclear issue."
Pyongyang needs to pursue "substantial" disarmament steps and immediately rejoin the halted six-party talks, he said. While Seoul is not against talking with the North, it intends to persist in the application of sanctions, Yu added.
South Korean academic Kim Yong-hyun said recent provocative actions by the North are intended to strengthen its bargaining position going into any future bilateral talks with the United States. "North Korea wants to show it also has hard-line cards," he said (Hyung Jin-Kim, Associated Press/Google News, Oct. 19).
Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department announced Friday that it had approved visas for North Korean deputy nuclear negotiator Ri Gun and his delegation so that they can attend two U.S. conferences later this month, Agence France-Presse reported.
The delegation is expected to take part in a conference at the University of California in San Diego and in a seminar in New York (Agence France-Presse/ABS-CBN News, Oct. 17).
A source said it appeared likely that U.S. diplomat Sung Kim would meet with Ri in New York, Reuters reported.
The Obama administration, by issuing the visas, could be showing its interest in finding out whether bilateral diplomacy with North Korea might result in a return to stalled six-party talks, analysts said.
"By allowing this visit to take place, Washington is telling Pyongyang that they are interested in keeping the dynamic going," said Evans Revere, president of the Korea Society (Arshad Mohammed, Reuters, Oct. 16).
Elsewhere, the United States is reportedly considering delaying the transfer of the operational command of South Korean soldiers past 2012, Yonhap News Agency reported.
The timetable for the wartime control transfer was agreed to by former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, who wanted more independence from the United States.
"Within the agreement, there are very clear directions for continued evaluation of political conditions and an explicit decision before OPCON transfer decision is made," said a senior Obama administration official. "So we would continue to make progress on the things we need to do to transfer the operational control. But the decision will be made based on how things look in 2012."
The United States has 28,500 soldiers stationed in South Korea as a holdover from the Korean War, which resulted in a 1953 armistice but no peace agreement. Peacetime command of South Korean troops was returned to Seoul in 1994 (Yonhap News Agency/Individual.com, Oct. 16).
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is scheduled this week to travel to Japan and South Korea, where he is expected to assure leaders of the United State' firm commitment to seeing the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons, the Korea Herald reported.
Gates' visit, which precedes President Barack Obama's trip to Asia next month, is anticipated to include discussions on bolstering collaborative defenses, including missile defense, said a U.S. defense official (Korea Herald, Oct. 20).
The State Department also announced Friday that sanctions official Philip Goldberg would head to Beijing this week for discussions with Chinese officials on the enforcement of U.N. Security Council penalties against the North, Kyodo News reported (Kyodo News/Breitbart.com, Oct. 16).