28 September 2008 : Yonhap
The Bush administration may offer an olive branch to North Korea after the U.S. presidential election in November in a desperate bid to keep its rare foreign policy feat alive, a prominent expert on nuclear disarmament said.
Gary Samore, vice president of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, told Yonhap News Agency that it is important for North Korea -- which is threatening to reverse its denuclearization steps -- to wait until then without aggravating the situation.
"I think if North Korea begins to reprocess (plutonium), it is very unlikely that the Bush administration would make a concession under those circumstances," he said in an interview. "But if the North Koreans wait, then after the U.S. election it's possible that the Bush administration will make a new effort to achieve some diplomatic agreement."
The unpredictable regime has threatened to reload nuclear material very soon into the mothballed plutonium reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, where weapons-grade material used to be extracted from spent fuel rods. Pyongyang also eliminated seals and surveillance cameras at the plant and barred International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from it.
The move was the latest in a series of steps to undo its year-long disablement of the Yongbyon nuclear facilities, which had been touted as President George W. Bush's diplomatic achievement amid troubled efforts to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions and stabilize Afghanistan.
Samore pointed out that the plutonium reprocessing work would push the nuclear deal to "redline," making the North face the suspension of promised energy assistance. Pyongyang was to receive 1 million tons of fuel oil or the equivalent under an aid-for-denuclearization deal signed last year with the U.S., South Korea, China, Japan and Russia. Only half of it has been delivered to the North.
"If the North Koreans go ahead and introduce nuclear material, all of the six parties would agree that the deal is no longer in place, and therefore there will be no more shipments of energy," he said.
North Korea's intention is still unclear.
"They may be playing this tactically," said Samore, who served as senior director for non-proliferation and export control at the U.S. National Security Council from 1996-2001. He then worked as director of studies and senior fellow for non-proliferation at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
He is on a trip here to attend a security forum co-organized by the IISS and the Asan Institute for Policy Studies (AIPS) in Seoul.
"They may wait and see whether the Bush administration offers a concession or compromise on its current demands. Or they may be waiting for the next U.S. administration and use the threat of reprocessing as a bargaining chip," he said.
Whatever the North's tactic is, Samore said, the outlook for the six-way talks is "pretty negative."
"I think our leverage against North Korea is not very strong now. The U.S.-North Korea relations are getting worse. North-South Korea relations are on bad terms right now," he said.
"It is going to be a challenge for the next U.S. administration working with South Korea, Japan, China and Russia. It is going to be a challenge to try to restart the six-party talks."
Samore said the North's refusal to link the verification of its recent nuclear declaration with the promised removal from the list of terrorism-sponsoring nations makes sense in a way, since the six-way talks did not produce any written document on that.
North Korea calls for an immediate delisting, while Washington calls for Pyongyang to first cooperate in verifying the account of its nuclear activity.
He ascribed the dispute to a "diplomatic ambiguity."
"What may have happened is that Christopher Hill (the chief U.S. nuclear negotiator) told the North Koreans that the U.S. was going to make this linkage, but the North Koreans never accepted it," he said. "It may be a case of diplomatic ambiguity that has created a problem. Or both sides feel that the other side is not acting according to an agreement."
"But I think the U.S. is right that the only way the declaration can be verified is through the use of scientific methods that include environmental sampling," he said.
He proposed a two-track verification system as a solution: separating the plutonium-based program from the suspicion on uranium enrichment program and proliferation, as was the procedure in receiving the nuclear declaration.
"We might try to deal with this difficult problem by breaking it up into a number of parts and deal with easy ones first and deal with hard ones down the road," he said.
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