Talks with N. Korea take hiatus
BEIJING – Expressing renewed hope for a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear standoff, envoys from six nations adjourned negotiations Saturday with a pledge to reconvene by September.
While the third round of negotiations ended with little formal progress, China, which hosted the meetings, pointed to hints that North Korea would eventually freeze its nuclear program in exchange for additional energy aid.
Still, “a serious lack of mutual trust” persists between the United States and North Korea, Wang Yi, China’s vice foreign minister, said Saturday.
Among the major points of disagreement are the timing and extent of how North Korea will abandon its nuclear program, just who would conduct inspections and the specifics of energy assistance for the isolated communist country.
U.S. officials say North Korea has not been clear enough about which facilities and programs it would dismantle, or how it would dismantle them.
North Korea, for its part, wants the United States to lift economic sanctions and contribute some assistance as a show of trust.
Under a new U.S. proposal introduced Wednesday, the four other nations participating in the talks – China, Japan, Russia and South Korea – would provide energy aid during an initial, three-month preparatory stage. The United States itself would not provide assistance until after North Korea began dismantlement.
Perhaps most significantly, U.S. officials said North Korean envoys continued to deny the existence of a program to develop nuclear weapons based on highly enriched uranium.
The current standoff began in October 2002 when the United States confronted North Korea with evidence of the uranium program. The Bush administration says North Korea acknowledged at the time that the program existed, but it has since retracted that statement.
Wang said Saturday that the two sides still had “serious differences” with regard to the uranium program.
The new U.S. proposal, which also included a security guarantee to North Korea, marked the first time the Bush administration had presented the North with a road map to ending the nuclear standoff.
North Korea filled in some details of its own proposal, saying its freeze would include all nuclear weapons facilities and materials – including its primary plutonium facility in Yongbyon – and that it would not test weapons or transfer them to others.
It also said that “under the right conditions” the freeze would be the first step toward total nuclear dismantlement.