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Politics : The Iraq War And Beyond -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ed Huang who wrote (41)	5/5/2003 10:10:07 AM
From: Ed Huang	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9018

North Korea Urges U.S. Action on 'Bold Proposal' Mon May 5, 2003 03:16 AM ET SEOUL (Reuters) - Communist North Korea urged the United States on Monday to respond to the "bold proposal" it made at last month's talks in Beijing to help defuse their six-month nuclear standoff. Pyongyang said it had heard nothing new from Washington. "If the U.S. does not positively respond to the DPRK's bold proposal, it will be held accountable for scuttling all efforts for dialogue and seriously straining the situation," said an article in North Korea's daily Rodong Sinmun, published in English by the state-run KCNA news agency. DPRK is the acronym for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "The U.S. repeated its old assertion that the DPRK should scrap its nuclear program before dialogue without advancing any new proposal at the talks," the paper said. The State Department said North Korea had told U.S. negotiators at the Beijing talks that it had nuclear weapons. North Korea has not made public any details of its proposal while Washington has not elaborated on what it heard at the negotiating table. South Korean newspapers reported last week that North Korea had expressed a willingness to scrap its nuclear plans but only simultaneously with reciprocal U.S. moves. The United States wants North Korea, which it branded part of an "axis of evil" along with Iran and prewar Iraq, to dismantle its nuclear program. It has vowed to pursue a diplomatic solution despite Pyongyang's disclosure in Beijing. In a shift in longtime U.S. policy on North Korea, President Bush is seeking to build support to block North Korea from selling weapons-grade nuclear material, the New York Times reported on Monday. CENTRAL WORRY For a decade, declared U.S. policy had been that North Korea would be prevented, by all means necessary, from producing plutonium or highly enriched uranium, the report said. After Bush met Australian Prime Minister John Howard at the weekend, an official familiar with the talks told The New York Times: "The president said that the central worry is not what they've got, but where it goes. "He's very pragmatic about it, and the reality is that we probably won't know the extent of what they are producing. So the whole focus is to keep the plutonium from going further," the official was quoted as saying. The report said another official who had discussed the issue with Bush said his thinking was that the North Koreans "are looking to get us excited, to make us issue declarations." "And his answer to them is 'You're hungry, and you can't eat plutonium'." In return for disarmament, Pyongyang has sought free oil, energy, economic exchanges and normal relations with Washington. North Korea kept up its bellicose rhetoric on Monday, accusing the United States of launching a "smear campaign" to isolate and stifle its regime. A DPRK Foreign Ministry spokesman said Washington was aggravating the situation by asserting that Pyongyang had failed to take substantial steps to combat terrorism and continued to sell ballistic missile technology to countries designated by the United States as states sponsoring terrorism. "The U.S. smear campaign against the DPRK will only make the settlement of the nuclear issue more complicated and aggravate the situation," KCNA quoted the ministry spokesman as saying. The nuclear crisis erupted in October, when Washington said the North had admitted to a covert program to make highly enriched uranium for nuclear arms in addition to a plutonium program frozen under a 1994 pact with the United States. Tensions escalated after Pyongyang pulled out of a global nuclear non-proliferation treaty. reuters.com