North Korea to drop nuke plans

GENEVA (AP)— North Korea agreed yesterday to account for and disable its atomic programs by the end of the year, offering its first timeline for a process long sought by nuclear negotiators, chief U.S. envoy Christopher Hill said.

Kim Gye-gwan, head of the North Korean delegation, said separately his country’s willingness to cooperate was clear — in return for “political and economic compensation” — but he pointedly mentioned no dates in brief remarks to reporters here.

Mr. Hill, a U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, said two days of talks between the United States and North Korea in Geneva had been “very good and very substantive” and would help improve chances of a successful meeting later this month with Japan, Russia, South Korea and China in “six-party talks” aimed at ending the North’s nuclear-weapons program.

“One thing that we agreed on is that [North Korea] will provide a full declaration of all of their nuclear programs and will disable their nuclear programs by the end of 2007,” Mr. Hill said.

Mr. Hill said the declaration will also include plutonium and uranium enrichment programs, which the United States fears could be used to make nuclear weapons.

“When we say all nuclear programs, we mean all,” he said.

U.S. critics of the talks say they doubt the North will give a full accounting of its sensitive nuclear research or give up its nuclear weapons. But Mr. Hill said this weekend’s talks marked the first time that North Korea had offered a deadline for declaring and disabling its nuclear program.

Mr. Kim said, “We are happy with the way the peace talks went. We made it clear, we showed clear willingness to declare and dismantle all nuclear facilities.”

The agreement is “very significant, for sure,” said Patricia Lewis, director of the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva, noting that North Korea had allowed U.N. inspectors back into the country and that they could verify what is declared.

“Confidence can increase, and we can see whether or not it’s really being shut down,” she said.

Mr. Hill declined to say whether the disabling agreement would include more than the plutonium-producing nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, which North Korea shut down in July.

“We have to work out some of the details on that,” Mr. Hill told reporters. “We will have a declaration in time to disable what needs to be disabled,” he said.

He said he and Mr. Kim had discussed a range of issues in their two days of talks at the U.S. and North Korean missions to U.N. offices in Geneva.

Mr. Kim said the two days of talks included discussions on North Korea’s demand to be removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. North Korea is pressing for normalized relations with the United States and economic and security guarantees.

“In return for this, we will receive political and economic compensation,” he said. “We wouldn’t be an enemy country anymore.”

Mr. Hill said earlier yesterday that improving U.S. relations with North Korea will depend on other progress in the talks, saying it “is a relationship that we will continue to try to build step by step with the understanding that we’re not going to have a normalized relationship until we have a denuclearized North Korea.”

He said he expected the next full session of the six-nation talks this month in Beijing to produce a “more detailed implementation plan for ’disablement.’ ”

The meeting in Geneva was part of a flurry of “working-group” sessions required in February’s six-nation accord, in which North Korea agreed to disable its plutonium-producing nuclear reactor and declare and eventually dismantle all its nuclear activities.