Nuclear test hangs over North Korea talks

As diplomats gather here for a new round of negotiations aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear program, Pyongyang's recent nuclear test has clouded the prospect for success. With North Korea claiming nuclear-power status but other participants in the six-party talks refusing to recognize that, the meetings starting Monday promise to be testy.

Both leading protagonists, US delegation chief Christopher Hill and North Korean negotiator Kim Kye-gwan, said on the eve of their meeting that they were not optimistic about the prospects.

For the US, Mr. Hill has made clear that the immediate goal is to implement an agreement reached at the last talks in September 2005, in whose first article Pyongyang "committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs."

North Korea threw that commitment into doubt on Oct. 9, when it tested a nuclear device for the first time. "We need a sign that we have moved off the pages of the September agreement and onto the ground of the Korean peninsula," Hill told reporters before leaving Washington.

Mr. Kim, however, was quoted by the official Chinese Xinhua news agency as saying on his arrival in Beijing that he was not prepared to discuss his country's nuclear weapons. "We will not give up the nuclear weapons which are against the US invasion and threat," Xinhua reported him as saying.

The talks are the first for more than a year, since North Korea walked out in protest at financial sanctions that the US government imposed, freezing official bank accounts in Macau.

The political landscape has changed radically since then, with Pyongyang's detonation of a nuclear device making it a de facto nuclear power.

Neither the US nor China, nor any other state in the region, is ready to accept North Korea's description of itself as a nuclear state. But the test "makes it much harder" to impose a freeze on the North's nuclear activities, says Timothy Savage, an expert on Korea with the Nautilus think tank.

"You are not trying to stop something happening any more – you are trying to walk back the dog," he says.

That will be awkward, a senior US diplomat in Asia says, because of the pride North Korea's government has expressed in its nuclear status. "The way the North Koreans are playing this domestically, as a huge victory, makes it difficult for them to walk this back," he says. "That's why people are skeptical" about success at the talks.

The test also makes it more likely that the North will demand more from the US and Japan in return for any concessions, says Chen Fengjun, a professor at Peking University's School of International Relations. "Since North Korea already possesses nuclear capability, it will probably raise its request for compensation," he says.

Page: 1 | 2