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| Christopher Hill says he hopes for "clarity" on the issue this week. Kyodo News/AP |
Did N. Korea give Syria nuclear aid?
The US will press for details in the next round of six-party talks, to be held Thursday in Beijing.
from the September 26, 2007 edition
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"The Israelis must have had pretty good evidence," says Robyn Lim, professor of international relations at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan. "The US had to have been told in advance of the raid, and the Turks would have to have known in advance as well."
But why would North Korea have a team at the Syrian base while six-party talks are about to resume?
"The connection with Syria is ongoing business," says Mr. Kim of the Institute of Defense Analyses. "It's not something that can be disconnected. The US must have been aware of that information for a long time."
Indeed, Syria maintains strong relations with North Korea. A Syrian delegation visited Pyongyang last week.
"There's no doubt Syria has long been interested in the enrichment of uranium," says Kim. "The Syrian delegation in Pyongyang was probably talking about both nukes and missiles."
Professor Lim, a former Australian intelligence analyst, says while North Korea will "pretend to come clean" at the talks, the presumption is the North continues to export missiles to Middle Eastern countries and may well have also been selling nuclear secrets. She sees North Korea as participating in the talks for the sake of the enormous aid that's promised if the North convinces the US, South Korea, China, Russia, and Japan that it has abandoned its nuclear program.
"The talks are designed just to keep enough aid flowing to prop up the regime," she says.
N. Korea could react
Analysts doubt, however, that the six-party talks will fail despite the issues of proliferation and highly enriched uranium. North Korea has already shut down its five-megawatt reactor at its nuclear complex at Yongbyon where it's believed to have made up to a dozen warheads, including one that it detonated last October in its only nuclear test to date.
Mr. Hill "will have no other option" but to raise the issue of proliferation in the talks, says Kim Song Han, a professor at Korea University. Nonetheless, he says, the priority will be to make North Korea disable its Yongbyon facilities, which made warheads with plutonium at their core.
"If the US pushes North Korea to be more detailed," Professor Kim says, "North Korea will react very harshly."
This week's talks will help set the stage for next week's North-South Korean summit in Pyongyang at which South Korea's President Roh Moo Hyun is to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Mr. Roh says he wants to pursue a "peace system" with North Korea while talking only briefly about the nuclear issue since it's already "being resolved."
Kim predicts North Korea will go through with disablement of its facilities at Yongbyon but remains "pessimistic" about dismantlement – the final stage – and is not certain if inspectors will ever see facilities elsewhere, including the site of the underground nuclear test.
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