North Korea offers new peace deal US to study nuclear weapons proposal Julian Borger in Washington and Jonathan Watts in Tokyo Tuesday April 29, 2003 The Guardian North Korea has offered to abandon its nuclear weapons programme, stop missile exports and readmit foreign inspectors in return for a US pledge not to attack, it was revealed last night. The offer, announced yesterday by the Chinese foreign ministry, represents the first clear sign since the Iraq war that Pyongyang could be interested in negotiating away its nuclear ambitions. The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said America was examining the proposals, which were apparently made at a Chinese-brokered meeting in Beijing last week. But US officials cautioned against over-optimism, saying that North Korea had a history of sending out confusing signals, mixing conciliation with apocalyptic threats. In the aftermath of the war in Iraq there has been intense speculation that the Bush administration would now turn to North Korea. The Pyongyang government had earlier declared that the Iraq war demonstrated the need for a powerful deterrent to American aggression. It also told the US delegation at the Beijing meeting that it already had nuclear warheads and was ready to prove it, which was widely interpreted as a possible threat to test its bombs. However, the latest details of that meeting show that North Korea also offered significant concessions. Alongside its longstanding offer to halt its nuclear programme in return for a non-aggression pact, it promised to stop exporting missiles and allow nuclear inspectors into the country. Pyongyang expelled inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency late last year, but it was not immediately clear whether it was prepared to readmit IAEA staff. The offer that it would not sell missiles to any other country addresses one of the key anxieties of the Bush administration: that North Korea, as a so-called "rogue state" and member of the "axis of evil", would not only become a nuclear threat in its own right but would act as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction. It is known that Pyongyang has traded ballistic missile technology with Pakistan in return for nuclear secrets. A European diplomat also said yesterday that North Korea is prepared to consider multilateral talks with its neighbours, as demanded by the US, dropping an earlier insistence on two-way talks with Washington. "The initial reports from the talks focused on the negative," said Eric Heginbotham, the director of the Korea task force at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. "This news at least indicates the North may still be interested in an agreement. Of course it's hard to tell if they are serious or not." The Chinese foreign ministry revealed the North Korean offer in a briefing for western diplomats in Beijing, possibly in an effort to counter the downbeat assessment of last week's trilateral talks by the world's press. In response, Mr Powell told reporters: "The North Koreans acknowledged a number of things that they were doing and, in effect, said these are now up for further discussion. "They did put forward a plan that would ultimately deal with their nuclear capability and their missile activities," the secretary of state added. "But they, of course, expect something considerable in return." Most importantly, the North Korean offer is contingent on the US signing a formal non-aggression treaty, something the Bush administration has so far been reluctant to do, arguing that Pyongyang broke a 1994 agreement, and that the US Congress would not ratify a formal pact. However, US officials have said that other forms of assurance could be negotiated. "The North Koreans have said a lot of contradictory things in the past. We are going to have to look at what they have said this time and determine what it means," a US official said, adding that the bottom line in Washington's position remains unaltered. "They need to verifiably and irreversibly end their nuclear weapons programme. That's the outcome we're seeking." During the formal periods of discussion last week, Chinese representatives said North Korea had made no admission of its nuclear weapons programme, though they conceded there were plenty of opportunities for off-the-record talks between the two sides. Although still unconfirmed, last week's reports that the North has declared itself a member of the nuclear club caused shockwaves in Asia and increased the likelihood of a reprimand and sanctions by the UN security council. White House officials have been pushing for such tough measures since North Korea kicked out the IAEA inspectors. Pyongyang says it would treat sanctions as an act of war - a threat China, South Korea, Japan and Russia have taken seriously enough to try to block US moves to increase pressure on the North. China's disclosure of Pyongyang's compromise offer could be aimed at forestalling a fresh attempt by the US to tighten the economic blockade. Pyongyang is concerned that Washington's real intention is regime change. Without a non-aggression treaty guaranteeing the country's sovereignty, it fears an inspection process could increase its vulnerability, as was the case in Iraq.
Without reading any of that article I am going to guess it is just basically North Korea acting like a bratty a-hole child and then saying they will stop acting like that if we give them money. They will continue to run this racket forever. Don't you guys love appeasing a-hole governments?
I'd love them moreso if they imploded and became a mini-black hole...of course, they already look like a black hole from outer space...
So North Korea is saying, "We agree to stop doing the things we have already agreed to stop doing, but did anyway."
http://slate.msn.com/id/2082164/ The North Korean Solution What's so bad about Kim's latest offer? By Fred Kaplan Posted Monday, April 28, 2003, at 4:32 PM PT Last week's long-awaited nuclear talks between the United States and North Korea seemed, at first glance, disastrous. Over lunch on Thursday, Deputy Foreign Minister Li Gun took Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly aside and told him (according to U.S. officials) that North Korea already has some nuclear weapons and that "it's up to you whether we do a physical demonstration or transfer them." President Bush reacted dismissively, telling NBC, "They're back to the old blackmail game." And indeed it appeared to be so. China's foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, who had sponsored and mediated the talks in Beijing, was clearly appalled by his neighbor's bluster. The South Korean government, whose new president, Roh Moo-hyun, was elected on a platform of outreach to the north, declared that a nuclear Pyongyang was unacceptable. The major newspapers commonly reported that the talks had "broken down." However, developments over the weekend suggested something more subtle, and potentially hopeful, was going on. Yesterday's Los Angeles Times reported that Kelly told Japan's chief Cabinet secretary, Yasuo Fukuda, that the North Koreans had made a "bold, new proposal." Kelly also told other Asian officials that the meeting left him "more optimistic" than he had been after his session in Pyongyang last October. . . . In the mid-to-late 1990s, when the Clinton-era Agreed Framework was in force, the energy assistance to Pyongyang was administered by the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, an entity that consisted of delegates from the United States, South Korea, and Japan. In his 1999 book, Negotiating on the Edge: North Korean Negotiating Behavior, Scott Snyder of the Asia Foundation observes that as long as activity could be funneled through this multilateral body, things went fairly well. Any agreement reached this time around must be firmer than the Agreed Framework. Kim Jong-il must agree not just to halt his nuclear program, as his father did in 1994, but to reverse it; not just to put the fuel rods under lock and key, but to get rid of them. For him to do this, Bush and his Asian allies must offer equally dramatic security guarantees and tangible economic assistance—which might gradually have the effect of opening up North Korea to the world, which could carry benefits for everybody.
I don't want our children to inherit a world that allows genocidal criminals like Kim to govern countries. His plea for peace should not be enough for decent, moral human beings. Regardless of what has occurred in the past, it is time for governments of the world to ban together and put Kim in his proper place- a jail cell.
We rejected it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2986683.stm US rejects N Korea concessions The North is reported to want substantial economic aid The United States has rejected the idea of making economic concessions to North Korea in exchange for a commitment to abandon its nuclear programme. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the US would not "reward North Korea for bad behaviour". . . . South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun has pledged to continue his predecessor Kim Dae-jung's policy of engaging North Korea. But while stressing the need for continued dialogue and denying the need for sanctions, Seoul has repeatedly said it will never accept its neighbour possessing nuclear capabilities.
The one thing about the proposal that sounded promising is that UN nuclear inspectors would have been back inside N. Korea.
