- SEOUL (AFP) - South Korea
held crisis talks Monday as the United States led condemnation of North
Korea's decision to take control of thousands of spent fuel rods that could
be used to make nuclear weapons.
-
- South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung and president-elect
Roh Moo-Hyun, who will replace Kim in two months, met on the emerging nuclear
crisis in Seoul for the first time since Roh's election last week.
-
- The United States responded with swift condemnation to
Pyongyang's decision to remove international surveillance cameras from
its frozen nuclear facilities and to unseal the spent fuel rods.
-
- "The 8,000-odd spent fuel rods are of particular
concern because they can be reprocessed to recover plutonium for nuclear
weapons," US State Department spokesman Louis Fintor said.
-
- The North's decision to tamper with the fuel rods is
the most dangerous move yet in a two-month-old standoff over nuclear weapons,
analysts warned.
-
- Kim's first meeting with Roh following the liberal reformer's
victory in Thursday's election was supposed to focus on smoothing over
the February 25 transfer of power.
-
- Instead the 90-minute talks centred on Pyongyang's latest
move in its standoff with the international community.
-
- "Their discussion was pinned down on international
relations which focused on North Korea's nuclear issue," President
Kim's spokeswoman Park Sun-Sook said.
-
- South Korea's frustration with the North was evident
in a foreign ministry statemement which urged Pyongyang to restore the
seals and disabled monitoring cameras.
-
- "Despite repeated warnings from our government and
the international community, North Korea took further actions to unfreeze
its nuclear activities, raising regional tension and amplifying international
concerns over nuclear proliferation," the statement said.
-
- The United States has been stepping up international
pressure on North Korea since the weekend.
-
- Deputy US Ambassador Evans Revere met South Korean Deputy
Foreign Minister Lee Tai-Sik in Seoul Monday to discuss countermeasures
to be taken against the North following their foreign ministers' urgent
talks over phone.
-
- Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi has also expressed
widespread international alarm about Pyongyang's "regrettable"
latest move.
-
- US Senator Richard Lugar, who will head the Senate's
foreign relations committee next year, said North Korea was creating "a
very dangerous situation, initially for South Korea and for Japan but ultimately
for the United States."
-
- But Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov on
Monday warned the United States against economically "blackmailing"
North Korea to frustrate its suspected nuclear programme.
-
- "Blackmailing North Korea by exploiting its difficult
economic situation would be counterproductive and dangerous," he said
in an interview with the daily Vremya Novostei released in Moscow.
-
- The United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) called for restraint from North Korea after the Stalinist country
began removing seals and monitoring cameras Saturday from frozen nuclear
facilities.
-
- But defiant North Korea said Sunday it had begun removing
seals from a cooling pond containing some 8,000 irradiated fuel rods at
one of its nuclear reactors in Yongbyon.
-
- The rods, which could be used to extract some 25 kilograms
(55 pounds) of weapons-grade plutonium for at least three nuclear weapons,
were sealed in 1994 under an accord North Korea signed with the United
States to suspend its nuclear weapons program.
-
- The North's action is "of great non-proliferation
concern and represents a further disruption of the IAEA's ability to apply
safeguards," IAEA director general Mohammed ElBaradei said in Vienna.
-
- Pyongyang said it unfroze its nuclear facilities because
it was in a desperate energy crisis aggravated by the suspension of fuel
oil shipments, but Washington said the spent fuel has nothing to do with
power generation.
-
- The United States and North Korea came close to war over
Pyongyang's plutonium program in the early 1990s. The confrontation was
defused when Washington and Pyongyang signed the 1994 Agreed Framework.
-
- But the accord has been unravelling since the US announcement
in October that Pyongyang has admitted to running a new, secret and separate
program based on enriched uranium. In retaliation, Washington cut its fuel
aid to Pyongyang.
|
