文章基本信息
- 标题：N-arms negotiations remain a hard sell with North Korea
- 作者：Tim Johnson Knight Ridder Newspapers
- 期刊名称：Deseret News (Salt Lake City)
- 印刷版ISSN：0745-4724
- 出版年度：2005
- 卷号：Aug 6, 2005
- 出版社：Deseret News Publishing Company
N-arms negotiations remain a hard sell with North Korea
Tim Johnson Knight Ridder NewspapersBEIJING -- Deepening fatigue and vexation on Friday bedeviled marathon talks to disarm North Korea of its nuclear weapons, and the chief U.S. negotiator complained of "excruciating" jawboning sessions to work around a deadlock.
A central sticking point has been North Korea's insistence that it retain the right to operate nuclear programs for peaceful purposes.
"We had another long day," U.S. envoy Christopher Hill said Friday evening. "We made a little progress but I must say we didn't make enough progress."
Even the Chinese hosts of the six-nation talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis didn't attempt to camouflage the disagreements that were forcing the talks into a 12th day, Saturday, with no end in sight.
China's state-run Xinhua news agency quoted a South Korean envoy, Soon Min-soon, as saying North Korea and the United States "failed to narrow their differences" after a bilateral meeting earlier in the day.
The talks are the longest ever in the six-nation process that began in 2003, leaving diplomats combating exhaustion and flirting with the temptation to call a halt. North Korea has balked at a final document agreed to by U.S., Russian, Japanese, South Korean and Chinese negotiators, insisting that it won't give up all its nuclear programs.
"Recess is one of the sort of termination scenarios, where the idea would be we take some time and delegations go back to capitals," Hill said.
Hill said Washington opposed North Korea's demand that it be allowed to retain nuclear plants for energy or research purposes because the nation had a history of turning such plants into weapons factories.
"We have a state that has taken research reactors and turned them into bomb-making reactors," he said.
Confronted with U.S. evidence, North Korea admitted in 2002 that it had broken a 1994 nuclear-disarmament agreement, sparking the crisis. Last February, Pyongyang said it had taken spent fuel rods and converted them to nuclear weapons.
Other parties to the talks appear less adamant than Washington does about pressing North Korea to give up all nuclear activity, including generating electricity.
One scholar said the Stalinist regime in Pyongyang was insisting on its right to a civilian nuclear program with hopes that it could attract newer technology -- and perhaps eventually build better bombs.
