So Ronery
June 8, 2005 | Leave a Comment
North Korea apparently wants the United States to recognize it as a nuclear state as a basis for future negotiations.
The assertion was made Monday at the United Nations, sources close to the negotiations said.
“We have to be treated as a nation possessing nuclear weapons,” Pak Gil Yon, North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations, was quoted as telling Joseph DeTrani, special U.S. envoy to North Korea.
There was no specific mention of what sort of treatment Pyongyang was seeking or that North Korea intended to return to the six-nation nuclear weapons talks, which have not been held since June 2004.
Although a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman announced on Feb. 10 that North Korea possessed nuclear weapons, Monday’s meeting was the first time a North Korean official directly informed a U.S. government official that Pyongyang had nuclear weapons.
Sources in the U.S. government and among diplomatic circles in Washington said North Korea had likely given up on its idea of turning the six-way talks among the two Koreas, Japan, the United States, China and Russia into disarmament talks.
According to John W. Lewis, professor emeritus of Chinese politics at Stanford University, North Korean officials have criticized the six-way talks as a framework to force North Korea to unilaterally abandon its nuclear program.
Lewis visited North Korea in late May and was told by North Korean officials that the United States had to remove its nuclear threat from the Korean Peninsula before Pyongyang would give up its nuclear program. By having the United States recognize North Korea as a nuclear state, Pyongyang apparently wants Washington to treat it as a nation on equal footing. In that case, the six-way talks could become a discussion of arms control.
Analysts said North Korea might ask the United States to reduce its military presence in South Korea and remove North Korea as a potential target for a pre-emptive nuclear strike in exchange for Pyongyang’s abandonment of its nuclear weapons program.
Other sources in the U.S. government said North Korea may be seeking to be treated like Pakistan.
Pakistan has strengthened its ties with the United States even though it went ahead with nuclear weapons tests and has been implicated in the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
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