US officials met twice last week with North Korean officials in New York to tell them the US was ready to resume nuclear negotiations and wanted to resolve the issue diplomatically, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said.
"We told the North Koreans that the six-party process is the venue for resolving the nuclear issue and we called on North Korea to follow through on its commitment to the six-party talks," Ereli said Monday.
He said the US requested the meetings because it was felt a face-to-face presentation of the US position might be effective.
Ereli said the US has meetings with North Korea's UN diplomats in New York from time to time when they serve a useful purpose to pass messages and make points known.
He said he did not know how North Korea responded to the US presentation made by Joseph DeTrani, the State Department's special envoy for North Korea negotiations
Ereli said DeTrani left Sunday on a trip to China, South Korea and Japan to continue consultations on getting the nuclear negotiations going again. Russia also is involved in the talks.
Three rounds of six-nation talks aimed at persuading the North to halt weapons development have taken place since last year but without a breakthrough. North Korea boycotted a fourth round scheduled for September and analysts believed it was holding out for a change in the White House.
On Saturday North Korea said after the talks in New York it had concluded that Pyongyang should hold off on nuclear negotiations until the US changes its "hostile" policy toward the country.
The report, from Pyongyang's official news agency KCNA, said officials met on Tuesday and Friday.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told The New York Times he was now certain the nuclear material his agency once monitored in North Korea had been converted into fuel for four to six nuclear bombs.
ElBaradei said his judgment that North Korea had converted its stockpile of spent nuclear fuel into weapons-grade plutonium was not based on new intelligence.
Instead, he said, it was based on the agency's years of accumulated knowledge of North Korea's abilities, and the amount of time that had passed since North Korea ejected inspectors and began removing the 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods that inspectors had been monitoring.
"I'm sure they have reprocessed it all," he said. "We know they have the fissile material," he said, referring to the rods, which can be reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium.
"The production process is not that difficult" to turn the rods into bomb fuel, and now enough time has passed for North Korea to have solved any production problems, he said.
North Korea agreed in 1994 to freeze plutonium production but in 2002 renounced the deal and ejected the IAEA after Washington accused it of trying to produce highly enriched uranium.
Asked whether the two New York meetings had moved the ball forward on North Korea, US State Department number-two Richard Armitage said: "I'm not sure."
"We'll have to wait until they digest what was said," said Armitage, who last week expressed the hope that the six party talks could resume by the first week of January.
The State Department refused to discuss the specifics or get into details on the meeting with the North Koreans.
Ereli said the US indicated to them it remained ready to resume the six-party talks at an early date, without preconditions, and called on Pyongyang to follow through on its commitment to continue with the discussions.
But a North Korean spokesman said at the weekend that Pyongyang would not return to the negotiating table until the lineup of a new US administration following President George W. Bush's re-election was fully known.
Washington intended to use the six-party talks to force North Korea to dismantle all its nuclear program, including those for peaceful purposes, he said.
Three rounds of talks have been held so far but North Korea refused to participate in the fourth round in September after rejecting a US aid-for-disarmament offer.
Ereli downplayed the significance of the New York meeting, stressing that the "the real substance, the real engagement, the real diplomacy is conducted" through the six-party process.
A beauty queen who pulled out of the Miss South Africa competition when her nationality was questioned has said she wants to relocate to Nigeria, after coming second in the Miss Universe pageant while representing the West African country. Chidimma Adetshina, whose father is Nigerian, was crowned Miss Universe Africa and Oceania and was runner-up to Denmark’s Victoria Kjar Theilvig in Mexico on Saturday night. The 23-year-old law student withdrew from the Miss South Africa competition in August, saying that she needed to protect herself and her family after the government alleged that her mother had stolen the identity of a South
BELT-TIGHTENING: Chinese investments in Cambodia are projected to drop to US$35 million in 2026 from more than US$420 million in 2021 At a ceremony in August, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet knelt to receive blessings from saffron-robed monks as fireworks and balloons heralded the breaking of ground for a canal he hoped would transform his country’s economic fortunes. Addressing hundreds of people waving the Cambodian flag, Hun Manet said China would contribute 49 percent to the funding of the Funan Techo Canal that would link the Mekong River to the Gulf of Thailand and reduce Cambodia’s shipping reliance on Vietnam. Cambodia’s government estimates the strategic, if contentious, infrastructure project would cost US$1.7 billion, nearly 4 percent of the nation’s annual GDP. However, months later,
HOPEFUL FOR PEACE: Zelenskiy said that the war would ‘end sooner’ with Trump and that Ukraine must do all it can to ensure the fighting ends next year Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom early yesterday suspended gas deliveries via Ukraine, Vienna-based utility OMV said, in a development that signals a fast-approaching end of Moscow’s last gas flows to Europe. Russia’s oldest gas-export route to Europe, a pipeline dating back to Soviet days via Ukraine, is set to shut at the end of this year. Ukraine has said it would not extend the transit agreement with Russian state-owned Gazprom to deprive Russia of profits that Kyiv says help to finance the war against it. Moscow’s suspension of gas for Austria, the main receiver of gas via Ukraine, means Russia now only
‘HARD-HEADED’: Some people did not evacuate to protect their property or because they were skeptical of the warnings, a disaster agency official said Typhoon Man-yi yesterday slammed into the Philippines’ most populous island, with the national weather service warning of flooding, landslides and huge waves as the storm sweeps across the archipelago nation. Man-yi was still packing maximum sustained winds of 185kph after making its first landfall late on Saturday on lightly populated Catanduanes island. More than 1.2 million people fled their homes ahead of Man-yi as the weather forecaster warned of a “life-threatening” effect from the powerful storm, which follows an unusual streak of violent weather. Man-yi uprooted trees, brought down power lines and smashed flimsy houses to pieces after hitting Catanduanes in the typhoon-prone
RSS