South Korea hopes for talks on North by BBC News Online 7:02pm 11th Jul, 2003   11 July, 2003,    South Korea is doing its utmost to hold multilateral talks on North Korea's nuclear programme within two months, according to a top official.    The South Korean President's foreign policy chief, Ban Ki-moon, told YTN television that the venue could be determined after all involved agree on such talks. North Korea has been insisting on holding direct talks with the United States, but Washington says any talks should involve South Korea, Japan, Russia, and China.    But Mr Ban said the North has shown a gradual change in its stance towards holding multilateral talks. On Wednesday, Seoul's intelligence agency said that North Korea had reprocessed "a small number" of its spent nuclear fuel rods, South Korea's intelligence agency said on Wednesday.    North Korea has claimed before to have begun reprocessing its 8,000 spent rods - a move which could allow it to extract enough weapons-grade plutonium to develop a handful of nuclear weapons within months of starting the reprocessing operation. But international intelligence agencies have been unsure whether the North was bluffing, as part of its continuing high-risk stand-off over its nuclear ambitions.    The United States appeared unconvinced by the latest developments, with a US official telling Reuters news agency: "Our assessment of where they are on reprocessing is not 100% clear."    National Intelligence Agency director Ko Young-koo told parliament that his staff had noticed "high-explosive tests being conducted in Yongduk district", which is 40 km (25 miles) northwest of Yongbyon.    Conventional high explosives can be used as the trigger for nuclear devices. South Korea's Defence Ministry has already claimed that the North conducted numerous nuclear-related tests of explosive material in the 1980s and 1990s.    The 8,000 spent fuel rods are part of a plutonium-based nuclear weapons programme that was halted under a 1994 nuclear agreement between North Korea and the US and its allies.    The agreement crumbled last year after US officials said Pyongyang had admitted to having a secret atomic programme.    North Korea's Nuclear Threat :Questions&Answers(25 April, 2003).    The United States and North Korea have been locked in months of impasse over the secretive state's nuclear programme. BBC News Online analyses the crisis over the North's nuclear ambitions, and examines the background to Western and Asian policy on the issue.    What is this crisis all about?    Relations between the US and North Korea have deteriorated since President George W Bush labelled North Korea part of an "axis of evil" in January 2002. Tensions really started escalating in October, when the US accused North Korea of developing a secret nuclear weapons programme. Since then North Korea has restarted a mothballed nuclear power station, thrown out inspectors from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and pulled out of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.    It has also upped its frequently doom-laden rhetoric, warning of the risk of nuclear war.    It is often very difficult to tell what lies behind North Korea's moves. Pyongyang and its mercurial leader Kim Jong-il act in erratic and contradictory ways. But it seems possible that North Korea has been trying to use the nuclear issue as a hard-line ploy to negotiate a non-aggression pact and improved economic aid from the US. Alternatively, the paranoid North may have decided the US intends to attack it anyway and has been readying its defences while the US was preoccupied with Iraq.    Can diplomatic talks resolve it?    Maybe, but not easily. Almost everyone - except North Korea - agrees the secretive state should not be allowed to continue with its nuclear weapons programme. The difficulty will be finding enough diplomatic and economic carrots to persuade North Korea's leaders to give the programme up.    The Bush administration is especially wary because North Korea has broken exactly that kind of nuclear deal before, in 1994. And although the North's most pressing problem is its moribund economy, Kim Jong-il's first concern is the survival of himself and his military backers. From his perspective, he is being asked to give up his only guarantee against US attack, nuclear weapons.    What do we know about North Korea's nuclear weapons programme?    According to US accounts, the North Koreans admitted that they had a nuclear weapons programme at a meeting in October 2002 with Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly in Pyongyang.    Again according to the US, a North Korean negotiator told Mr Kelly in April 2003 that the North had nuclear weapons.Publicly, North Korea has merely said it retains "the right" to have such weapons.Most arms control experts suspect North Korea of pursuing an active weapons programme - certainly up to 1994, when it signed a landmark agreement to freeze all nuclear-related activities.    In December 2002, North Korea restarted its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon and forced two IAEA monitors to leave the country. As a result, the outside world cannot be sure as to how far work has progressed at Yongbyon. If it was fully operational, some analysts believe it could produce enough plutonium to build another bomb within a year or two. America's CIA says a separate, enriched uranium programme could be producing "two or more" bombs each year by the middle of this decade.    How many weapons does North Korea already possess?    This is very hard to say without the IAEA inspections. Experts believe that North Korea may have extracted sufficient plutonium for a small number of bombs. US officials have put the number at "one or two". Spent fuel rods that were put into storage in 1994 could also be used to extract plutonium for a handful of weapons, the US believes.    Should we be worried?    Yes. Arms proliferation matters, especially when weapons of mass destruction fall into the hands of secretive, unpredictable regimes which may well be heading for catastrophic failure. Many experts believe that the North Korean system is in terminal decline. Its people suffer great poverty and frequent famine. How the regime ends matters, and managing this potential crisis is made harder if it has nuclear arms. There is also the danger that an unstable regime like this could provide such weaponry to third parties. North Korea already has a bad track-record in the proliferation of missile technology.    Hasn't North Korea threatened nuclear blackmail before?    Yes, in 1993. That time North Korea was persuaded to suspend its nuclear programme by negotiations which led to the 1994 agreement.North Korea agreed to halt all its nuclear activities and in due course allow full inspections of its materials and facilities. In return it was to be supplied with heavy fuel oil and two power-generating reactors of a type less likely to prove a source of weapons-grade materials. The reactors, which were to be supplied by an international consortium known as Kedo, were badly behind schedule when the latest crisis hit. Their future is now uncertain.    What difference does the US see between North Korea and Iraq?    They are different cases. North Korea is already an isolated regime with huge domestic problems. Two of America's regional allies - South Korea and Japan - have an active policy of engagement to try to win Pyongyang round to a more compliant line.    Perhaps more importantly, North Korea is believed to have the bomb, while Iraq did not. The view in the Bush administration is that action has to be taken before a country gets a nuclear capability. With North Korea it is just too late, so Washington has to manage the consequences as best it can. Visit the related web page
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