22 November 2010

North Korean Enrichment Would Violate Commitments, U.S. Says

Ambassador Bosworth is consulting with U.S. regional partners following reports of North Korea's uranium-enrichment program.

By Stephen Kaufman
Staff Writer

Washington – If true, North Korea’s claim to have centrifuges for the production of enriched uranium would violate that country’s claims that it is committed to eliminating nuclear weapons and would reinforce longstanding international concerns over its nuclear activities, U.S. officials say.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said November 22 that North Korea needs to “be serious about living up to their obligations” to the international community, and its continued failure to do so has resulted in the strongest sanctions the country has ever faced under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874 and has “greatly increased the price of their noncompliance.”

According to press reports, U.S. scientist Siegfried Hecker says North Korean officials recently showed him a small, industrial-scale uranium-enrichment facility, which could allow the country an alternative means of making nuclear weapons besides its plutonium-based program.

“Obviously, their claims, if true, contradict the pledges and commitments that they have made repeatedly to the international community,” Gibbs said. U.S. officials, including Special Representative for North Korea Policy Stephen Bosworth, “are traveling in the region right now to brief our partners and our allies in coordinating a policy response to their actions,” he said.

The Obama administration believes the six-party process, which includes North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Russia, China and the United States, “can play an important role” in resolving continued international concern over Pyongyang’s nuclear activities “if and when the North Koreans take that six-party process to move toward denuclearization seriously,” Gibbs said.

“We do not wish to talk simply for the sake of talking. The North Koreans have to be serious about living up to their obligations,” he said.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley echoed Bosworth’s November 22 statement in South Korea that although North Korea’s new claims of a uranium-enrichment program are disappointing and provocative, they are not surprising.

“This obviously is an issue of concern, not a crisis. We are going to consult with our partners and coordinate a unified response to North Korea’s actions,” Crowley said, adding that Bosworth will meet with Chinese officials in Beijing November 23.

“What we’ve seen over the past couple of years is a series of significant provocations by North Korea,” including ballistic missile tests, nuclear tests, and the March attack upon the South Korean ship Cheonan.

“Our position is clear: North Korea has to take affirmative steps to denuclearize. It has to be willing to credibly show that it’s prepared to meet its international obligations” and take “complete, verifiable and irreversible … steps towards denuclearization,” as it committed to do in September 2005, Crowley said.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)