North Korea - North Korea has been raising the stakes in its dispute with the KEDO countries by blaming Washington for an acute electricity shortage stemming from a freeze on the communist state's atomic energy program, and suggesting that US military threats make nuclear war possible at any moment.
North Korea has been raising the stakes in its dispute with the KEDO countries by blaming Washington for an acute electricity shortage stemming from a freeze on the communist state’s atomic energy programme, and suggesting that US military threats make nuclear war possible at any moment.
Despite a diplomatic snub from North Korea, Seoul’s president-elect Roh Moo-hyun planned in January to send a mission to the United States and Japan to discuss ways to end the nuclear impasse, even though the board of UN watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was due to meet in emergency session to discuss the North Korean situation on February 12. Pyongyang has denounced the IAEA, calling it the “cat’s paw” of the United States and insisting that the agency is in no position to discuss the crisis.
The North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) pitched in by stating that “The military situation on the Korean peninsula is so tense that nuclear war may break out any moment”. Another KCNA report quoted the Rodong Sinmun newspaper as saying that repeated US statements that it sought a peaceful solution to the row represented “trite double-dealing tactics of the U.S.” to mask plans to attack the isolated North. Yet another KCNA report said US moves to block North Korean efforts to generate nuclear power had caused a severe electricity shortage that had crippled industry and transport and “interfered with the people’s cultural and emotional life.” “If the United States did not kick up a nuclear row and the construction of an atomic power plant … had progressed by the country itself as scheduled, the electricity problem would have already been solved fully,” KCNA said, referring to the North’s plans to build two nuclear reactors a decade ago. Construction was frozen after the IAEA and the United States raised suspicions that Pyongyang was extracting plutonium to make weapons. North Korea denied it was making atomic weapons but refused to allow verification.
The current crisis erupted in October when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted to reviving an arms programme it had agreed to shut down under a 1994 deal. Pyongyang later expelled IAEA inspectors, removed seals from a mothballed reactor and pulled out of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. North Korea was to have been compensated for freezing reactor construction with monthly shipments of fuel oil and the Western-financed building of two light-water reactors from which it would be difficult to extract weapons-grade fissile material. But after the latest crisis flared up, oil shipments were halted and the reactor project went into limbo Shortly before MPS went to press the International Atomic Energy Agency declared that North Korea had failed to meet its nuclear commitments and sent the issue to the United Nations Security Council. However, the Bush administration is treading more softly than some expected – it is urging the Security Council to adopt a statement condemning North Korea’s decision to reactivate its nuclear programme, but delaying any consideration of sanctions against Pyongyang.