WASHINGTON’S special envoy on North Korea began a visit to South Korea, Japan and China as fears grow that Kim Jong-il’s secretive communist government is ratcheting up its nuclear programme.
Stephen Bosworth was due in the South Korean capital Seoul yesterday for a two-day trip, the US state department said, and would then travel on to Tokyo and Beijing, before flying back to Washington later in the week.
While US diplomats did not elaborate on the reasons for Mr Bosworth’s trip, it looks almost certain to examine recent developments regarding the North’s nuclear programme.
His visit comes shortly after a US nuclear scientist, Siegfried Hecker of Stanford University, said he saw hundreds of centrifuges in North Korea during a visit this month, adding to the case that Pyongyang has a uranium enrichment programme that will give it a second way to obtain fissile material for atomic bombs.
Fresh satellite images show building under way at the country’s main atomic complex, Yongbyon. The pictures, taken earlier this month by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, showed North Korea was building a light-water reactor.
While Washington has believed for several years that Pyongyang was operating this kind of programme, the new evidence seems to indicate that it is at a much more sophisticated stage than previously thought.
The news increases tensions in the regions, especially among neighbours Japan and South Korea. There are also fears that the North will try and sell its nuclear technology abroad.
North Korea said in April last year that it is to restore its main reactor at Yongbyon, which had been disabled under a February 2007 accord.
North Korea, which conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009, is believed to have enough fissile material from its separate, plutonium-based nuclear programme to make between six and 12 atomic bombs.
Six-party aid-for-disarmament talks, involving both Koreas, China, Washington, Japan and Russia, last met in December 2008 but have been stalled since. North Korea has said it wants to return to the talks but demands that UN sanctions imposed for its two nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009 be lifted first. Both Seoul and Washington have dismissed its pledges to denuclearise as insincere.
“From my perspective, it’s North Korea continuing on a path which is destabilising for the region,” Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, told CNN.
"I look at the sinking of the Cheonana few months ago where they killed 46 South Korean sailors, you know, all of this is consistent with belligerent behaviour, and the kind of instability creation in a part of the world that is very dangerous," he said.
The South Korean JoonAng Dailysaid in an editorial that uranium enrichment was irrefutable evidence that North Korea had violated UN sanctions banning development of any form of nuclear weapons.
“Now international society should prepare much tougher sanctions against the North in order not to allow it to play the bully again. China in particular must go beyond its lukewarm sanction against its ally and put much more pressure on it,” the newspaper said.