NORTH KOREA/THE US: The United States yesterday considered cancelling talks due to be held in Beijing next week on ending North Korea's suspected nuclear weapons program, after Pyongyang said it had begun reprocessing more than 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods.
"Whether the talks go forward, that's not decided. There is active consideration to cancelling them," said a Bush administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Later yesterday a White House official said the decision would be made by the president, who is on holiday in Crawford, Texas, and the talks would likely go ahead.
North Korea raised the ante just before key talks with the US and China were due to open on Tuesday by announcing it was reprocessing more than 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods at its Yongbyong nuclear plant.
"As we have already declared, we are successfully reprocessing more than 8,000 spent fuel rods at the final phase," an unnamed spokesman of Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry said, adding that "interim information" had been sent to the United States and "other countries concerned" last month.
US experts have said reprocessing the rods would give the communist state enough plutonium to make several atomic bombs.
The senior US official denied that the United States had an indication that North Korea had begun reprocessing the rods and said it was possible Pyongyang had done so and the United States would not yet know.
North Korea's claim could not be confirmed independently because it expelled UN nuclear monitors last year, and no reports from Tokyo, Seoul or Washington have endorsed it.
Analysts say the announcement is in keeping with North Korea's negotiating style in which its aggressive brinkmanship is used to shock its opponents into concessions.
If it is confirmed that North Korea has already begun reprocessing the spent plutonium fuel rods then the United States would almost certainly not show up in Beijing next Tuesday for the first round of talks.
Pyongyang has been trying very hard to bring the US to the negotiating table, so it seems unlikely that it would want to wreck the talks. Last week it announced it was going to be "flexible", a move which led to the meeting being set up.
The US wanted to have multilateral talks also involving South Korea, Japan, China, while Pyongyang insisted it wanted bilateral talks with the United States leading to a mutual non-aggression pact and diplomatic recognition.
China stepped in to force a compromise and bring the two parties together in what will be only a preliminary meeting to organise a timetable, venue and framework of negotiations which might cover everything from proliferation to aid issues.
Washington believes North Korea already has one or two nuclear bombs and can extract enough plutonium from the fuel rods to make six to eight more within months.
South Korea's new ambassador to the United States, Mr Han Sung-joo, said yesterday that any negotiated deal would be far more complex than US-North Korean talks in 1994 that froze the North's nuclear facilities, ending a crisis at that time.
Now, Mr Han said, North Korea will be expected to not only stop but promptly and verifiably dismantle its nuclear programmes. "This is going to be an arduous, long process. It's not going to be a cakewalk," he said. He did not expect any deal for at least a month or two, noting that the 1994 crisis took well over a year to resolve.
China's involvement is regarded as a diplomatic victory for Washington as Beijing had been reluctant to get involved in what US officials described as a global dispute.