N. Korea says it has met nuclear criteria

American and North Korean officials traded charges Friday over the lagging effort to shut down Pyongyang’s nuclear program, raising new doubts about an initiative that the Bush administration has hoped would yield a rare diplomatic success.

North Korea’s Foreign Ministry declared that it had fulfilled a commitment to provide U.S. officials with a full list of its nuclear activities before a Dec. 31 deadline, and intended to do no more.

“As far as the nuclear declaration on which wrong opinion is being built up by some quarters is concerned, [North Korea] has done what it should do,” the ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

U.S. officials insisted that Pyongyang had not yet provided the declaration that it promised on two occasions last year.

“The North Koreans need to get about the business of completing the declaration,” said Sean McCormack, the chief State Department spokesman. “It is another data point that will indicate that they are serious about denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.”

The North Korean government last year pledged a step-by-step program of disabling and then dismantling its nuclear complex in return for various rewards, including fuel oil, steel products and normalization of diplomatic relations.

By the end of last year, North Korea was to have dismantled a decrepit reactor at Yongbyon and disclosed all nuclear assets and activities, including its inventory of bombs and fissile materials and a uranium enrichment program that Pyongyang has so far denied.

But as the year-end deadline passed without completion of the nuclear inventory or full disabling of the reactor, criticism has grown in the United States that Kim Jong Il’s government is following a familiar pattern of probing to see what it can obtain without giving up the nuclear program it considers a precious asset.

U.S. officials, who have clung to optimism despite a series of snags, said it was important not to overlook that North Korea said in its statement that it remained committed to the effort.

“I think we’re seeing progress on parts of this agreement,” said Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman.

But Robert Einhorn, a former senior U.S. official on nonproliferation, said North Korea’s statement may be more than just bluster aimed at improving its bargaining position in talks with the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia. Pyongyang regards secrecy about its nuclear program as a “strategic asset,” and may be unwilling to come clean, said Einhorn, who is at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“Obviously, a failure to make a full and accurate declaration will cast real doubt on whether they are willing to get rid of their nuclear capability completely,” he said. For that reason, he said, it is “potentially a showstopper” for the six-nation denuclearization talks.

North Korean officials and the U.S. negotiating team, headed by Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, had discussed what the nuclear inventory declaration would include, American officials have said. U.S. officials hoped those discussions would avoid a later confrontation over an inadequate declaration.

But North Korea said Friday that it had offered the United States a document in November, which the Americans apparently found insufficient. The North Koreans said that although the U.S. officials wanted more talks, Pyongyang had had “enough discussions.”

The ministry’s statement again denied that the North Koreans had aided Syria in a nuclear weapons program, calling that allegation “a fiction.” U.S. officials have demanded to know whether North Korea had a hand in building an alleged Syrian nuclear facility that reportedly was bombed by Israel in early September.

The North Koreans said that in response to American suspicions that Pyongyang had imported aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment, they had shown U.S. officials a military site at which aluminum tubes were used for other purposes.

The North Koreans accused the United States of failing to honor its commitment to take North Korea off the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and to lift sanctions under American trade laws.

The ministry asserted that North Korea had done more than other countries as part of the denuclearization deal. But it said it refused to go further because the deal provided that each side would move ahead “action for action.”

Charles L. Pritchard, a former Bush administration envoy who is president of the Korea Economic Institute, said the North Korean statements were aimed at rebutting accusations from several countries that Pyongyang had failed to meet its commitments by the year-end deadline. He said he did not view them as a threat to the denuclearization effort.

The countries are “signaling each other in a PR kind of way,” he said.

The Bush administration, after taking a hard line on North Korea for its first six years, has made a series of concessions in the last year to keep negotiations going. Einhorn said the administration might change its tune if the latest statement proves to be a signal of intransigence.

The administration “has already taken a lot of hits from the right wing,” he said. “I think the administration will feel it’s under pressure to do something to show that it doesn’t have infinite patience.”

--

paul.richter@latimes.com