North Adds New Demand in Koreans’ Nuclear Talks

North Korea added a fresh demand on Thursday that promised to prolong once again debate over mutual nuclear inspections on the Korean Peninsula.

Meeting in the truce village of Panmunjom, the North Koreans urged the south to add a new duty for a joint nuclear control commission that must be established by March 18.

Besides working out details of how to enforce a Dec. 31 north-south agreement to ban nuclear weapons and facilities for enriching uranium and reprocessing nuclear fuel to produce plutonium, the north said the commission should undertake “joint actions against nuclear threats outside the Korean Peninsula”--an apparent reference to Japan. It also proposed that the two sides seek “international guarantees of a nuclear-free Korea.”

North Korea also rejected appeals by the south to permit mutual trial inspections of nuclear facilities by March 18 and to make final by April 18 the procedures for full mutual inspections.

Although the two sides agreed to meet again Tuesday, the new demands appeared to dash hope for early inspections.

The north’s demands were the latest in a long series of conditions that it has thrown up against approving inspections to dispel growing fears that it is in the process of developing nuclear weapons. South Korea has no nuclear weapons.

On Tuesday in Washington, CIA Director Robert M. Gates said that North Korea is nearing completion of two plants in Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang, to produce plutonium from which it could build nuclear bombs within “a few months to as much as a couple of years.”

On Wednesday in Seoul, Chang Man Soon, South Korea’s assistant foreign minister, said flatly that “North Korea will be able to produce some weapons-grade plutonium by June at the latest.”

The new North Korean demands apparently were aimed at Japan to divert attention from the north’s nuclear program. Last week, in a sixth round of talks between prime ministers of the north and south in Pyongyang, North Korean Prime Minister Yon Hyong Muk, for the first time, urged the south to take joint action against a Japanese program of reprocessing and enrichment of nuclear fuel that he claimed could produce enough plutonium for 1,000 nuclear bombs a year.

South Korean Prime Minister Chung Won Shik rejected the proposal.