N. Korea Missile Test Seen as Unlikely in Wake of Pact

After three years of diplomatic efforts and a summer of nervous tension, North Korea effectively agreed Sunday to suspend further missile testing, senior U.S. officials said.

The agreement, which came after six days of negotiations between North Korean and U.S. officials in Berlin, was indirect and contained no explicit commitment from the North Korean government. Instead, the statement said only that, as the talks continue, each side “would endeavor to preserve a positive atmosphere conducive to improvement of bilateral relations.”

“We agreed to make further efforts to solve apprehensions both sides face,” the senior North Korean negotiator, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan, said after the talks Sunday, according to the Japanese news agency Kyodo.

Still, that wording was good enough to enable U.S. officials to describe the statement as a de facto moratorium and, as such, an extremely significant development.

“We are confident that North Korea understands our concerns, and we don’t expect there will be a missile launch,” State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said.

Added a senior Clinton administration official who declined to be identified: “We believe this is an important step forward. Based on this statement, we don’t expect North Korea to test ballistic missiles.”

A Japanese Foreign Ministry official expressed “hope that this process will proceed further and that peace and stability on the Korean peninsula will be secured.”

In return for a commitment from North Korea to refrain from any further missile tests, a U.S. official said, Washington would be prepared to consider easing punishing U.S. economic sanctions that have been in force for more than four decades.

“We expect on our part to look at ways to improve the political and economic relationship,” the U.S. official said.

North Korea stunned the West and some of America’s closest allies in Asia one year ago when it fired a three-stage Taepodong 1 missile that flew eastward over Japan. While the government in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, insisted that it was launching a space satellite, arms control specialists harbored few doubts that the missile could easily carry warheads capable of reaching Japan and beyond.

Earlier this summer, intelligence reports alerted the U.S. and other governments that the regime seemed to be preparing to test-fire an even more advanced missile, called the Taepodong 2, which has a range long enough to reach the westernmost parts of the U.S., namely Alaska and Guam. For weeks after, there were numerous reports speculating as to the level of activity at the missile launch pad.

After North Korea was persuaded to suspend its nuclear weapons development program in a comprehensive agreement in 1994, it took another two years for Pyongyang even to engage with the United States on the missile issue.

Talks that the U.S. would like to see end with a scrapping of the missile program produced few signs of progress until this summer, when a flurry of diplomacy by the U.S., Japan and South Korea, enlisting China and Russia, aimed to make North Korea understand that a missile test would enrage all its neighbors.

“We worked in a similar way on the nuclear side to get them to freeze their nuclear program. Now we’re working the same way on the missiles,” a senior State Department official said.

U.S. Ambassador Charles Kartman and North Korean official Kim met in Berlin from Tuesday to Sunday in the latest round of negotiations on bilateral concerns, but they clearly focused on the missile-testing issue. There were few expectations for a major breakthrough, but observers following the talks were hoping for a signal of North Korea’s intentions--whether it wanted a positive relationship with the West or was preparing to retreat back into its isolation.

The joint U.S.-North Korean statement Sunday said the talks “took place in a constructive and businesslike atmosphere.”

“The two sides agreed to continue these efforts,” it said, “and agreed that, in the interim, each would endeavor to preserve a positive atmosphere conducive to improving bilateral relations and to peace and security in Northeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific region.”

It added: “The two sides held productive discussions on pending issues, including the sanctions and missile issues. Each side came to a deeper understanding of the other’s concerns and each acknowledged the need to continue taking steps that address these concerns.”

A large part of the significance of Sunday’s statement was that it seemed to contain the positive signal that U.S. and other officials had been hoping for. The joint statement committed both sides to continue their talks in Berlin.

Two South Korean officials said today that Seoul expected that talks would probably resume soon at a higher diplomatic level.

One source suggested that talks might take place later this month, perhaps between Kang Suk Chu, North Korea’s first deputy foreign minister, and U.S. State Department counselor Wendy Sherman. The other senior official said the timing and staffing of any future meeting had not been decided. Kang met with Clinton administration envoy William J. Perry, the former Defense secretary, when Perry visited Pyongyang in May.

“This is a small but very important beginning of a long process in removing the threat of weapons of mass destruction” from the Korean peninsula and in engaging North Korea with the outside world, one of the senior South Korean officials said. “These two trends will clearly contribute to a more stable situation in the region.”

Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi was more cautious. “I see it as a step toward North Korea freezing a missile launch, but I don’t think of the agreement as a sign that the North has abandoned a launch capability,” he told reporters in Auckland, New Zealand, where world leaders attended the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

Chinese President Jiang Zemin may have foreshadowed the development in Berlin when he suggested Saturday that for the sake of regional stability, Beijing would not want North Korea to test-fire another long-range missile.

“China will do everything it should to help maintain peace and stability on the Korean peninsula, and it will prevent anything that undermines stability,” Jiang was quoted as saying by South Korean officials after he met with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung for about half an hour in Auckland.

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Marshall reported from Washington and Chen from Auckland. Times staff writer Sonni Efron contributed to this article from Tokyo.