North Korea Admits Its Nuclear Programs Are Weapons Related: US

WASHINGTON, July 15 (AFP) - North Korea acknowledged that most of its nuclear programs are weapons related, during the recent six-party talks to resolve the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula, US Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly said Thursday.
"While they said they wanted to maintain a civil nuclear program, they also acknowledged that most of their nuclear programs are weapons related," Kelly told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in his first public briefing since returning from the third round of the six-party talks in Beijing last month.
North Korea has refrained from stating publicly that it has nuclear weapons, although it speaks of an existing "nuclear deterrent."
Kelly said the North Korean delegation at the talks "clearly identified" a five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon as a nuclear weapons facility.
Pyongyang began to reactivate the Yongbyon reactor after expelling International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors in 2002 following US exposure of its secret nuclear arms program.
North Korea had declared several times in 2003 that it had finished reprocessing its 8,000-plus existing spent fuel rods, and the United States believes it could have produced enough fissile material for five or six additional nuclear weapons.
Since then, North Korea has stated it is strengthening what it calls its nuclear deterrent capability.
Kelly said Thursday that to resolve the crisis, North Korea proposed at the Beijing meeting it would freeze its nuclear weapons programs for rewards, including energy aid, lifting of sanctions and removal from the list of nations sponsoring terrorism.
"We are continuing to study the North`s proposal," he said, pointing out that "it is clear we are still far from agreement."
At the talks, the United States offered Pyongyang three months to shut down and seal its nuclear weapons facilities in return for economic and diplomatic rewards and multilateral security guarantees.
It was the first significant overture to Pyongyang since US President George W. Bush took office in early 2001 and branded the North part of an "axis of evil" alongside Iran and pre-war Iraq.
Aside from the United States and North Korea, the other parties at the talks are host China as well as Russia, South Korea and Japan.
Kelly said the initial US assessment was that the North Korean proposal "lacks detail and is vague on a number of key elements."
He said the scope of the proposal was narrow in terms of facilities covered and had ignored pre-2003 plutonium, nuclear weapons and the uranium enrichment program.
North Korea also wanted to exclude the IAEA, the UN`s nuclear watchdog, from verification and sought to create a new verification regime from among the six countries involved in the crisis talks, Kelly said.
"This unprecedented approach would be hard to set up and carry out," he said.
Kelly said among "positive elements" in positions Pyongyang staked out in the Beijing talks was that a freeze in its nuclear weapons program would be "the first step on the path to nuclear dismantlement, not an end to itself."
Specifically, North Korea said it would freeze all its facilities related to nuclear weapons and the products that resulted from their operation and refrain from producing more nuclear weapons, transferring and testing them.
Pyongyang confirmed that whatever was included in the freeze would also be incorporated in any commitment to dismantlement further down the line, he said.
The United States and other parties at the talks, Kelly said, had "questions" over the North Korean proposal, including what the scope of the freeze and dismantlement would be.
He said inclusion of Pyongyang`s uranium enrichment program was "critical."
The fourth round of the six-party talks is scheduled to be held by the end of September.