北朝鮮 軽水炉提供求める考え

６か国協議で設置が決まった米朝の作業部会が、日本時間の６日朝から始まるのを前に、北朝鮮のキム・ケグァン外務次官は、ニューヨークで、クリントン政権時代に米朝協議に携わったアメリカ政府の元高官と会談し、軽水炉型の原子力発電所の提供を求めていく考えに変わりがないことを示しました。

ニューヨークを訪問しているキム・ケグァン外務次官は、４日、クリントン政権時代に米朝協議に携わるなど、北朝鮮との対話路線を担い、ブッシュ政権でＫＥＤＯ＝朝鮮半島エネルギー開発機構の事務局長を務めたカートマン氏と夕食を共にするなど、２度にわたって会談しました。カートマン氏は、記者団に対して「キム次官とは過去のことについて話をした。軽水炉型の原子力発電所に今も関心が高く、その姿勢は一貫している」と述べて、北朝鮮が軽水炉型の原子力発電所の提供を求めていく考えに変わりがないことを示しました。一方、キム次官は、４日、記者団に対し「準備はすべてできている」と述べ、作業部会に自信を示したほか、ブロードウェイの人気ミュージカルに招待を受けて鑑賞するなど、余裕も見せていました。米朝の作業部会は、現地時間の５日夜、日本時間の６日朝から始まる予定で、北朝鮮は、さきの６か国協議での合意に従って、アメリカに対し、テロ支援国家の指定や貿易上の制裁を解除するよう求めるものとみられます。

NHKニュース

The North Korea Climbdown BY JOHN R. BOLTON

Politicized intelligence? This time it's for real.

BY JOHN R. BOLTON
Monday, March 5, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

Washington's most important person--the Anonymous Senior Official ("ASO")--was busy last week, briefing reporters on North Korea's uranium enrichment program.

The North's pursuit of nuclear weapons through uranium enrichment, an alternative to reprocessing plutonium from spent fuel at the Yongbyon reactor, constituted both a material breach of the 1994 Agreed Framework and an enormous challenge to the hope that it could ever be negotiated out of pursuing nuclear weapons. Based, however, on one public comment and much work by Mr./Ms. ASO, the media last week set about deconstructing a critical strategic concern underlying Bush administration Korea policy. According to their breathless reporting, yet another threat to America was disappearing, revealed as simply more intelligence hype from an administration that apparently did little else in its first term.

The reports raise three separate issues. First, what exactly is the intelligence judgment about North Korea's enrichment activities, and how valid was it in 2002? Second, what are the implications for the administration's ongoing negotiations with North Korea? And third, is Mr./Ms. ASO speaking for the Bush administration, or for those elements in the permanent bureaucracy that have consistently opposed key elements of the Bush foreign policy, at least as conducted until recently?

On the first question, concerning North Korea's enrichment activities, there is actually less here than meets the eye. The only attributable public comment is from Joseph DeTrani, mission manager for North Korea for the Director of National Intelligence, who said that he now had a "mid-confidence level" about North Korea's program, down from "high confidence." Mr. DeTrani's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee recounted how, in October 2002, the U.S. confronted Pyongyang "with information they were acquiring material sufficient for a production-scale capability of enriching uranium," and how North Korea "admitted to having such a program." Mr. DeTrani continued, "we've never walked away from that issue." Indeed, in 2002, intelligence community officials told me that new evidence erased existing, long-standing disagreements within the community about what the North was up to since the mid-1990s, producing a remarkable consensus that has not, to my knowledge, broken down since.

Neither in Mr. DeTrani's testimony, nor in any of Mr./Ms. ASO's backgrounding, is there any reversal on actual facts, only an apparent shift in the "confidence level." My understanding is that the decrease in confidence stems from the absence of significant new or contemporary information about North Korea's activities. This lack of new information may be attributable to a loss of sensitive sources and methods, or it may be attributable to the effectiveness of President Bush's Proliferation Security Initiative, or its creative financial sanctions, in drying up North Korea's procurement activity. But there has been no suggestion that the intelligence from 2002 and earlier has been contradicted or discredited. Mr. DeTrani's testimony is expressly to the contrary. Indeed, on Saturday he reiterated this precise point in a second public statement.

Moreover, as Donald Rumsfeld likes to say, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." If we lack new intelligence, analysts should say so explicitly, and policy makers can draw appropriate conclusions, one of which might well be that the North is simply better at concealing its clandestine nuclear activities, not that those activities don't exist. What analysts should not do is to cast doubt on earlier intelligence, or change confidence levels, if there are no other reasons to do so. In any event, there is nothing here to allow anyone to conclude that the 2002 intelligence conclusions were flawed or hyped.

This raises the second issue. Mr./Ms. ASO's backgrounding is really about the ongoing six-party talks, and less about what happened in 2002. In any arms-control negotiation, the need for verification is directly correlated to the propensity of the other side to lie, cheat and conceal its undesirable activities. In the present case, the greater the likelihood that North Korea will make commitments it has absolutely no intention of following, the more intrusive and pervasive should be the verification mechanism we insist on. Determining in this or any other case how invasive the verification process must be obviously depends in large part on the historical record.

North Korea's aggressive mendacity puts it near the top of the list, perhaps tied with Iran for the lead, of countries that need the most transparent, most intrusive, most pervasive verification systems. For America to agree to anything less would be to make our national security, and that of close friends and allies like Japan, dependent on North Korea's word--never a safe bet. And yet, it is precisely this extensive verification system that the North cannot accept, because the transparency we must require would threaten the very rock of domestic oppression on which the North Korean regime rests. North Korea's negotiators understand this contradiction. So do ours.

The only way around this problem is to conclude it doesn't exist, or is so minimal it can be "fixed" in negotiations. That's why Mr./Ms. ASO was busy, laying the foundation to argue that further deals with North Korea do not require much, if any, verification beyond what little the International Atomic Energy Agency can provide. If we continue this approach, what is already a bad deal will become a dangerous deal, whether we make it with North Korea directly or in the six-party talks. (As Nick Eberstadt has put it, a bad agreement with six parties is no better than a bad agreement with two parties.)

And that brings us to the third issue: Where exactly is the administration headed? Mr./Ms. ASO's identity is by definition unknown, but the view is spreading that this backgrounding is more than the bureaucracy's ruminations. I have my own unnamed senior officials who tell me it's not so, but the question remains. President Bush himself must speak, and sooner rather than later, to tell us what he thinks of the intelligence, and the direction of his own policy. Recent polls show his approval rating near 30%, with support among Republicans falling precipitously. If the president's conservative base erodes further, where will his support come from? From liberal editorialists enthusing about his newfound foreign policy "pragmatism"? Based on my personal experience, the president will not have both.

Mr. Bolton is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. and the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the U.N. and Abroad," forthcoming this fall from Simon & Schuster.

OpinionJournal - Extra

Kim Jong Il's Word

A U.N. agency yanks its cash and people from North Korea.

Monday, March 5, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

North Korean officials arrived in New York over the weekend for discussions on normalizing relations with the U.S. as part of the nuclear disarmament accord struck last month. Chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill is scheduled to meet today and tomorrow with his counterpart, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan.

May we suggest that, before he sits down, Mr. Hill take a look at the brief statement issued quietly Thursday by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). There is no better guide to Kim Jong Il's negotiating style, nor to the North Korean dictator's habit of breaking his word. Nuclear negotiators, beware.

The agency announced, in an item on its Web site, that it is suspending all operations in North Korea because the "necessary conditions set out by the Executive Board on 25 January 2007 have not been met." The UNDP's 20 or so projects will be shut down, we're told, and its eight international staffers will be pulled out of the country. The U.N. isn't known for its tough love, and no one we've talked to can recall another example of the UNDP suspending operations in a country that refused to comply with the regulations.

The "necessary conditions" were imposed at the last board meeting in response to an outcry over the UNDP's lack of oversight over its programs in North Korea. U.N. documents, produced reluctantly after prodding by the U.S. mission to the U.N., showed numerous irregularities dating back into the late 1990s. Tens of millions of dollars for programs that were supposed to help the poor appear instead to have been handed over to Kim's dictatorship.

As the March 1 deadline for compliance approached, North Korea decided to throw a tantrum to see if it could get excused from its obligations. It deemed the conditions politically motivated--especially the one that limits aid to programs that directly help the people and bans assistance that could aid the government--and demanded a renegotiation.

Never mind that North Korea sits on the Executive Board and had agreed to abide by the terms thrashed out in January. To its credit, the UNDP refused to be bullied into extending the deadline and is holding Pyongyang to its commitments. The suspension applies to all existing projects; the board had already suspended new projects until an audit could be completed and better oversight provided.

The U.N. has another deadline fast approaching in North Korea. At the end of January, Secretary General Ban Ki Moon ordered a full investigation of all U.N. programs in North Korea, to be completed within three months. Those include Unicef, the World Food Program and the U.N. Population Fund. As the end-of-April deadline for that audit comes closer, it will be instructive to watch Pyongyang's degree of cooperation.

Meanwhile, the talks on North Korea's nuclear program are moving ahead, with the U.S., South Korea and Japan all holding bilateral meetings with Pyongyang this month toward the goal of normalizing relations. At the top of Japan's agenda is the whereabouts of its citizens who were kidnapped by North Korean agents in the late 1970s and 1980s and forced to train North Korean spies. Negotiations with Pyongyang have so far yielded the return of only five abductees along with preposterous explanations for how the rest have supposedly died.

The preference in some diplomatic circles, including the U.S. State Department and perhaps now in the White House, is to dismiss the U.N. corruption in North Korea as well as the abductee and other human-rights violations as side-issues to the more vital objective of getting Kim to give up his nuclear program.

We'd argue that international focus on these issues is an essential part of keeping up the pressure on Kim's regime. But even if you buy the argument that these are ancillary issues, there's still an important lesson here: If Kim won't abide by the pledges he made regarding UNDP aid to his country, how can he be expected to keep his promises on nuclear disarmament?

Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton lays out the troubling case of changing American intelligence judgments toward North Korea in The Wall Street Journal today (article available here). His point about the need for an intrusive inspection and verification regime is especially important. Under the six-party agreement announced on February 13, North Korea has 60 days to account for all of its nuclear programs. If it doesn't, or if Kim attempts to renegotiate the terms at the last minute, we'd like to think the U.S. would show at least as much fortitude as the United Nations, and tell Kim to take a hike.

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