Mick Hartley

Well this is an interesting update on the supposed breakthrough last month in the six-party talks on North Korea, when the North Koreans were promised 50,000 metric tons of fuel aid in exchange for agreeing to shut down their nuclear operations:

Here’s a new twist on the ever more tangled negotiations intended to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions: The nuclear plant Pyongyang is supposed to shut down in return for oil and other concessions is barely in operation and the North Koreans want to get rid of it.

Informants who have been in North Korea or have access to intelligence reports say the walls of the plant are crumbling, machinery is rusting, and maintenance of the electric power plant, roads, and warehouses that sustain the plant has been neglected. North Korea’s impoverished economy just cannot support that operation.

Moreover, its technology is fifty years old and obsolete. It was acquired, possibly by Russians spies, by the Soviet Union from the British in the 1950’s, then passed to North Korea in the 1980’s. The North Koreans are anxious to replace it with something more modern and are expected to demand that later.

In the Six-Party Talks in Beijing on February 13, North Korea agreed with the United States, China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea to “shut down and seal” in 60 days their nuclear facility at Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang. In return, they would get “energy assistance equivalent to 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil.”

In short, North Korea bargained away a limping nuclear plant as if it were a valuable property…

To further complicate things, the North Koreans have upped their demands beyond what they agreed to in February. An influential Chinese scholar, Zhang Liangui of the Communist Party School’s International Strategic Research Institute, was quoted in a Shanghai newspaper last week as saying North Korea “is gradually asking for higher prices.”

Using North Korea’s formal name, Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, or DPRK, he said the North Korean demand that they have in hand the $25 million previously frozen in a Macao bank before they would shut down the Yongbyon facility “is only a symptom of a trend.”

As if on cue, the next day a North Korean newspaper published in Tokyo asserted: “The stark reality is that even after the ’13 February’ agreement, the DRPK and the United States are still in hostile relations.” The DPRK, the Choson Sinbo continued, “has consistently maintained its position that the United States should physically prove that it has changed its hostile policy.”

Experienced Korea hands explained that meant withdrawing American military forces from South Korea and Japan, abrogating the US security treaties with Japan and South Korea, negotiating a peace treaty to replace the truce that ended the Korean War of 1950-53, ending all financial sanctions on North Korea, and establishing full fledged diplomatic relations.

None of which, it has to be said, should be much of a surprise. Not that the talks were actually making progress anyway.