SEOUL/BEIJING, 11 February 2004 — A Pakistani scientist’s confession that he sold nuclear weapons technology to North Korea was a lie cooked up by the United States to justify an invasion, the communist North said yesterday.
The father of Pakistan’s nuclear arms program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, said last week he had sold nuclear secrets to Libya and two countries President George W. Bush has labeled part of an “axis of evil”, North Korea and Iran.
After confessing on television to black-market nuclear-technology dealings and absolving Pakistan’s military and government of blame, Khan was pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf in an apparent attempt to end the controversy.
Khan’s confession came three weeks before North Korea was scheduled to join the United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea for a second round of talks to try to end the North’s nuclear weapons programs.
In the North’s first reaction, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said the US had fabricated Khan’s story to derail the nuclear talks and lay the groundwork for an Iraq-style invasion.
“The United States is now hyping the story about the transfer of nuclear technology to the DPRK by a Pakistani scientist in a bid to make the DPRK’s enriched uranium program sound plausible,” said the spokesman in a statement published by Pyongyang’s official KCNA news agency.
“This is nothing but a mean and groundless propaganda,” the spokesman said, adding Khan’s disclosures were such a “sheer lie that the DPRK does not bat an eyelid even a bit”.
North Korea - its official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) - has long denied it has been pursuing an atomic weapons program using highly enriched uranium (HEU), as the US has alleged.
US officials said the North Koreans had said in October 2002 it had such a program when confronted with evidence.
The confrontation led to North Korea withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and taking plutonium rods out of storage, reactivating a plutonium-based program that was frozen under a North Korea-US pact in 1994.
“This is aimed to scour the interior of the DPRK on the basis of a legitimate mandate and attack it just as what it did in Iraq in the end and invent a pretext to escape isolation and scuttle the projected six-way talks,” KCNA said of the Khan disclosures.
The Korea Herald newspaper said Khan’s confessions added to reports the Pakistani scientist had visited North Korea 12 times. The confessions gave the US negotiating team “new ammunition to confront the North Koreans”, the daily said.
Hwang Jong-yop, North Korea’s highest-ranking defector, told the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper in Japan last week that a North Korean official in charge of the country’s military industry visited Pakistan in 1996 and reached an agreement to obtain uranium for weapons.
South Korean analysts say North Korea suffered a big setback from Khan’s disclosures. Some predicted continued denials by the North might ruin prospects for the Beijing talks. “If negotiations start getting into the HEU program, the situation gets tremendously complicated,” said Koh Yu-hwan, a professor of North Korea studies at Dongguk University.
“It is a program that North Korea cannot admit to, and the United States, for its part, cannot overlook it,” he said.
A Chinese government spokeswoman said yesterday the Korean nuclear crisis cannot be defused after just a few rounds of talks, and countries taking part should have reasonable and realistic expectations. The talks, in Beijing from Feb. 25, will follow an initial round that ended inconclusively in August.
“The North Korea nuclear issue is a very complicated issue,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue told a news conference. “It cannot be resolved in one to two, or two to three meetings.”
China, the largest provider of food and oil to North Korea, has worked hard to bring it to the negotiating table.
Beijing has said it hopes the new talks could “achieve substantial results”. But Japan and Russia have said they expected no breakthrough.
North Korea has stuck to its demand for compensation from the United States in return for freezing its nuclear arms program, rebuffing South Korean calls that it work for a compromise.
“Everybody should have relatively reasonable or realistic expectations of the second round of six-party talks,” Zhang said.
The six-party talks were a “good mechanism” and countries taking part should cooperate, show the utmost flexibility and address each other’s concerns, she said.
