US takes Korean nuclear line seriously

THE United States says it is taking conflicting North Korean statements on its nuclear capability very seriously despite the South’s insistence that there was no real proof its neighbour had such weapons.

“We know what they say. We have some things that can verify what they say. We don’t know everything,” visiting US Deputy Defence Secretary Wolfowitz told a news conference in South Korea’s capital, Seoul.

“Certainly what we know suggests that we should take what they’re saying very seriously,” he added.

However, South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun, at an earlier news conference, insisted there was still no hard proof the North possessed nuclear weapons, and even Seoul’s own spy agencies were not entirely sure.

“There has been no change in the official position that our intelligence agencies do not have definite, decisive proof,” Roh told reporters at the presidential Blue House. While Roh and visiting Wolfowitz assigned different weight to North Korea’s nuclear claims, a US lawmaker said Pyongyang officials told him Pyongyang was augmenting its stock of atomic arms.

Tensions have been high on the Korean peninsula for more than seven months, since the United States said the communist North had said it was pursuing a secret nuclear arms programme. North Korean state media have issued conflicting statements on the country’s nuclear status, at times accusing US officials of lying about Pyongyang’s declarations, and at other times saying the North had already reprocessed plutonium for bombs.

Highlighting other potential threats from the North, Seoul said four North Korean fishing boats crossed a disputed maritime border with South Korea yesterday, a day after the South fired warning shots to repel eight vessels.

South Korea’s prime minister said the 12 incursions since last week were probably a deliberate show of Pyongyang’s rejection of the de facto sea border west of the peninsula, where deadly naval gun battles erupted last June and in 1999.

Wolfowitz said it was hard to “understand what goes on in a country as closed as North Korea.” However, Roh told a news conference that, although the North had said several times it had nuclear weapons, no one had verified Pyongyang’s statements.

The South would never accept a nuclear-armed North, he added, but Seoul’s policy toward Pyongyang must be based on a cool assessment of the facts and not on rhetoric.

The head of a US Congressional delegation told reporters in Seoul after a visit to the North that officials there had repeated they had nuclear weapons and had reprocessed plutonium to make more. Pennsylvania Republican Curt Weldon, who led a six-member congressional team to Pyongyang, said North Korean foreign minister Paek Nam-sun and vice-foreign minister Kim Kye-gwan “admitted to having nuclear capability and weapons at this moment”: “They admitted to having just about completed the reprocessing of 8,000 rods, and they admitted to an effort to expand their nuclear production programme.”

The fuel rods had been taken out of commission under a mostly defunct 1994 agreement with the US that froze the North’s previously suspected effort to build atomic bombs.

Wolfowitz is the most senior Pentagon official to visit East Asia since the Bush administration took office in 2001. He flew to Japan after a visit to Seoul to discuss changes to an alliance under which 37,000 US troops are based in the South. He urged Seoul to raise defence spending and modernise its military forces to match changes in the US force presence.