- SEOUL, South Korea -- North
Korea is "armed to the teeth" with weapons of mass destruction
and busy selling its weapons and missile technology to any state willing
to pay for it, a top U.S. official has warned.
Denouncing the North Korean leadership as "an evil regime," U.S.
Undersecretary of State John Bolton said that unless the secretive communist
state halted its weapons exports and development of weapons of mass destruction
it would risk losing what international assistance it was currently receiving.
Speaking in the South Korean capital Thursday, Bolton said North Korea
was "the world's foremost peddler of ballistic missile-related equipment,
components, materials, and technical expertise."
Among the recipients of North Korean missile exports were "notable
rogue state clients such as Syria, Libya and Iran," he told a meeting
of the Korean American Association.
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- U.S. envoy John Bolton says North Korea has stockpiled
weapons of mass destruction and is selling them to any state willing to
pay. CNN's Sohn Jie-ae reports.
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- Furthermore he said, North Korea had active programs
to develop chemical, biological and nuclear arms.
There is, he said, "little doubt" that North Korea has both an
active chemical weapons program and "one of the most robust offensive
bioweapons programs on Earth."
However, despite such tough talk he added that Washington remained open
to dialogue with Pyongyang.
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- Choice
"North Korea today faces a choice," Bolton said. "If North
Korea wants to have a brighter future, it needs to fundamentally shift
the way it operates at home and abroad."
His speech came at a delicate time for diplomacy on the Korean peninsula
with officials from North and South Korea meeting at the same time across
town in another Seoul hotel to discuss the development of economic ties.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday during a visit to Japan, Deputy U.S. Secretary
of State Richard Armitage signaled that Washington was planning to send
an envoy to Pyongyang in the near future.
"We have received a variety of messages from North Korea in recent
months and it seems to me that the general thrust is that they would welcome
a visit by assistant secretary (James) Kelly," Armitage told a news
conference.
His comments followed a brief meeting last month between U.S. Secretary
of State Colin Powell and North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun on
the sidelines of a regional security meeting in Brunei.
Their brief informal chat over coffee was the highest-level contact between
the U.S. and North Korea since a landmark visit to Pyongyang by Powell's
predecessor Madeleine Albright in October 2000.
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- Axis speech 'factually correct'
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- Bolton warned that construction of two nuclear power
reactors in the North was under threat
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- In January, U.S. President George W. Bush included North
Korea, along with Iran and Iraq, in what he called an "axis of evil"
that threatened world peace.
The move sparked a fierce reaction from North Korea, sending relations
between Pyongyang and Washington plummeting and effectively freezing dialogue
between the two sides.
Referring to that speech Bolton said the "axis" reference was
"more than a rhetorical flourish -- it was factually correct."
"First, the characteristics of the three countries' leadership are
much the same: the leaders feel only they are important, not the people.
Indeed, in North Korea, the people can starve as long as the leadership
is well fed," he said.
"Second, there is a hard connection between these regimes -- an 'axis'
along which flow dangerous weapons and dangerous technology."
Bolton said that unless North Korea began a speedy reform process it would
risk losing a key 1994 agreement with a U.S.-led consortium to build two
light-water nuclear reactors -- a project that is already well behind schedule.
The project was originally agreed with the previous Clinton administration
in return for the North agreeing to put a freeze on its own nuclear programs
and mothball reactors capable of producing weapons grade material.
However, the Bush administration has accused the North of stalling on the
verification process and says that unless Pyongyang cooperates it will
withdraw funding for the project.
For its part North Korea has rejected proposed visits by international
weapons inspectors saying there must first be "substantial progress"
in the construction of the two new reactors.
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- The <http://www.cnn.com/interactive_legal.html#AP>Associated
Press & <http://www.cnn.com/interactive_legal.html#Reuters>Reuters
contributed to this report.
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- http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/east/08/29/nkorea.us/index.html
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