A top US arms control official said on Thursday North Korea was an evil regime which had repeatedly ignored US warnings to stop proliferating weapons of mass destruction.
John Bolton, US undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, also warned that a project to build a nuclear power plant in North Korea would be further delayed because of the Stalinist state’s refusal to cooperate with nuclear inspectors.
In a speech in Seoul, Bolton denounced Pyongyang as ”an evil regime that is armed to the teeth including with weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.”
Bolton said missile exports have been North Korea’s principal source of fundraising for many years.
”North Korea also is the world’s foremost peddler of ballistic missile-related equipment, components, materials and technical expertise,” he said.
”This administration has repeatedly put the North on notice that it must get out of the business of proliferation. Nonetheless, we see few, if any, signs of change on this front,” he said.
US President Bush has branded North Korea, along with Iran and North Korea, part of an ”axis of evil” bent on spreading weapons of mass destruction around the world.
Spurred by a collapsing economy Pyongyang has made tentative steps to emerge from its isolationist shell over the past month, with its foreign minister holding brief talks with US Secretary of State Colin Powell at a regional forum in Brunei.
But the US administration has remained highly sceptical of North Korea’s motives.
Bolton warned that the nuclear reactor project in North Korea could not be completed by 2005, a deadline which has been already pushed back two years from the original target.
”The problem is that key nuclear components to power the reactors cannot and will not be delivered until the IAEA effectively accounts for North Korea’s activities — past and perhaps present,” Bolton said.
The United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have demanded that North Korea allow special inspections of its nuclear facilities.
But North Korea has refused to allow the inspections until key nuclear reactor components arrive on its soil.
Under a 1994 deal to head off a nuclear crisis, a US-led consortium agreed to build two light water nuclear reactors in North Korea by 2003. In return, the North agreed to freeze its suspected nuclear weapons program.
But the communist state is suspected of having secretly secured weapons-grade plutonium from its old nuclear reactors before the agreement.
Bolton recalled a US intelligence report saying North Korea had processed ”enough plutonium for at least one and possibly two nuclear weapons” — a claim denied by Pyongyang. – Sapa-AFP