Amid the unfruitful closure of the multilateral effort to persuade North Korea to agree to a nuclear verification process, the U.S. government announced Friday that it would stop providing fuel to the communist country.
“This is action-for-action. The North Koreans have not come through and signed onto the verification protocol, which all other parties have agreed. Therefore, those fuel shipments aren’t going forward,” State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said in daily briefing.
McCormack said the other parties agreed to the U.S. move. “I think this is the understanding of other parties and future fuel shipments aren't going to move forward absent a verification regime,” he said, adding “So that's very clear from the United States' point of view.”
The chief American nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill will continue his consultations with his South Korean counterpart, with Japanese, Russian and Chinese counterparts on the situation, the spokesman said.
Meanwhile, Kim Kye-gwan, chief nuclear negotiator for North Korea, Saturday told reporters in Beijing that if the U.S. moves to halt fuel aid, North Korea will also modify the speed of disablement of its nuclear facility.
“We don’t care whether the fuel provision gets halted or stopped. If the provision stops, we’ll modify the speed of the disablement,” Yonhap reported Saturday.