The Korea Times
amn_close.png
amn_bl.png
National
  • Politics
  • Foreign Affairs
  • Multicultural Community
  • Defense
  • Environment & Animals
  • Law & Crime
  • Society
  • Health & Science
amn_bl.png
Business
  • Tech
  • Bio
  • Companies
  • World Expo 2030
amn_bl.png
Finance
  • Companies
  • Economy
  • Markets
  • Cryptocurrency
amn_bl.png
Opinion
  • Editorial
  • Columns
  • Thoughts of the Times
  • Cartoon
  • Today in History
  • Blogs
  • Tribune Service
  • Blondie & Garfield
  • Letter to the Editor
amn_bl.png
Lifestyle
  • Travel & Food
  • Trends
  • People & Events
  • Books
  • Around Town
  • Fortune Telling
amn_bl.png
Entertainment & Arts
  • K-pop
  • Films
  • Shows & Dramas
  • Music
  • Theater & Others
amn_bl.png
Sports
  • Hangzhou Asian Games
amn_bl.png
World
  • SCMP
  • Asia
amn_bl.png
Video
  • Korean Storytellers
  • POPKORN
  • Culture
  • People
  • News
amn_bl.png
Photos
  • Photo News
  • Darkroom
amn_NK.png amn_DR.png amn_LK.png amn_LE.png
  • bt_fb_on_2022.svgbt_fb_over_2022.svg
  • bt_X_on_2023.svgbt_X_over_2023.svg
  • bt_youtube_on_2022.svgbt_youtube_over_2022.svg
  • bt_instagram_on_2022.svgbt_instagram_over_2022.svg
The Korea Times
amn_close.png
amn_bl.png
National
  • Politics
  • Foreign Affairs
  • Multicultural Community
  • Defense
  • Environment & Animals
  • Law & Crime
  • Society
  • Health & Science
amn_bl.png
Business
  • Tech
  • Bio
  • Companies
  • World Expo 2030
amn_bl.png
Finance
  • Companies
  • Economy
  • Markets
  • Cryptocurrency
amn_bl.png
Opinion
  • Editorial
  • Columns
  • Thoughts of the Times
  • Cartoon
  • Today in History
  • Blogs
  • Tribune Service
  • Blondie & Garfield
  • Letter to the Editor
amn_bl.png
Lifestyle
  • Travel & Food
  • Trends
  • People & Events
  • Books
  • Around Town
  • Fortune Telling
amn_bl.png
Entertainment & Arts
  • K-pop
  • Films
  • Shows & Dramas
  • Music
  • Theater & Others
amn_bl.png
Sports
  • Hangzhou Asian Games
amn_bl.png
World
  • SCMP
  • Asia
amn_bl.png
Video
  • Korean Storytellers
  • POPKORN
  • Culture
  • People
  • News
amn_bl.png
Photos
  • Photo News
  • Darkroom
amn_NK.png amn_DR.png amn_LK.png amn_LE.png
  • bt_fb_on_2022.svgbt_fb_over_2022.svg
  • bt_X_on_2023.svgbt_X_over_2023.svg
  • bt_youtube_on_2022.svgbt_youtube_over_2022.svg
  • bt_instagram_on_2022.svgbt_instagram_over_2022.svg
  • Login
  • Register
  • Login
  • Register
  • The Korea Times
  • search
  • all menu
  • Login
  • Subscribe
  • Photos
  • Video
  • World
  • Sports
  • Opinion
  • Entertainment & Art
  • Lifestyle
  • Finance
  • Business
  • National
  • North Korea
  • 1

    Hotels grapple with chronic staff shortages

  • 3

    INTERVIEWMeet the man behind giant rubber ducks that once took over Seoul

  • 5

    Photo of Samsung chief's playful pose goes viral

  • 7

    Korea to expand visa benefits to accelerate inbound tourism

  • 9

    K-dramas, beauty, food to maintain popularity on TikTok in 2024

  • 11

    'Soundtrack #2' tells classic yet realistic love story

  • 13

    NYT picks President Yoon, NewJeans among 71 'most stylish' people of 2023

  • 15

    Pro-Palestine protests in Seoul concern Israeli ambassador

  • 17

    Samsung to unveil AI-powered lifestyle vision at CES 2024

  • 19

    LGES, KAIST enable EVs to go 900 km on single charge

  • 2

    'Moon gov't neglected, concealed North's killing of S. Korean official'

  • 4

    Giant panda statue at Everland

  • 6

    Padres' Kim Ha-seong files blackmail complaint against Korean player

  • 8

    CJ Olive Young fined 1.89 bil. won for unfair supply contracts

  • 10

    SK reshuffles top management focusing on generational shift

  • 12

    Major hospitals struggle to recruit pediatricians

  • 14

    INTERVIEW'Now is time for Koreans to unlock potential in Africa'

  • 16

    Lawyer of Korean descent selected as chair of Dentons Global Board

  • 18

    China's Xi warns top EU officials not to engage in 'confrontation'

  • 20

    Yoon vows to expand support for arms industry

Close scrollclosebutton

Close for 24 hours

Open
  • The Korea Times
  • search
  • all menu
  • Login
  • Subscribe
  • Photos
  • Video
  • World
  • Sports
  • Opinion
  • Entertainment & Art
  • Lifestyle
  • Finance
  • Business
  • National
  • North Korea
Opinion
  • Yun Byung-se
  • Kim Won-soo
  • Ahn Ho-young
  • Kim Sang-woo
  • Lee Kyung-hwa
  • Mitch Shin
  • Peter S. Kim
  • Daniel Shin
  • Jeon Su-mi
  • Jang Daul
  • Song Kyung-jin
  • Park Jung-won
  • Cho Hee-kyoung
  • Park Chong-hoon
  • Kim Sung-woo
  • Donald Kirk
  • John Burton
  • Robert D. Atkinson
  • Mark Peterson
  • Eugene Lee
  • Rushan Ziatdinov
  • Lee Jong-eun
  • Chyung Eun-ju and Joel Cho
  • Bernhard J. Seliger
  • Imran Khalid
  • Troy Stangarone
  • Jason Lim
  • Casey Lartigue, Jr.
  • Bernard Rowan
  • Steven L. Shields
  • Deauwand Myers
  • John J. Metzler
  • Andrew Hammond
  • Sandip Kumar Mishra
Sat, December 9, 2023 | 04:17
Tong Kim
Off the Record on HEU
Posted : 2007-04-08 15:25
Updated : 2007-04-08 15:25
Print PreviewPrint Preview
Font Size UpFont Size Up
Font Size DownFont Size Down
  • facebook
  • twitter
  • kakaolink
  • whatsapp
  • reddit
  • mailto
  • link
By Tong Kim
As wire stories are reporting that a solution has been suggested for the transfer of frozen funds in a Macau bank to North Korea, public attention is being refocused on whether North Korea will fulfill its commitment to shutdown its nuclear facilities by April 14 in compliance with the February 13 agreement of the six party talks.

Technically it should still be possible. A shut down means turning the switch off with appropriate safety measures. North Korean engineers at Yongbyun know how to do it for they did it before under the Agreed Framework. Sealing can be done in a matter of hours after the shut down. IAEA inspectors can be brought in a couple of days.

North Koreans must realize that if it further delays carrying out its commitments, the nuclear negotiation will lose its momentum and it will likely turn off the other parties in the talks.

As the crucial phase of “disablement” in the February 13 agreement ? during which the DPRK is also obliged to provide “a complete declaration of all nuclear programs” ? will come next, the highly enriched uranium (HEU) issue remains an unavoidable subject that must be addressed satisfactorily for the nuclear dismantlement talks to move forward.

Skeptics of U.S. policy have raised questions with respect to the authenticity of U.S. information on the DPRK’s uranium enrichment program, and others are still questioning whether the DPRK had actually acknowledged the existence of its HEU program at the October 4, 2002 meeting in Pyongyang between former assistant secretary of state James Kelly and DPRK first vice foreign minister Kang Suk Ju, during which I served as the interpreter for the U.S. delegation.

In response to inquires from several news organizations, I have said that I believed then and still believe that the United States had irrefutable evidence to support the charges Mr. Kelly made concerning North Korea’s pursuit of a covert HEU program to develop nuclear weapons. I also said that after listening to Kang’s response at that meeting the U.S. delegation, including myself and two other members on the U.S. team who listened to Kang both in Korean and English interpretation provided by the North Korean side, concluded that Kang had acknowledged the U.S. charges laid out against the DPRK.

My conclusion was not based on a single particular phrase or sentence but on the totality of Kang’s statements, -- including several revealing sentences of a blunt language and unreserved expressions, and their nuances, which all helped convince me of the foundation of his acknowledgment.

To the best of my recollection, Mr. Kelly did not use the term HEU per se, but his description obviously referred to an HEU program since he said the DPRK was pursuing the uranium enrichment program to develop nuclear weapons. Contrary to initial press reports shortly after the meeting, the U.S. delegation had not “presented evidence to compel Kang to admit the program.” What the DPRK was told was the United States had clear and compelling information regarding Pyongyang’s uranium enrichment program. However, there was no discussion of the status of the HEU program.

The DPRK officially denied its acknowledgement first through its foreign ministry statement broadcast over KCNA (Korean Central News Agency) on October 25, 2002, 21 days after the Kelly-Kang meeting and 10 days after Kang’s acknowledgement was reported in the press. The KCNA’s English version stated, “the DPRK made it very clear to the special envoy of the U.S. president that the DPRK was entitled to possess not only nuclear weapons but any type of weapons more powerful than that…” But its Korean said, “The DPRK was bound to have something more powerful than that.”

“That” in both English and Korean versions referred to the DPRK’s uranium enrichment program, which was the main topic for Kelly’s meeting with Kang. The United States was convinced that the DPRK was pursuing such a program.

The second official denial by the North came during the first round of six party talks in August 2003, when the head of the DPRK delegation, vice foreign minister Kim Young Il, said what Kang said to Kelly was “we are bound to have something more (powerful) than what is produced by way of uranium enrichment.”

The third denial was made by another foreign ministry statement of October 18, 2003, which said “In order to protect our sovereignty from the increasing U.S. threat to crush us to death with nuclear weapons, we merely told him (Kelly) that “we were bound to have something more powerful than nuclear weapons.”

Pyongyang has since consistently denied its initial acknowledgement by the logic that vice minister Kang did not exactly say, “We have an HEU nuclear weapons program.” But I am still convinced, judging from the totality of all relevant factors including a swift shift in position and attitude from the day before, that the DPRK had decided to let the U.S. delegation know that the DPRK had such a program and there would be more to come for the United States to deal with.

In my view, Pyongyang made a big blunder in October 2002 by acknowledging its uranium enrichment program in the mistaken belief that such acknowledgement would induce the United States to negotiations to resolve a newly emerged HEU program as well as other issues of concern to the United States. Pyongyang was wrong if it had thought it could use the HEU program as leverage.

On the other hand it is also possible that the DPRK, out of desperation having lost all of its hope for improving relations with the United States for security and economic benefits, conscious of the fact that it was designated as part of an axis of evil that could be “a target for preemptive U.S. attack, may have decided to prepare itself for the worst case scenario?and to confront and fight U.S. hostility up front. If this was the case, Pyongyang was giving up any chance of engagement.

It appeared true that the administration’s policy toward the North hardened because of Pyongyang’s HEU program, but the hardening of policy had probably been set in motion irrespective and in advance of Kang’s admission. I remember that James Kelly, while serving as the top point man on North Korea, told a public audience that what the United States knew about the DPRK’s HEU program was more important than who said what at that meeting.

The DPRK’s astonishing reaction to the U.S. charges at the time may also be seen in terms of the high expectation it had of the long waited visit of the American presidential envoy to Pyongyang, a year and a half after the inauguration of the first Bush administration and several months after the administration’s announced decision to reengage the DPRK, subsequent to the completion of a year-long North Korea policy review. Although Pyongyang had been getting mixed signals from Washington, it had not at all anticipated Washington to bring up the HEU issue.

Even if Kang Suk Ju had denied North Korea’s HEU program, I doubt the ensuing course of U.S. policy would have been different, given the administration’s revulsion to the North Korean regime and the threatening security environment in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which raised scary concerns about any possibility of transferring weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists.

There are some critics of U.S. policy who are eager to accuse the Bush administration of having fabricated unfounded HEU information to use it as a pretext to refuse engaging the DPRK and who are inclined to interpret vice minister Kang’s acknowledgement as the justification for a turning point in Washington’s North Korean policy. I strongly and totally reject these radical notions. Nothing would be further from the truth.

The recent discussion by U.S. officials indicating that Washington does not know the scope or stage of development of North Korea’s uranium enrichment program is irrelevant to the validity of Jim Kelly’s exposition of 2002. He did not say the DPRK was producing HEU, but that it was pursuing an enrichment program to make nuclear weapons.

If Washington had overplayed the HEU program, it would be “a self-inflicted sticking point for the United States” -- as I said in one interview ? because this question must be answered clearly by the second phase of the 2/13 implementation agreement. In the same context, the DPRK has an obligation as a minimum to explain what it has done with the HEU related equipment and material that the United States knows it has purchased. What’s your take?

Tong Kim is former senior interpreter at the U.S. State Department and now a research professor at Korea University and a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

 
wooribank
LG group
Top 10 Stories
1Korea to expand visa benefits to accelerate inbound tourism Korea to expand visa benefits to accelerate inbound tourism
2Seoul-Moscow ties likely stuck in limbo amid blame game Seoul-Moscow ties likely stuck in limbo amid blame game
3Will Korea avoid hard landing in housing market? Will Korea avoid hard landing in housing market?
4Why Korean shoppers flock to Chinese e-commerce sitesWhy Korean shoppers flock to Chinese e-commerce sites
5[INTERVIEW] Ex-NIS chief urges politicians to stop misusing spy agency INTERVIEWEx-NIS chief urges politicians to stop misusing spy agency
6Seoul awards honorary citizenship to outstanding foreign residentsSeoul awards honorary citizenship to outstanding foreign residents
7‘12.12: The Day’ goes strong at box office, attracts younger generation‘12.12: The Day’ goes strong at box office, attracts younger generation
8K-pop's appeal reflected in global accolades K-pop's appeal reflected in global accolades
9Hyundai Motor hires former US Ambassador to Korea Sung Kim as adviser Hyundai Motor hires former US Ambassador to Korea Sung Kim as adviser
10Hanwha signs $2.4 bil. deal to export infantry fighting vehicles to Australia Hanwha signs $2.4 bil. deal to export infantry fighting vehicles to Australia
Top 5 Entertainment News
1‘12.12: The Day’ goes strong at box office, attracts younger generation‘12.12: The Day’ goes strong at box office, attracts younger generation
2[REVIEW] Musical 'Monte Cristo' returns with riveting tale of vengeance, love REVIEWMusical 'Monte Cristo' returns with riveting tale of vengeance, love
3K-pop's appeal reflected in global accolades K-pop's appeal reflected in global accolades
4[INTERVIEW] Meet the man behind giant rubber ducks that once took over Seoul INTERVIEWMeet the man behind giant rubber ducks that once took over Seoul
5'Soundtrack #2' tells classic yet realistic love story 'Soundtrack #2' tells classic yet realistic love story
DARKROOM
  • It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

    It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

  • 2023 Thanksgiving parade in NYC

    2023 Thanksgiving parade in NYC

  • Appreciation of autumn colors

    Appreciation of autumn colors

  • Our children deserve better

    Our children deserve better

  • Israel-Gaza conflict erupts into war

    Israel-Gaza conflict erupts into war

  • Turkey-Syria earthquake

    Turkey-Syria earthquake

  • Nepal plane crash

    Nepal plane crash

  • Brazil capital uprising

    Brazil capital uprising

  • Happy New Year 2023

    Happy New Year 2023

  • World Cup 2022 Final - Argentina vs France

    World Cup 2022 Final - Argentina vs France

CEO & Publisher: Oh Young-jin
Digital News Email: webmaster@koreatimes.co.kr
Tel: 02-724-2114
Online newspaper registration No: 서울,아52844
Date of registration: 2020.02.05
Masthead: The Korea Times
Copyright © koreatimes.co.kr. All rights reserved.
  • About Us
  • Introduction
  • History
  • Contact Us
  • Products & Services
  • Subscribe
  • E-paper
  • RSS Service
  • Content Sales
  • Site Map
  • Policy
  • Code of Ethics
  • Ombudsman
  • Privacy Statement
  • Terms of Service
  • Copyright Policy
  • Family Site
  • Hankook Ilbo
  • Dongwha Group