Sen. Clinton Says US Should Not Walk Away From NK Deal

WASHINGTON _ Sen. Hillary Clinton, a leading Democrat presidential hopeful, urged the U.S. administration Sunday to be tough on North Korea, but to never walk away from negotiations.

The latest suspicions of a North Korea-Syria nuclear connection prove the international community's need for transparency and strong oversight of the Pyongyang regime, she said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"We've got to keep them under very close watch," she said.

But walking away from negotiations would give North Korea an "open door," Clinton said.

Pyongyang's nuclear proliferation, a major U.S. concern, has surfaced in a hazy but growing mystery following a Sept. 6 Israeli air incursion into Syria. According to sources quoted in press reports, Israeli officials claim the attacked facility was an atomic installation that North Korea was helping to equip.

Pyongyang has long been suspected of selling its missile parts and technology to the Middle East, including Iran and Syria, but this is the first time that a possible nuclear cooperation has been mentioned.

As U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began talks with her Chinese counterpart at the United Nations on Sunday, she said there are "still a lot of questions" that remain unanswered about North Korea's nuclear activities.

"We want to be able to answer questions about all aspects of the North Korean nuclear program," she said.

As allegations escalate, the six-party talks, attended by the two Koreas, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan, are set to open in Beijing this week with the aim of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton signed an agreement with North Korea in 1994 suspending Pyongyang's nuclear activities with a promise of a set of light water reactors to be built and financed by an international consortium. That deal collapsed with U.S. accusations in 2002 that the North was running a secret atomic weapons program in breach of the agreement.

Sen. Clinton argued that by walking away after the 2002 confrontation, the U.S. gave North Korea "a tremendous gift." "They then started reprocessing plutonium and testing nuclear weapons," she said.

The effective way to deal with Pyongyang is to rein it in, said Clinton "We've got to have ... a presence in North Korea, watching, evaluating, testing what they are doing, trying to prevent shipments if they are still in the business of exporting nuclear know-how or missiles of any other kind of weapon of mass destruction capacity," "So for me, yes, drive a harder bargain, but don't walk away from the table" to give them an open door, she said.

(Yonhap)