5 June 2001
North Korea Threatens to Pull Out of Missile Pacts
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

BEIJING, June 4 - Citing their deep displeasure with Washington, officials from North Korea have threatened to pull out of two agreements under which that isolated nation had promised to halt missile testing and to stop building nuclear reactors that could be used to produce weapons, an American academic said today.

In a meeting in Pyongyang, Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun told the scholar that the United States had made hostile and offensive statements about North Korea, the American said as he returned from a visit there. Mr. Paek complained to the visitor that the administration was backing away from commitments made by President Clinton.

Last month, a delegation from the European Union said the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, had told them that he would unilaterally extend his country's moratorium on missile testing and production until 2003 as a good will gesture. But the foreign minister appeared to cast doubt on that.

"It has yet to be decided whether we maintain the moratorium on missile testing," Selig Harrison, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has studied North Korea, related that Mr. Paek had told him. "That depends entirely on the policy of the new U.S. administration, whether it is hostile
or not."

Since he took office in January, Mr. Bush has signaled that he intends to be tough with North Korea, rejecting the policy of cautious engagement that had characterized Mr. Clinton's last year in office.

Administration officials have been openly skeptical about South Korea's "sunshine policy" of engagement with the North. The officials have also pushed for immediate and aggressive inspections of North Korean nuclear sites, actions that North Korea has said it will not allow.

Mr. Harrison said four high North Korean officials had each told him that such policies could threaten the two loose accords that now form the foundation for relations between North Korea and the United States.

Under the first, the Agreed Framework, signed in 1994, North Korea said it would stop producing weapons-grade plutonium, closing its lone operating reactor and shelving plans for two others in exchange for a promise to help meet energy needs. The plan called for the United States, Japan and South Korea to build two light-water reactors in North Korea by 2003.

North Korean nuclear reactors produced plutonium that could readily be processed for use in nuclear weapons. The light-water reactors do not.

The second agreement, when Mr. Kim agreed in 1999 to a temporary moratorium on missile testing in exchange for relaxed American economic sanctions, was negotiated by former Defense Secretary William J. Perry. In late 1998, North Korea alarmed the world by sending a long- range unarmed missile toward Japan.

Both agreements seem in jeopardy, said Mr. Harrison, whose book ``Korean Endgame'' will be published this year. After a five-day visit to North Korea last week, his seventh, Mr. Harrison said that Washington's hard-line attitude seemed to have strengthened the hand of conservatives in Pyongyang.

``I don't believe anyone has decided that we need nuclear weapons at this stage, but everybody is thinking in that direction in light of the hostile policy of the Bush administration,'' Mr. Harrison said he was told by a top military official, Col. Gen. Ri Chan Bok.

The basic goal of the 1994 pact was to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons by giving it a relatively safe reactor. But construction on the two light-water reactors, originally to be completed in 2003, is years behind schedule. Western officials now predict that the first one will not operate until at least 2007.

The leader of the consortium that is supplying the reactors, Charles Kartman, said today on a visit to Seoul that the first reactor would be delivered in 2008.

North Korea, whose infrastructure is largely in ruins, is desperately short of power. Mr. Harrison said officials saw Washington's insistence on earlier - and more aggressive - inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a new precondition for building the reactors that would
result in further delays.

``If the Bush administration is reluctant to provide the electricity it owes us, this would mean it is breaking the Agreed Framework,'' Mr. Paek was quoted as saying. ``We would be driven to go our own way and to go back to our original plan of building our own reactors.''