IAEA Team to Visit North Korea to Discuss Nuclear Shutdown

Jun 22, 08:16 PM

Current Headlines: Text of report in English by South Korean news agency Yonhap

WASHINGTON, 22 June: The UN nuclear watchdog announced its inspectors will go into North Korea on Tuesday (26 June) to discuss shutting down of the country's nuclear facilities, reinforcing what a US envoy called Pyongyang's expressed willingness to abide by a six-nation denuclearization deal.

"Our team heading for North Korea will be leaving on Sunday (24 June), will be arriving in Pyongyang on Tuesday and hopefully then we will start the process of working with (North Korea) on the modalities of shutting down the nuclear facility at Yongbyon," Muhammad al-Baradi'i, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told reporters in Vienna on Friday (22 June).

North Korea had expelled the inspectors in late 2002 in retaliation for US accusations that it was running a secret nuclear weapons programme.

The team will be more of a working-level delegation charged with negotiating an agreement with the North on details of the monitoring and inspection activities. The agreement would have to be approved by the IAEA board of governors, after which an inspection team will go in.

US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, speaking in Seoul after a two-day visit to Pyongyang, said North Korea was prepared to close down its nuclear facilities.

"Indeed, the DPRK indicated that they are prepared, promptly, to shut down the Yongbyon facility as called for in the February agreement," he said. DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's official name.

Yongbyon is where North Korea has its reactor and reprocessing facilities that over past decades are believed to have produced fissile material used to make nuclear weapons.

The 13 February deal, signed by six governments - South and North Korea, the US, China, Russia and Japan - commits Pyongyang to shut down these installations and allow international inspectors to monitor them.

The US envoy had gone to the North to verify Pyongyang's commitment to implementing the deal, and also to show Washington's will to carry out its part. The February pact lays out phases sequencing North Korea's denuclearization steps with political and economic incentives provided by other parties.

Hill met with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-kwan and with the foreign minister while in Pyongyang.

The US State Department on Friday (22 June) said its nuclear envoy had "good meetings" with the North Korean officials and received "positive feedback."

Pyongyang officials "underscored that they are prepared and ready in concrete terms in the next several days, in coming weeks, to meet their obligations under the 13 February agreement and also to talk about moving on to the next phase," the spokesman said.

"They said they intend to meet the commitments, so we believe that they intend to," he said. "We will see if they follow through on those words."

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