Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 23, 1994 TAG: 9406280017
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: From Cox News Service and Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
In exchange for the freeze, Clinton agreed to drop, for now, efforts to impose economic sanctions on Pyongyang and to resume high-level diplomatic talks between U.S. and North Korean officials early next month in Geneva.
Those talks, through which North Korea seeks to craft a new relationship with the United States and the rest of the world, had been suspended after North Korea's refusal to allow full inspections of its alleged nuclear weapons program.
Wednesday, however, North Korea promised Clinton that it would freeze its nuclear program and allow international inspectors to remain in North Korea to monitor that freeze, in exchange for a resumption of the high-level talks.
Clinton said North Korea had agreed to all three conditions set by the United States: it must not reprocess spent plutonium removed recently from an experimental reactor, must not refuel the reactor, and must permit international inspectors to maintain safeguards against nuclear proliferation.
Clinton said the North Koreans' definition of a nuclear freeze ``was the same as ours.
``We welcome this very positive development,'' he said, vowing that the next round of talks between U.S. and North Korean diplomats would encompass ``the full range of security, political and economic issues'' dividing Pyongyang and Washington.
North Korea has viewed the talks as a route toward full diplomatic and economic relations.
Wednesday's agreement left unsettled key questions surrounding North Korea's nuclear program, which Pyongyang insists is for civilian purposes, but appeared to break a months-long impasse that had been driving the two countries toward the brink of war.
``This does not solve the problem,'' Clinton said in a press conference, ``but it certainly gives us the basis for seeking a solution.''
Clinton praised Carter and telephoned him to thank the former president for his role as a catalyst to Wednesday's agreement. Carter, who was president from 1977 until 1981, visited North Korean President Kim Il Sung last week in Pyongyang.
In a second result of Carter's personal diplomacy, North Korea agreed Wednesday to meet with South Korean officials next week in talks to set up the first-ever presidential summit between the archenemies, in a move that could further defuse tensions on the Korean peninsula.
The preparatory talks are to be held along the heavily militarized border separating Korea into North and South and could mark the beginning of a larger reconciliation between the two countries.
Korea was divided into communist North and capitalist South at the end of World War II. In 1950, the North invaded the South, starting a war that lasted three years and has not formally ended.
Senate GOP leader Bob Dole criticized the White House for its embrace of the Pyongyang declaration of a freeze, ``with no evidence that North Korean words mean any more today than they have for four decades.''
In the past, North Korea has played a cat-and-mouse game with the International Atomic Energy Agency, admitting inspectors but refusing to let them conduct a comprehensive search. Specifically, fuel rods removed from an experimental reactor were kept from the inspectors, and they also were denied access to waste sites.
The inspectors were trying to determine if plutonium was diverted to nuclear use before 1989. Some analysts are convinced North Korea has at least one atomic bomb and may be playing for time in order to build an arsenal of a half-dozen by the end of the year.
by CNB