Japan does not expect North Korea to meet a year-end deadline to declare its nuclear programmes but wants a full accounting once it does, an official said Wednesday. The communist state was given until the end of 2007 to disable and declare all its nuclear programmes in the next stage of a six-nation aid-for-disarmament deal reached with Pyongyang earlier this year.
A senior Japanese foreign ministry official, who requested anonymity, said diplomats in Tokyo were not holding their breath. "These are peaceful days for us," he told reporters.
"The year-end date isn't significant. What's important is a perfectly accurate declaration of whether North Korea has the will to abandon its nuclear programme," he said.
North Korea, which tested an atom bomb last year, has gone ahead with disablement of its plutonium-producing Yongbyon reactor, the most visible symbol of its nuclear drive. But the declaration has proved difficult, with South Korea indicating the obstacle was over whether Pyongyang was ready to disclose a suspected uranium enrichment programme.
China, North Korea's main ally and host of the six-nation talks, said Tuesday that Pyongyang was likely to miss the year-end deadline but stressed that the "majority" of the work would be finished.
Japan has been the most critical member of the six-nation talks, sometimes putting itself at odds with the United States, its main ally. Japan has tense relations with North Korea in part due to the regime's kidnappings of Japanese civilians in the 1970s and 1980s to train its spies.
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