North Korea has given full access to experts from the United States, Russia and China on a rare visit to the reclusive nation to examine ways to disable its nuclear weapons program, the State Department said Wednesday.
"They saw everything they had asked to see," said department spokesman Sean McCormack after the experts began surveying key nuclear facilities on Wednesday.
The US team led by Sung Kim, State Department director for Korean affairs, reported they had visited a five megawatt reactor at the Yongbyon nuclear complex and would inspect other facilities on Thursday before talks with North Korean officials, McCormack said.
The main task of the experts from the three top nuclear powers is to check on the Yongbyon complex, which Pyongyang closed down in July as part of a February multilateral agreement, and decide the most effective way of shutting down the plants permanently.
After the visit, the experts would discuss with the North Koreans "about some of their initial impressions, about what they saw, about how you might go about actually disabling the reactors," McCormack told reporters. They would then report back to the next session of six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear ambitions expected next week, which involve the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia.
McCormack stressed that any agreement on disablement of North Korea's nuclear facilities would be decided within the six-party process. After over four years of stalemate, the North agreed on February 13 under the six-party framework to declare and disable its nuclear program in return for aid, security guarantees and major diplomatic benefits. In July it shut down its only operating reactor at Yongbyon in return for 50,000 tonnes of fuel oil.
The International Atomic Energy Agency in August confirmed the shutdown, along with the closure of a nuclear fuel fabrication plant, a reprocessing plant and a separate 50-megawatt reactor, only partly built, at Yongbyon. In addition, a 200-megawatt reactor under construction at Taechon was shut. The next step is to disable the facilities by encasing them in concrete or some other method-something the experts will advise on.
The United States said North Korea agreed at a recent bilateral meeting in Geneva to declare and disable its nuclear facilities by the end of the year. The February agreement does not specifically mention any existing nuclear weapons or plutonium stockpiles held by the North, which conducted its first atomic bomb test last October.
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