North Korea is "making progress" in resolving allegations that it had been pursuing a covert programme to produce highly-enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, US envoy Christopher Hill said here on Wednesday. "I say that we've made some progress," Hill told reporters after a brief half-hour meeting with the head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, here.
"We've by no means resolved the issue up until now, but we're continuing to work with them," Hill said. Hill, the US under-secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs and the chief US nuclear negotiator with North Korea, was responding to a Washington Post report that Pyongyang was seeking to prove that US accusations about the uranium-enrichment programme were wrong. US intelligence first concluded in July 2002 that North Korea had embarked on a large-scale programme to produce highly-enriched uranium for use in weapons.
If Pyongyang could show it never intended to produce highly-enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, it would seriously undermine the US intelligence community's credibility, already undercut by mistaken claims that Iraq was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
Comments
Comments are closed.