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North Korea has agreed to allow a U.S. delegation and top nuclear scientists to visit the nuclear complex at Yongbyon before the next round of six-way talks, the American daily USA Today reported Friday.
The delegation is scheduled to visit the North from Jan. 6 to 10, they said. Included in the delegation is Sig Hecker, who was a director from 1985 to 1997 of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which produced the first U.S. nuclear bomb.
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The area of Yongbyon, North Korea, where a nuclear reactor is suspected to have resumed operations, in breach of the Geneva agreement.
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The delegation would be the first outsiders to see the site since North Korea expelled UN weapons inspectors a year ago. U.S. President George W. Bush blocked a congressional delegation's visit to North Korea in October, but has approved this trip, USA Today reported.
Besides Hecker, the delegation includes a China expert from Stanford University, two Senate foreign policy aides who have previously visited Pyongyang and a former State Department official who has negotiated with North Korea.
The Kim Jong Il regime may want to prove that it has nuclear weapons as a way of bolstering its negotiating stance, USA Today said.
An official of the South Korean government, however, said that it would be the second such U.S. delegation to visit North Korea since August last year. Although the delegation is to visit the nuclear complex in Yongbyon, it might be meaningless, since it will not include officials from the Bush Administration, South Korean official said.
Further on, the official from the South Korean government said that this visit might seem to be a positive sign from North Korea just before the six-way talks, but the official said that the visit would not include any inspection nor negotiation by the U.S. delegation.
(Yoon Hee-young, hyyoon@chosun.com )
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