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With six-party nuclear talks stalled over the delayed remittance of North Korea¡¯s US$25 million from a Macau bank, there are increasing calls for the U.S. to forge diplomatic ties with the Stalinist country regardless of its nuclear arsenal. The president of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, George Schwab, made the argument in an interview with Radio Free Asia recently. He said that it would be better to accept North Korea with a couple of nuclear weapons than letting it develop more while the multilateral disarmament talks drag on for another two or three years. In other words, Washington should normalize ties with Pyongyang now provided the North agrees to make no more nuclear weapons.
The South Korean government has ruled this out, but it was an official reaction. It is at least noteworthy in the context that a government official said that North Korea¡¯s recently tested nuclear weapon was less than 1/20 the strength of the U.S. atomic bombs that fell on Nagasaki in 1945.
There are several signs that North Korea is attempting to normalize its ties with the U.S. while maintaining its status as a nuclear power.
Park Han-sik, an associate professor of political science at the University of Georgia, said after a recent visit to the North that Pyongyang aims to do just that. North Korea's chief nuclear negotiator Kim Kye-gwan is said to have sounded out his U.S. counterpart Christopher Hill to that effect on March 5, asking the U.S. to treat North Korea ¡°the way you treat India.¡±
Prof. Lee Geun at the Graduate School of International Studies of Seoul National University said that option should only be considered if North Korea wholly opens and reform its society and agrees on a concrete roadmap for the scrapping of its nuclear weapons. A researcher with a state-run think tank here said the U.S. could tolerate a nuclear-armed North Korea if there is a guarantee that it will not export weapons or technology. ¡°In that case, South Korea is going to have to come up with some way of dealing with that serious threat on its own,¡± he added.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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