N. Korea Agrees to Talks With Nuclear Agency

WASHINGTON —  In an important step toward stopping North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, the United States reached an agreement Monday with Pyongyang under which the regime will resume talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency about allowing outside inspections of its nuclear facilities.

After talks in Geneva, U.S. and North Korean negotiators issued a joint statement in which North Korea agreed to begin talks soon with the international agency on “outstanding safeguards and other issues” involving its nuclear installations. Until now, North Korea had been refusing to let the agency police its nuclear facilities, which the United States, Japan and South Korea believe are being used to produce the fuel needed to make nuclear weapons.

“It’s not a final resolution of the issue,” one U.S. official said. “But it goes much further than before” toward making sure there are international inspections of North Korea’s nuclear program.

In exchange, North Korea appears to have won some concessions from the United States. The statement suggests that the United States may help North Korea convert the nuclear power reactor at Yongbyon to light-water technology that cannot be used to divert fuel for weapons programs.

In addition, the United States agreed to meet with North Korea once again within the next two months, not only to talk about nuclear issues but also “to lay the basis for improving overall relations” between the two countries.

Better ties with the United States would enable impoverished North Korea to obtain aid and investment for its hard-strapped economy from other countries, such as Japan.

CIA Director R. James Woolsey has estimated that North Korea may already have enough material to produce at least one nuclear bomb.

The IAEA--the Vienna-based U.N. agency responsible for policing nuclear facilities to make sure that no materials are diverted to weapons programs--has been seeking the right to do two types of inspections in North Korea.

The first is the regular inspection of established nuclear power plants, such as the North Korean nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. The second is special, or “challenge,” inspections in which agency officials may spread throughout a country on short notice to look for evidence of nuclear weapons development.

The United States is showing “more and more give” in its negotiating position by agreeing to further talks with North Korea, said former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea James Lilley, who is now director of the Asian studies program at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

“The Americans are lowering their sights,” Lilley said. “We’re getting a situation now where North Korea is getting the continuation of bilateral talks with the United States, which is their primary objective, without meeting the condition of successful challenge inspections by the IAEA.”

The United States has no diplomatic relations with North Korea.

Lilley said that the language used in Monday’s agreement about improving overall relations was not unprecedented. In fact, he said, it is strikingly similar to the wording used when U.S. and North Korean officials met in early 1992. At that time, he said, the State Department wanted to suggest the possibility of “normalizing” relations with North Korea, but the Pentagon objected and had the wording watered down to “improving” relations.

At the center of the dispute over North Korea are two sites that the United States and its allies believe are secretly being used for storage or disposal of nuclear materials. After the international agency suggested that it would conduct special inspections of these two sites, North Korea last March not only refused to grant permission but threatened to withdraw entirely from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The language of the joint statement released Monday appeared to suggest that North Korea would be willing to talk to the agency about these special inspections. But the North Korean officials did not explicitly promise to allow the inspections.