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NKorea set to abandon nuke ambitions, Seoul says
SEOUL
Petroleumworld.com 10 31 07North Korea will take the first step towards completely abandoning its nuclear ambitions when work starts soon to disable its atomic plants, South Korea's foreign minister said Wednesday.
"This is the first step for the North's nuclear abandonment," Song Min-Soon told journalists, a day before the scheduled arrival in the North of a US disablement team.
"Once the disablement is completed, it would take North Korea a considerable period of time to restart the facilities."
Song said the team would engage in disablement procedures in some 10 sectors
including a five-megawatt reactor, nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities and a fuel fabrication plant at the Yongbyon complex.
The reactor's fuel rods produced the raw material for bomb-making plutonium. The communist North staged its first atomic weapons test in October 2006 but later agreed to disable the plants in return for energy aid and major diplomatic incentives.
Song compared the disablement, due to be completed by year-end, to the first stages in scrapping a car.
"When you send a car to a junkyard, you have to stop the car first, shut off its engine and then remove dangerous materials before dismantling it," he said.
"Likewise, when the nuclear facilities are being disabled, it means we are already in a process to abandon them."
The Yongbyon plants have already been shut down. Disablement aims to ensure they cannot be restarted without extensive work.
Song said North Korea and its five negotiating partners -- South Korea, the US, China, Japan and Russia -- would meet this year to discuss next steps.
If Pyongyang goes on to dismantle the plants, and hands over its plutonium stockpile and any nuclear weapons, it can expect normalised relations with the United States and Japan, a lifting of sanctions and a pact formally ending the 1950-1953 Korean War.
US nuclear envoy Christopher Hill was due to meet his North Korean counterpart in Beijing Wednesday for final discussions before disablement begins.
He said the two sides were broadly in agreement on the process.
Story from AFP 31 0431 GMT 10 07
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