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Nov 5, 2007 11:08 pm US/Eastern
U.S.: North Korea Begins Disabling Nuke Program
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) ―
A team of U.S. experts has begun disabling North Korea's nuclear weapons-making facilities, a U.S. official said, the first time Pyongyang has ever moved to scale back its development of atomic bombs.
U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters Monday in Washington that the disabling of the North's nuclear reactor at Yongbyon "is a positive first step in this process, and we certainly hope to see it continue."
He had no details about what specific steps the team was conducting. "This is going to be a process that is going to take some time," he said.
The North shut down Yongbyon in July and promised to disable it by year's end in exchange for energy aid and political concessions from other members of talks on its nuclear program: the U.S., China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.
The main U.S. envoy to the talks, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, has said the experts would take steps that would require the North to take at least a year for the reactor to be restarted.
On Tuesday, Japanese Foreign Minister Mashiko Komura said Japan may bear some costs for the disablement of the facilities.
Washington hopes that future talks will yield an agreement for the North to dismantle the facility entirely, and also wants the nuclear bombs Pyongyang is believed to have built to be confiscated.
The country conducted its first-ever nuclear test detonation in October 2006 — the culmination of decades of efforts to build the world's deadliest weapons — and is believed to have enough weapons-grade plutonium to make about a dozen bombs.
Sung Kim, the top State Department expert on the Koreas and head of the U.S. team, was due in Seoul later Tuesday to take part in meeting of U.S. and South Korean defense ministers the following day, the U.S. Embassy in Seoul said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was arriving in Seoul from China for the previously planned discussions on the U.S.-South Korea alliance.
Some 29,000 U.S. troops remain deployed in the South as a legacy of the Korean War, which ended in a 1953 cease-fire that has never been replaced by a peace treaty.
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