US to wait and see on North Korea nuke deal
(AP)
Updated: 2005-09-20 08:46

"The Bush administration was right to reverse course on North Korea and stop letting ideology get in the way of results," said Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The face-saving compromise was apparently key to winning North Korea's pledge to abandoning its nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs. North Korea had been demanding that it receive a light water reactor — the type least likely to be misused — but the United States ruled it out.

On the other side, guarantees that the North must return to international arms monitoring and meet milestones for cooperation allowed the United States and other partners to agree to a theoretical future claim to civilian nuclear energy, the senior U.S. official said.

Rice and the foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan met privately in New York on Saturday night and proposed tweaks to a compromise plan first floated by the Chinese, said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the diplomats' discussions were private.

Diplomats attend talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis at the Diaoyutai State Guest House in Beijing September 19, 2005. [Reuters]

Until that point, the current round of six-nation disarmament talks hosted by China was on the brink of failure. The talks include North Korea, South Korea, Russia, China, Japan and the United States.

In exchange for giving up weapons now, North Korea will get energy aid, economic cooperation, security assurances and a diplomatic nod from the United States.

"They have said — in principle — that they will abandon their weapons programs," Bush said at the White House. "And what we have said is, `Great. That's a wonderful step forward.' But now we've got to verify whether that happens."

The North announced in February that it had built nuclear weapons and renounced the then-stalled nuclear talks. It later called Bush "a half-baked man in terms of morality and a philistine whom we can never deal with."

As hopes for further diplomacy dwindled in May, Bush called North Korea leader Kim Jong Il a tyrant.

Although the rhetoric has softened since, the atmosphere of suspicion burbled just below the surface Monday.

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