Experts call for negotiations with N. Korea

WASHINGTON -- The United States should abandon its refusal to open direct negotiations with North Korea and instead seek "a verifiable nuclear settlement" with that country, a report sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations says.

The Bush administration, rejecting direct talks with North Korea, has pressed for a negotiation with broad international participation, to include China, South Korea, Japan and perhaps others.

A start toward that objective began last month with the United States holding talks with China and North Korea in Beijing.

Declaring that the situation in North Korea poses a "genuine crisis," the panel said it believes that it is increasingly likely that North Korea can and will move to produce additional nuclear weapons material.

"We cannot preclude that that is its aim and that it seeks to hold off the United States until it is successful," the report says. "The situation has drifted toward one in which the United States may have little choice but to live with a North Korea with more nuclear weapons and to find ways to prevent it from exporting its fissile material."

Asserting that the United States must try to prevent that outcome, the panel urged a bilateral negotiation of "a verifiable nuclear settlement with the North and, in return, demand that America's regional partners adopt a tougher posture should negotiations fail."

It added that this option may not be available if North Korea has already processed spent nuclear weapons fuel, which could put the country within reach of additional nuclear weapons in coming months.

As a contingency, the report says that if negotiations fail and the North continues to pursue nuclear weapons, the United States should seek sanctions "and consider imposing a blockade designed to intercept nuclear exports and other illicit or deadly exports."

The panel rejects the current administration approach, which says regional countries must be included in any negotiating process because of the strong stake they have in whether the North possesses nuclear weapons beyond the one or two it is believed to have already.

Far from shunning nuclear weapons, as it has promised, North Korea is pursuing both uranium- and plutonium-based nuclear programs, the administration says.

According to the report, America's regional partners "fear that the United States will attack North Korean nuclear facilities and unleash war on the peninsula." It says all regional countries oppose sanctions out of concern that this could trigger a war, as the North has threatened.

These countries, the report says, all agree on the need for serious U.S.-North Korean negotiations and attach less importance to the multilateral approach favored by the administration.

"The United States has not persuaded its regional partners that it is serious about negotiations, making efforts to secure their approval for a significantly tougher position difficult if not impossible" the study says.

The panel is bipartisan but many of its members have Democratic affiliations or served in the Clinton administration. The Council on Foreign Relations said the views in the report are solely those of its authors.

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Council of Foreign Relations: www.cfr.org/index.php