Bush: U.S. to lift key North Korea sanctions

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Besides providing information about its nuclear facilities, North Korea’s declaration is to provide a verifiable figure on how much plutonium they have. That still won’t answer the question of how many bombs North Korea has stockpiled, but plutonium is the “heart of the game because that is the stuff they make bombs out of,” says Christopher Hill, the lead U.S. negotiator in the talks under way between Pyongyang and the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.

What’s not in the declaration is as important as what it includes.

It won’t illuminate North Korea’s suspected program of developing weapons fueled by enriched uranium. As a result of the six-nation nuclear talks, the North has stopped making plutonium and begun disabling its nuclear facilities, but it still has a stockpile of radioactive material that experts believe is enough to build from six to 10 bombs.

The North proved it could build a working nuclear bomb when it carried out an underground nuclear test blast in October 2006. Details on the bombs, however, will be left to the next stage of the talks, when Pyongyang is supposed to abandon all its nuclear weapons program.

North Korea’s declaration also won’t give a complete accounting of how it allegedly helped Syria build what senior U.S. intelligence officials say was a secret nuclear reactor meant to make plutonium, which can be used to make high-yield nuclear weapons. Israeli jets bombed the structure in the remote eastern desert of Syria in September 2007.

How much plutonium was produced?
The North is expected in the declaration to say how much plutonium it has produced at its main reactor facility at Yongbyon.

“If we can verifiably determine the amount of plutonium that has been made, we then have an upper hand in understanding what may have happened in terms of weaponization,” Rice said earlier Thursday in Japan.

If the declaration can be verified, it also would clear the way for the highest diplomatic engagement the Bush administration has had with North Korea. But the United States remains wary of North Korea because of its history of broken promises.

Rice has said the United States won’t take the word of the North Koreans based on what they put on a piece of paper. She says there would be no hedging on the onsite verification of North Korea’s weapons and technology — that inspectors must be free to verify what North Korea discloses.

“Any effort to denuclearize the Korean peninsula must contend with the fact that North Korea is the most secretive and opaque regime on the planet,” she wrote in an opinion piece published in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. “We will not accept that statement on faith. We will insist on verification.”

North to televise tower's destruction
To demonstrate that it is serious about foregoing its nuclear weapons, North Korea is planning the televised destruction of a 65-foot-tall cooling tower at its main nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. The cooling tower is a key element of the reactor, but blowing it up — with the world watching — has little practical meaning because the reactor has already been nearly disabled.

Exempting North Korea from the enemy trade law, which also limits trade with Cuba, will have minimal impact as major U.S. companies aren’t lining up to do large amounts of business in North Korea.

North Korea was put on the list of nations that sponsor terrorism for its alleged involvement in the 1987 bombing of a South Korean airliner that killed 115 people. The designation effectively blocks North Korea from receiving low-interest loans from the World Bank and other international lending agencies.

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