20 February 2004
Bolton Says Success of Six-Party Talks Depends on North Korea
Under Secretary of State John Bolton’s Feb. 19 remarks in Tokyo
The success of the upcoming six-party talks in Beijing on North Korea depends on North Korea, says Under Secretary of State John R. Bolton.
“The real issue,” Bolton told reporters in Tokyo on February 19, “is what North Korea says. I think the United States and Japan and others have made their positions pretty clear. What we’d like to see is the strategic decision by North Korea that it’s going to give up its nuclear weapons programs — all of its nuclear weapons programs.”
Participating in the talks, to be held February 25, will be delegations from South Korea, North Korea, the United States, China, Japan, and Russia. Bolton cautioned that substantive and procedural developments in the talks will depend on “the attitude that North Korea brings.”
“It’s not a question of being optimistic or pessimistic. It’s a question of being realistic,” Bolton said. “And since the responsibility really lies with North Korea, until we actually hear what they have to say, I don’t think we can really prognosticate about the likely outcome.” He noted that President Bush has been very clear that the United States wants to pursue a diplomatic solution through a multilateral mechanism.
Bolton said he was in Tokyo to discuss with Japanese officials “a broad array of nonproliferation and international security matters” including “the unraveling of the black market network of Dr. A.Q. Khan of Pakistan.” Khan’s network is suspected of supplying Libya, Iran, and North Korea with uranium enrichment and other weapons-related technologies.
The Khan sales of nuclear technology, according to Bolton, illustrate the nature of the proliferation problem around the world today and the need for Bush’s year-old Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which, the under secretary said, has had an impact already in the Libyan decision to renounce its weapons of mass destruction programs and long-range ballistic missiles.
The PSI, Bolton explained, “is an activity, not an organization. So what we really want are countries to cooperate with us — in the intelligence area, in the military area, in the law enforcement area — to help us interdict trafficking in weapons of mass destruction and WMD-related materials.” Japan, he noted, has been an important PSI contributor.
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