By DPA
Seoul : North Korea’s uranium-enrichment programme is among the issues hindering the meeting of a year-end deadline for Pyongyang to declare its nuclear programme, South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min Soon said Thursday.
The deadline could pass unfulfilled as problems have cropped up not only with North Korea laying out its nuclear facilities, materials and operations but also with dismantling its main nuclear facility, Song said in Seoul.
There has been “slow progress,” particularly over the nuclear declaration, the minister said.
North Korea had denied it had a uranium-enrichment programme while the United States has long insisted the opposite is true. Highly enriched uranium could be used to produce nuclear weapons.
“As to the uranium-enrichment programme, we need more consultations among the countries concerned,” Song said of South Korea’s partners in six-nation talks on North Korea’s nuclear programme, which, besides the two Koreas, are the United States, China, Japan and Russia.
He emphasized, however, that it was more important to obtain a complete, credible nuclear declaration from North Korea than meet a deadline.
Experts have also said they believe Monday’s deadline won’t be met because the removal of nuclear fuel rods from the Yongbyon nuclear reactor would take longer than that.
Meanwhile, Japan’s Kyodo News agency reported that North Korea said it might slow the disablement work because of a delay in energy aid promised to the country.
“There is a delay in the implementation of economic compensation obligations to be undertaken by the other countries in the six-party talks,” Hyun Hak Bong, deputy director of the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s American affairs bureau, told Kyodo.
“We have no choice but to take measures to adjust,” he added.
North Korea promised at the beginning of October to disable its nuclear facility at Yongbyon, 100 km north of Pyongyang, by the end of the year and come clean about its nuclear activities.
The effort was the second of three steps by the North Korea in dismantling its nuclear programme in return for energy and economic aid.