By KUNA,
Tokyo : North Korea is ready to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) personnel back into its main nuclear complex in Yongbyon to ensure it is not processing highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said Tuesday, Japan’s Kyodo News Agency reported in a dispatch from Beijing.
“The specifics are that they will allow IAEA personnel to go to Yongbyon to ensure that they are not processing highly enriched uranium, that they are proceeding with peaceful purposes,” the veteran US diplomatic troubleshooter told journalists at Beijing airport en route to the US, after a six-day private mission to Pyongyang to defuse tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
“I believe that’s an important gesture on their part, but there still has to be a commitment eventually by the North Koreans to denuclearize, to abide by the 2005 (six-party) agreement that says that they will terminate their nuclear weapons activities,” he was quoted as saying.
Richardson said that it is now up to negotiations by North Korea and other members of the six-party talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear programs to ensure the return of IAEA monitors to Yongbyon, about 90 kilometers north of Pyongyang.
“Now it’s up to countries, negotiators to move forward,” Richardson, former US ambassador to the United Nations, added.
The six-party denuclearization talks involving the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the US have been stalled since December 2008.
North Korea expelled IAEA personnel involved in monitoring Yongbyon, along with US nuclear experts involved in disablement work at the complex, in April last year in retaliation for a UN Security Council statement condemning a rocket launch by the North the same month.
North Korea conducted plutonium-based nuclear tests twice in 2006 and 2009.