North Korea

US pulls North Korea from terror list

Article published on the 2008-10-11 Latest update 2008-10-12 13:33 TU

North Korean missiles on display at the war museum in Seoul.
(Photo: Reuters)

After weeks of behind the scenes negotiations, and years of tense disagreement and posturing, North Korea has agreed to allow outside observers verify its nuclear disarmament program and in return, on Saturday the United States struck the country from its list of states that sponsor terrorism.

During a trip to North Korea at the beginning of October, US negotiator Christopher Hill secured a pledge from the communist dictatorship to open up its plutonium program as well as any uranium enrichment and proliferation activities to outside monitoring and verification.

With this deal in hand, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a “last round” of telephone consultations with the other members of the six-party talks that had initially led North Korea to agree to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in return for aid.

The deal announced Saturday resurrected a disarmament deal that many thought was dead. Removing the country from the list removes a major stumbling block.

Noh Jong Sun, of Yonsei university in Seoul, South Korea, says this the deal is likely to move disarmament forward.

“The next step is a more of an optimistic process: we can begin to talk about the third stage of the de-nuclearisation of North Korea,” he told RFI. “We are about to finish the second stage. The United States removal of the list of terrorist sponsoring countries, that’s good enough at this point.”

After North Korea held its first nuclear weapons test in October 2006, it signed a deal with South Korea, Russia, China, the United States and Japan, in which it pledged to dismantle all its nuclear weapons facilities.

But tensions rose after the United States refused to remove the country from its terrorist blacklist, something that prevented North Korea from received many kinds of foreign aid.

Pyongyang stopped its disarmament this summer and threatened to refurbish and restart its Yongbyon nuclear reactor last month if the US did not follow through on its pledge to remove the country from the list.

The US remained reluctant to do so, claiming that it could not independently verify the progress of the disarmament, because Pyongyang was blocking access to sensitive sites.